PBS

Elon Musk’s SpaceX program proposes that 100 people could be sent to colonize Mars within 10 years. What might that colony look like?

2001: A Space Odyssey introduced a lot of people to the idea of rotation based artificial gravity, but in sci-fi, it’s far from the only one to implement the idea! Babylon 5, Halo, and Ringworld also used rotation-based artificial gravity in their stores, but, being an astrophysicist I had to ask, WHO DOES IT BEST? And more importantly, is artificial gravity in space possible?

The iconic move from Star Fox seems so easy, just press a button and BOOM. The ship rolls. But HOW? Barrel rolls in atmosphere are easy to execute with the use of ailerons, but in space, it's a different issue altogether. With no atmosphere (and no thrusters), how does one Barrel Roll like Star Fox in space?

Artificial intelligence is an ever evolving goal for researchers, and the object of endless fascination for writers, filmmakers, and the general public. But despite our best science fiction visions, creating digital intelligence is incredibly difficult.

Now that gravitational waves are definitely a thing, it’s time to think about some of the crazy things we can figure out with them. In some cases we’re going to need a gravitational wave observatory - in fact, we've already built one.

Quantum Field Theory is generally accepted as an accurate description of the subatomic universe. However until recently this theory had one giant hole in it. The particles it describes had no mass!

When you really think about it, kissing is an odd human behavior. You know, all the rubbing of our faces all over each other. So there must be a good reason why we do it, right? From motherly comforts to testing the genetic compatibility of your "mate" . . . the science of kissing is pretty awesome

Will the future of space exploration be guided by public or private entities? Which is better?

The Sun is getting brighter and the planets in our solar system that are habitable are changing.

Was your Art History class an endless succession of names and dates and movements? Art History doesn't have to be that way! We discuss new (and much more compelling) approaches the study of art.

The Kepler mission has determined that terrestrial planets are extremely common, and may orbit most stars in the Milky Way. But these planets are difficult to directly image because they’re dense and small. Our Sun is about ten billion times brighter than Earth. Train a distant telescope on us, and it will be overwhelmed by the Sun’s rays. So how can we find terrestrial planets around stars light

Are you easily fooled? Why we fall for April Fool's Pranks.

American college students and Tamil speakers in India were given the same unusual task: to connect two meaningless words to two irregular shapes. The remarkable result was that more than 95% of people provided the same answer. The words in question were “buba” and “kiki” and the shapes were random drawings of closed lines, one of them round-edged and the other pointy. The people associated the round-shaped line with the word “buba” and the pointy one to “kiki”. The results of the experiment indicate that we can draw meaning from where there is none. Even when we are talking to someone in the same language, our body language, tone, pitch and accent convey information beyond what we tell. What about accents? We all have it, although no one seems to notice their own. Accents develop because people who live in close proximity share the way of speaking, and we have our own accent bias. Studies have shown that even one-year-old babies have a preference for the sounds of the <a href="https://rumble.com/v30jfx-english-language-quiz-renaissance-period.html" target="_blank">language</a> spoken at home. But why does the English speaking world have so many accents in the first place? After colonizing territories on all world continents the descendants of the English must have lost the English accent at some point and developed their local way of speaking. During the period of 200 years since the first settlement to the invention of sound records, accents have changed and even developed tendencies peculiar to a geographical area: the <a href="https://rumble.com/v4e4ut-buckeye-woman-wakes-up-with-british-accent.html" target="_blank">British</a> non-rhetoric (inaudible) vs. the American rhetoric (hard) “r”. The way we talk conveys information about our level of education, ethnicity, socio-economic status, maybe not always accurate but it can affect people’s perceptions. Especially about credibility: people with accent are more likely to be disbelieved, and the heavier the accent the less believable they are perceived to be. Also, people are more likely to rate a suspect as guilty if they have a regional accent vs. a London accent. However, we all have a bias towards our own accent – we like it because it belongs to our social group.

