The Fermi Paradox refers to the apparent contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life in the universe and the lack of evidence or contact with such civilizations. Named after physicist Enrico Fermi, the paradox...

About 10,000 years ago, humans began to farm. This agricultural revolution was a turning point in our history and enabled the existence of civilization. Today, nearly 40 percent of our planet is farmland. Spread all over the world, these...

Humanity is on its way to creating a "black ball": a technological breakthrough that could destroy us all, says philosopher Nick Bostrom. In this incisive, surprisingly light-hearted conversation with Head of TED Chris Anderson, Bostrom...

In 1961, the astronomer Frank Drake wrote down what is now known as the Drake Equation. It's so important to the culture surrounding the search for extraterrestrial life that scientists have carved it into the upcoming Europa Clipper...

Shereen El Feki shows how some Arab cultures are borrowing trademarks of Western pop culture -- music videos, comics, even Barbie -- and adding a culturally appropriate twist. The hybridized media shows how two civilizations, rather than...

Do Aliens exist? Are we alone in the universe? Where is everyone? Fermi Paradox and Drake Equation: Where is everyone? You probably already know that there are more stars in the universe than all the sands on all the beaches of earth. In...

The simulation argument. Is the matrix real? Could your reality including everything you’ve ever known, be nothing more than pixels on a super advanced computer simulation? The argument that we may be living in a simulation is that a...

Certain mathematical equations contain unnerving dangers, Arguably, E=mc^2 is the most famous equation in science. C is a very large number. But in Einstein’s, equation it is squared. This means that mass contains an insane amount of...

In Part 1 of this interview From the Director's Chair, INET Executive Director Robert Johnson talks with Jeffrey Sachs about Sachs's book The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. Sachs doesn't view 2008 as...

Modern campaigning can get pretty dirty, but politicians today are only taking their cues from politicians in ancient Athens. This public radio story describes how direct democracy was carried out in ancient Athens, a Greek city-state....

Climate change is happening. Can AI help us prepare for the consequences? In this video, we’re discussing ways that AI can be and is currently being used to help us better understand the phenomenon of climate change and the ways that our...

Love is a complicated combination of brain chemicals and behavior that scientists are only just beginning to figure out. And it's remarkable that in every society that we have looked at on Earth, romantic love exists. So if love is so...

We could realistically see people starting to live and work on the Moon in the next decade -- and how we do it matters, says space policy researcher Jessy Kate Schingler. In this fascinating talk, she discusses the critical issues that...

Built on a hillside where a continent ends, two oceans collide, and the smallest of the world’s six floral kingdoms flourishes, the lodges of Grootbos Private Nature Reserve are uniquely positioned to capture the magic of South Africa’s...

Archaeologist and National Geographic explorer Gabriel Prieto returned to his hometown of Huanchaco, Peru to tell the story of its 3,500 years of cultural continuity and involve the local community in discovering their past. ➡ Subscribe:...

To support Kurzgesagt and learn more about Brilliant, go to https://www.brilliant.org/nutshell and sign up for free. The first 688 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual Premium subscription. Kurzgesagt Newsletter:...

Read more at BigThink.com: Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Timothy Snyder: Well, the whole idea of best interests in the...

Dao, Gun, Jian and Quiang are the four main traditional fighting weapons of China. Even though, the Chinese had already invented gunpowder by the end of the tenth century. So besides of having an arsenal of swords, spears, sabres,...

How potatoes brought down two Chinese dynasties. An endnote for our Potato video: https://youtu.be/wdPQ8zFUipw Thank you to all our Patreon supporters! Please check out our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheEndlessKnot Endless Knot...

Archaeologists believe the sudden destruction of a pre-Columbian civilization found in southern Illinois occurred around 1150 AD. But to find the cause of such upheaval, they look to the surrounding trees. From: SECRETS: America's Lost...

When these divers accidentally uncovered an enormous world of neon nightlife underwater, the only logical next step was to engineer a way to see like a shark. Everything It Takes to Explore Beneath Polar Ice Caps -...

We don't want to deluge you with information on the subject, but this week on Crash Course Mythology, Mike Rugnetta is talking once again about floods. We're looking at ancient flood myths in the Americas, and what they can tell us about...

As Earth’s climate changes, one of the hardest things to figure out is exactly how the planet will change in response. And while we can’t know the future for sure, we can get a lot of good clues from the past.

In astronomy we talk about billions of years like it’s no big deal. But how can we be sure about timescales so far beyond the capacity for human intuition? Our discovery of what we now call deep time is very recent - as recent as our...