Ever wonder how your finger can magically control your smartphone screen? We explain in this episode of SciShow.

Hank explains the gift that your brain gives you every day: the gift of neural plasticity -- the ways in which your brain actually changes at the cellular level as you learn.

Today we’re going to talk about on how we organize the data we use on our devices. You might remember last episode we walked through some sorting algorithms, but skipped over how the information actually got there in the first place! And...

In this episode we looked at robots and the engineering principles of robots. We learned how robots use sensors to interpret their environment, how actuators and effectors allow a robot to manipulate the objects around it to accomplish a...

Imagine it's late 1990, and you've just met a nice young man named Tim Berners-Lee, who starts telling you about his proposed system called the World Wide Web. Ian Ritchie was there. And ... he didn't buy it. A short story about...

They're millions of digits long, and it takes an army of mathematicians and machines to hunt them down -- what's not to love about monster primes? Adam Spencer, comedian and lifelong math geek, shares his passion for these odd numbers,...

Why are some countries rich? Why are some countries poor? In the end it comes down to Productivity. This week on Crash Course Econ, Adriene and Jacob investigate just why some economies are more productive than others, and what happens...

What exactly is the carbon cycle? Nathaniel Manning provides a basic look into the cyclical relationship of carbon, humans and the environment.

What if everything in your life was randomized: from the food you ate to the things you did and the places you traveled? Computer scientist Max Hawkins created algorithms to make decisions like these for him -- and got hooked on the...

So we ended last episode at the start of the 20th century with special purpose computing devices such as Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machines. But as the scale of human civilization continued to grow as did the demand for more...

The Internet is older than you might think!

Today we're going to talk about the birth of personal computing. Up until the early 1970s components were just too expensive, or underpowered, for making a useful computer for an individual, but this would begin to change with the...

Jane Goodall hasn't found the missing link, but she's come closer than nearly anyone else. The primatologist says the only real difference between humans and chimps is our sophisticated language. She urges us to start using it to change...

Today we’re going to create memory! Using the basic logic gates we discussed in episode 3 we can build a circuit that stores a single bit of information, and then through some clever scaling (and of course many new levels of...

Quantum tunneling happens when a particle seemingly teleports across a barrier. But despite how instantaneous this event sounds, recent research suggests that it doesn’t happen nearly as fast as you might think.

Since Joseph Marie Jacquard’s textile loom in 1801, there has been a demonstrated need to give our machines instructions. In the last few episodes, our instructions were already in our computer’s memory, but we need to talk about how...

You might be benefiting from the weird units you've never heard every time you put on your shoes or read about dark matter.

The World Wide Web is used every day by millions of people for everything from checking the weather to sharing cat videos. But what is it exactly? Twila Camp describes this interconnected information system as a virtual city that...

Cybersecurity is a set of techniques to protect the secrecy, integrity, and availability of computer systems and data against threats. In today’s episode, we’re going to unpack these three goals and talk through some strategies we use...

Using robotics, laser rangefinders, GPS and smart feedback tools, Dennis Hong is building a car for drivers who are blind. It's not a "self-driving" car, he's careful to note, but a car in which a non-sighted driver can determine speed,...

You might have heard that exposure to unnatural lights from digital devices can hurt your eyes. But is that true?

So we ended last episode with programming at the hardware level with things like plugboards and huge panels of switches, but what was really needed was a more versatile way to program computers - software! For much of this series we’ve...

Today, we'll explore the materials electrical engineers work with. We'll look at high-conductors, insulators, and how low-conductivity conductors can be used to generate light and heat.

Our bodies _ the physical, biological parts of us - and our minds - the thinking, conscious aspects - have a complicated, tangled relationship. Which one primarily defines you or your self? Are you a body with a mind or a mind with a...