PBS
Fighting the stigma of opioid addiction with stories of recovery
People working on the front lines of the opioid crisis at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation offer their Brief but Spectacular takes on addiction and recovery.
PBS
A Brief But Spectacular take on Asian American mental health
Christine Catipon is clinical psychologist at the University of California, Irvine Counseling Center. Growing up Filipina, she says that people around her did not want to talk about mental health. Catipon is now working to dismantle...
PBS
A nurse practitioner's Brief But Spectacular take on combating loneliness
Laurie Theeke is a nurse practitioner who studies loneliness as a unique bio-psychosocial stressor that impacts human health. After years of clinical experience, she developed a five-session program called "LISTEN," which seeks to guide...
PBS
What If Physics IS NOT Describing Reality?
Neils Bohr said, “It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.” Well it turns out that if we pay attention to this subtle difference, some of the most...
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Cosmic Microwave Background Challenge | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
If a photon leaves the train station shortly after the Big Bang ...
PBS
Could We Terraform Mars?
We already have the technology to bring humans safely to Mars and set up small settlements - or at least could do within a generation. But those settlements will need to be cocooned - shielded against the deadly cold, intense radiation,...
PBS
Planck's Constant and The Origin of Quantum Mechanics | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
Planck's Length is the length below which the concept of length loses its meaning. What exactly does that mean and what are the incredible implications this fact has upon our reality? To find out check out this episode of Space Time...
PBS
Planet X Discovered?? + Challenge Winners!
Some funky orbits near the Kuiper Belt are hinting towards a brand new planet, the elusive ‘Planet X.’ Our friends Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of Caltech are working hard to finally spot the potential gas giant through powerful...
PBS
How Plankton Created A Bizarre Giant of the Seas
At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been possible, thanks to a major revolution...
PBS
How Ankylosaurs Got Their Clubs
While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of how they worked and how this unusual anatomy developed in the first place.
PBS
Did An Ancient Pathogen Reshape Our Cells?
There is one - and only one - group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates, which are the monkeys of Africa and Asia, the apes, and us.
PBS
How Our Deadliest Parasite Turned To The Dark Side
Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little help from a mosquito, it left its animal host - probably a gorilla - and found its way to a new host: us.
PBS
How Did Our Most Famous Ancestor Really Die?
Did our most famous fossil ancestor, Lucy, die by falling out of a tall tree? The answer is part of a decades-long debate over how, exactly, our ancestors transitioned from life in the trees to life on the ground.
PBS
Did Eating Insects Shrink These Dinos?
We often think of dinosaurs as either preying on other dinos or mammals, or as plant-eaters -- but in ecosystems today, those aren’t the only two options. So why would we expect dinosaurs to have only been carnivores or herbivores, with...
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Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?
The laws of physics don’t specify an arrow of time - they don’t distinguish the past from the future. The equations we use to describe how things evolve forward in time also perfectly describe their evolution backwards in time. So the...
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Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?
Physicists have a long history of sticking our noses where they don’t belong - and one of our favorite places to step beyond our expertise is the question of consciousness and free will. Sometimes our musings are insightful, sometimes...
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How To Detect a Neutrino
Why is there something rather than nothing? Well the answer may be found in the weakest particle in the universe: the neutrino. For over half a century Fermilab has been the premier particle accelerator facility of the United States and...
PBS
Are We Running Out of Space Above Earth?
While recent news about the Chinese Long March 5 Rocket made a lot of people very nervous because a 22-ton rocket was going to fall out of the sky, this sort of thing happens all the time. Boosters, dead satellites, and sometimes even...
PBS
How Stars Destroy Each Other
Our galaxy is full of dysfunctional stellar relationships. With more than half of all stars existing in binary orbits, it’s inevitable that many stellar remnants will end up in parasitic spirals with their partners. Today we’re going to...
PBS
What If We Live in a Superdeterministic Universe?
Today we’re going to try to save reality - or at least realism. However this rescue effort has a price; one that you may not be willing to pay. Your very soul, or at least your free will, is on the line.
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Do Black Holes Create New Universes?
Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants - like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces - just right for the emergence of...
PBS
NEW DISCOVERY About Supermassive Black Holes Explained!
Astrophysicists have discovered a black hole that for millions of years has been blasting vast particle beams in opposite directions across the sky. And has recently swiveled to point its one of these jets directly at us. Is this an...
PBS
Is Interstellar Travel Impossible?
Space is pretty deadly. But is it so deadly that we’re effectively imprisoned in our solar system forever? Many have said so, but a few have actually figured it out.
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What If Space And Time Are NOT Real?
Physics progresses by breaking our intuitions, but we’re now at a point where further progress may require us to do away with the most intuitive and seemingly fundamental concepts of all—space and time.