You've probably heard of fool's gold, and it might make you think of prospectors in old timey California seeking their fortunes. But there's another kind of fool's gold called chalcopyrite, and lucky for those that want to strike...

Everyone knows where Punt is, right? The Ancient Egyptians sure did — they traded with them for millennia. But apparently they were *so* familiar with its location, they never bothered to write it down for posterity. So archaeologists...

Life on Earth has weathered boiling-hot oceans and volcanic-ash-darkened skies—but that’s nothing like the climate change we’re experiencing now. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll talk about the greenhouse effect, learn why...

As the 19th century came to a close, physicists were feeling pretty satisfied with the state of their science. The great edifice of physical theory seemed complete. A few minor experiments remained to verify everything. Little did those...

Movies. Video games. YouTube videos. All of them work because we accidentally figured out a way to fool your brain’s visual processing system, and you don’t even know it’s happening. In this video, I talk to neuroscientist David...

Medieval Europe. Where unbathed, sword-wielding knights ate rotten meat, thought the Earth was flat, defended chastity-belt wearing maidens, and tortured their foes with grisly gadgets. Except... this is more fiction than fact. So, where...

Since it was founded in 2011, U.S.-based nonprofit GiveDirectly has given cash unconditionally to villagers in eastern Africa, particularly Kenya and Uganda. The nonprofit's most recent project involves providing a basic income...

Scientists in the nineteenth century discovered a lot about life and matter. But exactly what kind of stuff is the human brain? That one was—and is—tricky.



The brain sciences—with experiments and therapies tied to biological...

So, "modern" is kind of a loaded term, but today we're going to talk about modern life in Europe, as it looked around the time the 19th century turned into the 20th. We'll look at what life was like in the rapidly growing urban centers...

For architect Ole Scheeren, the people who live and work inside a building are as much a part of that building as concrete, steel and glass. He asks: Can architecture be about collaboration and storytelling instead of the isolation and...

Plenty of good things are done in the name of religion, and plenty of bad things too. But what is religion, exactly — is it good or bad, in and of itself? Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah offers a generous, surprising view.

We’re continuing our discussion of nineteenth-century American theater with a look at some upsetting parts of the US's theatrical past. In the nineteenth century, race and racism contributed to a unique and troubling performance...

Invasive species are more than just unwelcome guests, and while some can be super harmful, others might actually be helpful!

Wouldn't it be nice if our transportation was as sleek as in The Jetsons or Futurama? Flying cars are cool, but what about a giant network of human-sized tubes that run through buildings and across entire cities? Well guess what? The...

Journalist Mustafa Akyol talks about the way that some local cultural practices (such as the seclusion of women) have become linked, in the popular mind, to the articles of faith of Islam. Has the world's general idea of the Islamic...

Tim Brown says the design profession has a bigger role to play than just creating nifty, fashionable little objects. He calls for a shift to local, collaborative, participatory "design thinking" -- starting with the example of...

We're on the edge of a new frontier in art and creativity -- and it's not human. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating...

In which John Green teaches you about Nationalism. Nationalism was everywhere in the 19th century, as people all over the world carved new nation-states out of old empires. Nationalist leaders changed the way people thought of themselves...

A clay cylinder covered in Akkadian cuneiform script, damaged and broken, the Cyrus Cylinder is a powerful symbol of religious tolerance and multi-culturalism. In this enthralling talk Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum,...

Margaret Wertheim leads a project to re-create the creatures of the coral reefs using a crochet technique invented by a mathematician -- celebrating the amazements of the reef, and deep-diving into the hyperbolic geometry underlying...

Many of the world's biggest problems require asking questions of scientists -- but why should we believe what they say? Historian of science Naomi Oreskes thinks deeply about our relationship to belief and draws out three problems with...

How could the most abundant bird in North America go extinct so quickly? Short answer: us.

The Bone Wars resulted in the description of some of the most famous dinosaurs we know of today, but not without some pretty big mistakes.

At the turn of the 18th century, audience were ready to go over the top, and get some really, really dramatic theater in their lives. Like, a dog dueling a man type of dramatic. In London, only two theaters were licensed, but...