Sound can't actually travel through a vacuum like space, but scientists have learned that there's still plenty to hear.

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...

Whales have a lot of the same ear parts as humans, but they are capable of making sounds that could easily shatter a human's eardrums. So why are they seemingly immune from their own sense-shattering sounds?

Sometimes, Squeaks needs to recharge his batteries. And when he does, he hangs out in his room and listens to his favorite music!

Cicadas are small insects, but they're famous for being one of the loudest animals in the world!

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has destroyed so much -- including hundreds of schools, where the country's children were forging their futures -- but it has not stopped Ukrainians from pursuing knowledge and curiosity. In a deeply...

Pianos can't be perfectly tuned - it's a mathematical fact!

In this tutorial I show how I synthesized the sound of hydrogen for the "Sound of Hydrogen" video using mathematica - it's a little technical, but you've been requesting it!

The US economy has been expanding wildly for two centuries. Are we witnessing the end of growth? Economist Robert Gordon lays out 4 reasons US growth may be slowing, detailing factors like epidemic debt and growing inequality, which...

You've probably heard how some drugs and treatments make people feel better, even when they turn out to be fake. That's the placebo effect, but how does it work? And could the same effect backfire, causing your brain to make you feel...

Singing in the shower seems to sound better, but what is actually happening to the sound waves in that soapy, tiled room?

Feathers are good for flying, but they help birds do a lot more than just soar through the skies.

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Have you ever seen a kid talk to her friends in English, but to her mom in Spanish? Learning a second language can be really hard for adults, so how do bilingual babies learn two at the same time?

Salt doesn’t just make things salty! It has a lot of different effects on how we perceive flavors!

There are over 13,000 active seismic stations out there, producing far more data than seismologists have time to go through. So, researchers set up a showdown of humans versus machines to sift through all this information and, in the...

Rice production needs to see a 50% increase by 2030 to keep up with population growth, but as the climate warms, rice plants will likely become less efficient. Fortunately, scientists are working on a pretty clever potential solution.

Designer Jared Ficklin creates wild visualizations that let us see music, using color and even fire (a first for the TED stage) to analyze how sound makes us feel. He takes a brief digression to analyze the sound of a skatepark -- and...

When we talk about 'English', we often think of it as a single language. But what do the dialects spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other, or with the writings of Chaucer? Claire Bowern traces the...

In nature, most of our basic forces both attract and repel. In fact, gravity is the only exception. But, according to theorists, sound waves actually have negative gravity.

Don't take the easy route! Instead, use this little trick to improve your writing -- let go of the words "good" and "bad," and push yourself to illustrate, elucidate and illuminate your world with language.

Wheezy Waiter announces the SciShow nominees for "Worst Science in a Film," & Hank talks about the bird flu and shares two sounds that had never been heard by human ears until very recently.

Humankind has been looking for the giant squid (Architeuthis) since we first started taking pictures underwater. But the elusive deep-sea predator could never be caught on film. Oceanographer and inventor Edith Widder shares the key...

Dr. Ivan Pavlov's groundbreaking work revealed that a dog will respond to neutral stimuli, such as a bell, in the same way that it will respond to, say, mouth-watering food. This research is widely applicable beyond a dog's salivation....

A portly Miller, barely able to sit on his horse, rambles on about the flighty wife of a crotchety old carpenter and the scholar she takes as her lover. This might sound like a bawdy joke, but it's part of one of the most esteemed works...