By the middle of the 20th century, the epicenter of American theater, the Broadway theater district in New York, was getting to be a pretty staid and commercial place. There was a lot of money to be made from prestige plays and dancing...

Watch. Dime. Develop. Powder. Pantry. Dirt. That's right, it's time for a dip into the random, because we're talking about the Dada theater that grew out of Symbolism, and the Surrealist theater that followed Dada. You'll learn about...

In a lyrical talk full of radical imagination, poet Aja Monet and community organizer phillip agnew share the story of how they fell in love and what they've learned about the powerful connection between great social movements and...

The March on Washington of 1963 is an enduring and widely-known event of the Civil Rights movement. But the March has its roots in an earlier planned March on Washington that didn't happen. In 1941, labor leader A. Philip Randolph began...

Roller coasters give people the opportunity to experience physics in dramatic ways. In this episode of SciShow, we break down how physics work on roller coasters to give you the ride of your life!

According to the math, washing machines should take several hours to get your clothes clean, but in reality it only takes a single hour or less. Now, scientists have finally figured out how they truly work.

When you’re learning about science for the first time, it can be easier to break things down into a simpler form, and you can end up with a few misconceptions about the world. But sometimes this is the first step to understanding that...

Researchers created a "super jelly" that can survive being run over with a car, and its weird properties take advantage of some novel chemistry.

Orphanages are costly and can cause irreparable damage both mentally and physically for its charges -- so why are they still so ubiquitous? Georgette Mulheir gravely describes the tragedy of orphanages and urges us to end our reliance on...

Although one third of the population suffers from motion sickness, scientists aren't exactly sure what causes it. Like the common cold, it's a seemingly simple problem that's still without a cure. And if you think it's bad on a long...

In 1944, amateur astronomer Hisako Koyama's latest endeavor was sketching the sun's shifting surface. She spent weeks angling her telescope towards the sun and tracking every change she saw with drawings. Little did she know, these...

Some dogs just seem to love watching TV. But are they really watching what we see?

What's so special about Leonard da Vinci's Vitruvian Man? With arms outstretched, the man fills the irreconcilable spaces of a circle and a square -- symbolizing the Renaissance-era belief in the mutable nature of humankind. James Earle...

Today we’re talking about mass transfer. It doesn’t just apply to objects and fluids as a whole, but also to the individual molecules and components that make them up. We’ll see that transfers of mass need their own driving force,...

Our descendants own the future, but the decisions and actions we make now will tremendously impact generations to come, says philosopher Roman Krznaric. From a global campaign to grant legal personhood to nature to a groundbreaking...

Botanist Corneille Ewango talks about his work at the Okapi Faunal Reserve in the Congo Basin -- and his heroic work protecting it from poachers, miners and raging civil wars.

Robert Gupta, violinist with the LA Philharmonic, talks about a violin lesson he once gave to a brilliant, schizophrenic musician -- and what he learned. Called back onstage later, Gupta plays his own transcription of the prelude from...

James Baldwin was an American novelist and social critic whose essays in “Notes of a Native Son” explored race, sex and class distinctions. -- In the 1960s, the FBI amassed almost 2,000 documents in an investigation into one of...

Future advances in engineering may come from chemistry. From molecular motors to salt-shaker-drug-deliverers, the future looks small.

In the 90s, patients displaying symptoms similar to, but not exactly like Parkinson's Disease left doctors scratching their heads. But when they took a look at their patients' diets, they found the culprit in the form of a popular and...

How counting in Ternary can solve a variant of the Tower's of Hanoi puzzle, and how this gives rise to a beautiful connection to Sierpinski's triangle.

If you live in a cold climate, you might know the agony of trying to get your car started on a chilly winter morning, or standing helplessly by as your phone's battery level plummets. So why do cold weather and batteries seem to just not...

Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility...

Your brain does a lot to smooth out your visual experience of the world… including the closest thing we have to time travel.