Astronaut Jerry Carr knows space. As commander of Skylab, he spent over 2000 hours in space, orbiting the Earth over 1000 times. Recounting his life story, Carr remembers the enchanting years he spent at NASA. Lesson by Jerry Carr,...

Pot Theft (A Radiolab Adventure)

Have you ever forgotten why you walked into a room? Turns out it's just your brain doing its job.

Trinidad and Tobago amassed great wealth in the 1970s thanks to oil -- but 2 out of every 3 dollars earmarked for development ended up wasted or stolen. This fact has haunted Afra Raymond for 30 years. Shining a flashlight on a continued...

Imagine if you could plug your brain into a machine that would bring you ultimate pleasure for the rest of your life. The only catch? You have to permanently leave reality behind. Hayley Levitt and Bethany Rickwald explore Robert...

The year is 1656. Your body is wracked by violent chills. Your head pounds and you're too weak to sit up. In your feverish state, you see a strange-looking man wearing a beak-like mask, his body covered from head to toe. Without seeing...

Fifty percent of traffic accidents happen at intersections. Gary Lauder shares a brilliant and cheap idea for helping drivers move along smoothly: a new traffic sign that combines the properties of "Stop" and "Yield."

Aw, don't be embarrassed everyone does it! Quick Questions explains what causes blushing, which Darwin called "the most peculiar and most human of all expressions."

When Richard J. Berry, the mayor of Albuquerque, saw a man on a street corner holding a cardboard sign that read "Want a job," he decided to take him (and others in his situation) up on it. He and his staff started a citywide initiative...

Why is yawning contagious? It might be your body trying to keep on the lookout for snakes.

Our neighboring star Betelgeuse got noticeably dimmer a few months ago, and thanks to the Hubble telescope, we recently figured out what was going on. Also, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suffered some damage this week.

What's it like to grow up within a group of people who exult in demonizing ... everyone else? Megan Phelps-Roper shares details of life inside America's most controversial church and describes how conversations on Twitter were key to her...

Urban development can be tough on wildlife. But some plants and animals are adapting to our cities in surprising ways.

TED Fellow Alicia Eggert takes us on a visual tour of her work -- from a giant sculpture on an uninhabited island in Maine to an installation that inflates only when people hold hands to complete an electric current. Her work explores...

For almost three decades, John Francis has been a planetwalker, traveling the globe by foot and sail with a message of environmental respect and responsibility (for 17 of those years without speaking). A funny, thoughtful talk with...

Most of the universe is made up of dark matter, so could it form into stars and galaxies like regular matter?

Hank gets all up in your face about kissing -- where does it come from, why do it we do it, and do other animals do it? From ancient India to that date you were on last night (which we won't tell anyone about if you won't), we explore...

A male firefly emits a series of enticing flashes. He hopes a female will respond and mate with him. A female from a different species mimics his patterns: by tricking the male, she lures him in -- and turns him into a meal. Where else...

For smallholder farmers in India, agriculture has long been an unreliable source of income -- crops that flourish one season can fail the next, thanks to heat, pests and disease. But climate risk is now making the profession nearly...

In this tutorial I show how I synthesized the sound of hydrogen for the "Sound of Hydrogen" video using mathematica - it's a little technical, but you've been requesting it!

You know how moths like to fly into lamps or crawl all over your tv screen at night? Why do they do this?! The answer is more complicated than you might think

There's a lot we can learn from Mongolian nomads about how to survive in the years to come, says environmental activist Khulan Batkhuyag. Taking us on a journey through the country's stunning rural landscape, she shows how Mongolian...

You probably know about the geomagnetic field that protects the earth from solar storms and radiation. But precision satellites have measured ANOTHER magnetic field coming from Earth, and its signals might hold the key to searching for...

For as long as we've had language, some people have tried to control it. And some of the most frequent targets of this communication regulation are the ums, ers, and likes that pepper our conversations. These linguistic fillers occur...