Humans are special, and we got that way thanks to evolution and natural selection. The proof is right there in our bodies! From anatomy to genes, here are some stories of how you got to be the way you are.

We all know tides have something to do with gravity from the Moon and Sun, but if gravity affects the motion of all objects equally, then how come oceans have large tides while other bodies of water don't? It's because your mental picture of the tides is probably WRONG!

Weather and climate are very different. But our experience of weather can have a big effect on how we view climate change. Why is that?

Find out how time and space switch roles when we move beyond the event horizon of the black hole.

Between them, general relativity and quantum mechanics seem to describe all of observable reality.

In part 2 of our special series on human ancestry, we ask why we are the only surviving branch on the human evolutionary tree. Just 50,000-100,000 years ago, Earth was home to three or four separate human species, including our most famous cousins: the Neanderthals. New research has shown that Neanderthals were not the brutish, unintelligent cavemen that cartoons make them out to be.

In 1990, an experiment conceived by Carl Sagan was performed using using the Galileo spacecraft. The purpose? To detect life on a planet based on measurements by a space probe. The experiment was successful, and abundant life was unequivocally confirmed. That planet? The Earth. Now, a quarter century later, we’re on the verge of conducting that same experiment on a world orbiting another star.

What does a ginkgo tree have in common with a dinosaur?

Among living things, the color blue is oddly rare. Blue rocks, blue sky, blue water, sure. But blue animals? They are few and far between. In this video, we'll look at some very cool butterflies with Bob Robbins, Ph.D. from Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History to help us learn how living things make blue, and why this beautiful hue is so rare in nature. To understand how <a href="https://rumble.com/v4up5j-blue-spotted-stingray.html" target="_blank">blue</a> works, we need to take a look at the most colorful animals of them all - butterflies. If you didn’t already know, butterflies have evolved from moths to be able to frolic in the sun. Their wings have developed lots of different colors, ranging from earthy browns to the most spectacular blue colors. The natural occurring colors in our bodies actually come from the food that we are eating and they are usually browns, reds and yellows, so how come some people have blue eyes? The scientific explanation is that, well, they don’t. There is no real blue color in nature, rather it’s all physics. The blue hue that we are constantly mesmerised by is nothing more than refraction of blue light. The animals that have been able to produce blue coloring for their skin do it by having a complex skin structure on those parts of their body. The wings of the <a href="https://rumble.com/v31rsl-butterfly-eat.html" target="_blank">butterflies</a> have the tiniest ridges where the light is refracted and the only colored light being able to deflect is the blue light. Everything else is absorbed at the bottom of the wing and that is why nature is the greatest scientist of them all!

Earth mysteries are a wide range of spiritual, quasi-religious and pseudo-scientific ideas focusing on cultural and religious beliefs about the Earth, generally with regard to particular geographical locations of historical significance. Believers in Earth mysteries generally consider certain locations to be "sacred", or that certain spiritual "energies" may be active at those locations. The term "alternative archaeology" has also been used to describe the study of <a href="https://rumble.com/v368lv-earth-moving-research.html" target="_blank">Earth</a> mystery beliefs. A black hole is a region of space-time exhibiting such strong gravitational effects that nothing—not even particles and electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from inside it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform space-time to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, no locally detectable features appear to be observed. In many ways a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Moreover, quantum field theory in curved space-time predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it essentially impossible to observe. <a href="https://rumble.com/v368pl-eddies-like-black-holes.html" target="_blank">Black holes</a> have mystified physicists for decades, but with the help of quantum mechanics, we are beginning to make serious progress in understanding these strange objects. This week on Space Time, Matt dives deeper into the physical process of creating a black hole, and what that can tell us about how black holes behave. Take a look as this video is sure to broaden your horizons!

When you look in mirror, and see what you think is a perfect reflection, you might be looking at universe whose laws are fundamentally different.

The "prisoner's dilemma" is a classic test in psychology. How can you win?