PBS
When Rodents Rafted Across the Ocean
The best evidence we have suggests that, while Caviomorpha originated in South America, they came from ancestors in Africa, over 40 million years ago. So how did they get there?
PBS
Can You Trust Your Eyes in Spacetime?
Last time we talked about what curvature means, looked at geodesics, great circles on spheres, and tried to understand the notion of "straightness". This week on Spacetime, we take a detour into how geometry works in spacetime. Get...
PBS
The Strange Case of the Buzzsaw Jaws
There are many fossils that challenge our ability to form even the most basic idea of how a living thing looked, or lived, or functioned. One of the longest-running of these mysteries involved a 270-million-year-old sea creature called...
PBS
How Cosmic Inflation Flattened the Universe
Although much of the Big Bang Theory is widely accepted to be true, it only gets us part of the way there. Observable truths such as the CMB and the flatness of our universe reveal that there is no way the universe has been expanding at...
PBS
The Great American Eclipse
Get your eclipse glasses ready because the a total solar eclipse is an astronomical event unlike any other.
PBS
Building an Infinite Bridge
Using the harmonic series we can build an infinitely long bridge. It takes a very long time though. A faster method was discovered in 2009.
PBS
Habitable Exoplanets Debunked!
When we say a planet is habitable, we aren't REALLY saying what we think we are saying. 'Habitable' means something else. Is Kepler 186f habitable, in the true sense of the word? And if not, what other planets should we be looking at?...
PBS
When Quasars When Quasars Collide STJC
In this video, we discuss the reports about the detection of a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting only one light year apart from each other. Studying the dance of these giants should tell us a ton about how black holes grow.
PBS
Are You a Boltzmann Brain?
Was an incredible drop in entropy responsible for the Big Bang? If that's the case, this would lead us to conclude that a great many other things are possible, including the likelihood that you are a Boltzmann Brain.
PBS
Why the Big Bang Definitely Happened
We pretty much know for sure that the universe was once extremely small, and extremely hot. And we know that something set it in motion, expanding rapidly and continuing to do-so today. But the actual moment of 'the Big Bang' is still a...
PBS
The Tully Monster & Other Problematic Creatures
There are animals in the fossil record that challenge some of our most basic ideas about what animals are supposed to look like. If there ever was a monster on this planet that was worthy of the name, it might have been the Tully Monster.
PBS
When Humans Were Prey
Not too long ago, our early human ancestors were under constant threat of attack from predators. And it turns out that this difficult chapter in our history may be responsible for the adaptations that allowed us to become so successful.
PBS
The Physics of Life (ft. It's Okay to be Smart & PBS Eons!)
Our universe is prone to increasing disorder and chaos. So how did it generate the extreme complexity we see in life? Actually, the laws of physics themselves may demand it.
PBS
When Fish First Breathed Air
385 million years ago, a group of fish would undertake one of the most important journeys in the history of life and become the first vertebrates to live on dry ground. But first, they had to acquire the ability to breathe air.
PBS
Why Haven't We Found Alien Life?
With millions of Earth like planets around sun like stars in our galaxy alone, why don't we see intelligent alien life? Or any other life for that matter? It gets especially weird when you factor in new scientific revelations that life...
PBS
When Apes Conquered Europe
Today, our closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, live only in small pockets of Africa and Asia. But back in the Miocene epoch, apes occupied all of Europe. Why aren't there wild apes in Europe today?
PBS
Is Gravity An Illusion?
Most of us take gravity as an assumed part of our living realities, but why? Basic physics introduces us to the concept of gravity from a Newtonian sense, but when you start factoring Einstein into an understanding of gravity, things get...
PBS
Stegosaurs: Tiny Brains & Thagomizers
If you take it as a given that extinct dinosaurs were all weird and wonderful, then you gotta at least consider that Stegosaurus was one of the weirdest and wonderfulest.
PBS
The Search for the Earliest Life
More than 4 billion years ago, the crust of the Earth was still cooling and the oceans were only beginning to form. But in recent years, we've started to discover that, even in this hellish environment, life found a way.
PBS
The Misunderstood Nature of Entropy
Entropy is surely one of the most intriguing and misunderstood concepts in all of physics. The entropy of the universe must always increase - so says the second law of thermodynamics. It's a law that seems emergent from deeper laws -...
PBS
Splitting Rent with Triangles
You can find out how to fairly divide rent between three different people even when you don't know the third person's preferences! Find out how with Sperner's Lemma.
PBS
Are We Living in an Ancestor Simulation? ft. Neil deGrasse T
The idea that our reality is a simulation is not as far-fetched as you may think. Many philosophers, scientists and tech-billionaires are seriously considering not just the possibility but the high probability that our civilization may...