PBS

Asteroid mining sounds like something out of a bad space movie, but harvesting materials from space rocks might be our ticket to building space colonies or living on Mars.

A look at some awesome people behind discoveries in psychology, neuroscience and biology.

Join the #AnythingButPepper movement!

Laughing is a universal human behavior, one that transcends borders of language and culture. But it's also REALLY WEIRD. Why do we do it? The answer has less to do with humor than you might think

The real magic of Harry Potter is that it can reduce prejudice and boost empathy. This week we break down the psychological benefits of literature

We walk through life led by our noses. Literally. Because they’re on the front of our faces. How does the sense of smell work, and how sensitive are our noses? Why are smell-related memories so vivid? How many different smells could we possibly smell?

If we, or any conscious being is around to witness the very distant future our galaxy, what will they see? How long will life persist as the stars begin to die?

Causality is meant to move in one direction: forward. But the Quantum Eraser experiment seems to reverse causality. How and why can this happen and what are the implications of this experiment on how we understand Quantum Mechanics and our greater universe?

If you study a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, you may notice a large, deep blue splotch on the lower right. This area, creatively named the Cold Spot. Is this feature a statistical fluke, the signature of vast supervoids, or even the imprint of another universe?

To understand finance, search algorithms and even evolution you need to understand Random Walks.

We’re living in a brief window of time where our planet isn’t frozen underneath a giant layer of glaciers. How much longer will the moderate climate that we’ve come to know as “normal” continue? This episode looks at how the changes in our planet’s orbit and rotation impacts our climate.

Black holes! From Stephen Hawking to Interstellar, black holes are mammoths in the world of science AND sci-fi. But what exactly IS a black hole? Do events happen inside black holes? Are black holes really a hole? Are black holes really black?!

Amusiais an intriguing word, but what does it mean? Amusia is a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition. Amusia may be present from birth or may develop as the result of an injury. Can you imagine life without music? We know we can’t. Take a look at these interesting facts and stories about some people who can't hear the music. Mrs. L was a young-looking sixty-seven-year-old woman. She was intelligent, but she didn’t know what “singing” meant. She also didn’t hear music like most of us do. In Oliver Saks’ book Musicophilia, Mrs. L described music to sound like pots and pans being thrown around the kitchen. This condition isn’t unique to Mrs. L. About 4% of the population is born with “amusia”. In some worse amusia, some people can’t even recognize musical information at all. A recent study looked at why beat deaf individuals are unable to keep a beat or tap along with <a href="https://rumble.com/v2zp92-freestyle-slalom-klaudia-hartmanis.html" target="_blank">music</a>. We are not entirely certain about what’s going on inside the brains of those who suffer from amsuia; a number of regions are involved in processing music. We do know that the ability to move along to a beat isn’t unique to the human brain. Other species with local learning abilities are able to keep a beat-think dolphins, seals, parrots and even <a href="https://rumble.com/v2zljm-parrot-singing-with-2-year-old-drummer.html" target="_blank">cockatoos</a> like Snowball, the dancing sensation.

Find out why more species live near the equator!

Twas the night before Christmas, so here are some scientific gift giving tips.

Our laws of physics are equations of motion, along with some associated constants. We’ve talked about the symmetries of these equations, and how they lead us to conserved quantities. But this is just the tip of the theoretical iceberg - sometimes investigating the symmetries of these equations predicts entirely new physics. The standard model of particle physics is a remarkable example.

Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most unintuitive theory ever devised. And yet it’s also the most successful, in terms of sheer predictive power. Simply by following the math of quantum mechanics, incredible discoveries have been made. Its wild success tells us that the mathematical description provided by quantum mechanics reflects deep truths about reality.

Every once in a while we add a second onto our days. Similar to the Leap Year, this is known as the Leap Second. But, if the Leap Year already helps us account for the offset from a calendar in days, what exactly does the Leap Second do? Check out this video for the answer!

The scientific reasons you're into your bae.

The second law of thermodynamics – the law that entropy must, on average, increase – has been interpreted as the inevitability of the decay of structure. This is … misleading. Structure can develop in one region even as the entropy of the universe rises. Ultimately, entropy is a measure of the availability of free energy – of energy that isn’t hopelessly mixed in thermal equilibrium.

Quasars, X-ray Binaries and Supermassive voids at the center of our galaxies … black holes take many forms. In this episode Matt tells us what these different types of black holes are and how scientists are using VLBI, Very Long Baseline Interferometry, to map the different black holes throughout the known universe.

Do 97% of climate scientists really agree that humans are the main cause of climate change? Yep! Here’s what the 97 percent statistic *really* means.

Just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Over the past centuries, archaeologists, historians, and engineers have reconstructed a great deal of the technology and science used to build the Egyptian pyramids. This week we look at ancient Egyptian mathematics, building techniques, tools, and culture to reconstruct the Great Pyramid’s construction.

Is our universe a definitive single reality or is it merely one within an infinitely branching multiverse?

I’m tall. Most of the people in my family are tall. Does that mean my son will be tall? Turns out the inheritance of height is a lot more complicated than we thought. Scientists know that nature (genes) and nurture (environment) both play a role, but after more than a century of questions, we’re only just now starting to get some answers