SciShow
Eavesdropping On Other Worlds
We usually only get to use our sense of sight in exploring the universe, but that hasn’t prevented scientists from trying to listen in.
SciShow
Is Our Solar System Missing Moons?
You might be pretty confident that when a moon is there it’s there to stay, but that’s not always the case. Moons may have a history of disappearing.
SciShow
JWST: Looking Beyond The Pretty Pictures
The James Webb Space Telescope isn't just for finding Pinterest worthy pictures, we're finding some amazing details in the sometimes blurry background photos.
SciShow
This Toxic Liquid Telescope from the 1850s Is Finally Useful
Sometimes looking into a pool of a toxic liquid holds the secrets of the universe–or maybe just this one time.
SciShow
The Biggest Star In The Universe Is Too Small
R136a1 is the most massive star that astronomers have ever discovered. It's so massive you might think the laws of physics wouldn't allow it. But it turns out that its current mass estimate is actually so low that it threatens our...
SciShow
We Don’t Know Why Astronauts Get Motion Sick
A majority of modern astronauts experience any one of a suite of symptoms scientists collectively call Space Motion Sickness, or SMS. But despite knowing about it for nearly as long as humans have gone into space, we still don't know...
SciShow
Astronauts Need a Better Sunscreen
Space is a dangerous place. One of the many dangers comes in the form of radiation. On Earth, sunscreen helps shield our bodies. But astronauts on the ISS, or eventually on the Moon/Mars/etc., will have to be rocking some suped-up sunblock.
SciShow
This is How We’ll “See” the Universe’s First Second
In June 2023, scientists around the world announced the first official detection of the gravitational wave background — a cacophonous symphony of gravitational waves coming from every direction in space. Buried within that cosmic noise,...
SciShow
The Rocket that Hopped
Surveyor 6 may not have been the first craft to make a soft landing on the Moon, but it is the first craft to take off from the surface of another world. And it did so in a very adorable way. Long before any Apollo astronaut, Surveyor 6...
SciShow
The Only Moons That Trade Places
Saturn's moons Janus and Epimetheus were once thought to be the same moon. It turns out they're dance partners.
SciShow
The Particle So Extreme Scientists Called it OMG
In 1991, a subatomic particle smashed into Earth's atmosphere traveling faster than anything humans can replicate. It's the most energetic particle detected to date, and maybe even the fastest (except light itself). Astronomers call it...
SciShow
The Spiders That Turn Stars into Planets
Neutron stars, are some of the most extreme phenomenon in the universe. It's doubly so for a subset known as pulsars. Some are spinning so fast, and are so massive, that astronomers aren't entirely sure how they got to be that way. One...
SciShow
We Finally Landed on the Bottom of the Moon!
Humans have been hurling spacecraft at the Moon for over 60 years. But even with all that practice, it's still quite the challenge to successfully land something on the surface. Case in point: in August 2023, two missions attempted to...
PBS
Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?
The laws of physics don’t specify an arrow of time - they don’t distinguish the past from the future. The equations we use to describe how things evolve forward in time also perfectly describe their evolution backwards in time. So the...
PBS
What If The Universe Is Math?
In his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, the physicist Eugine Wigner said that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious”. This statement was inspired by...
PBS
Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Quantum mechanics forbids us from measuring the universe beyond a certain level of precision. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. And in some cases succeeding, by squeezing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to its breaking point.
PBS
Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?
Physicists have a long history of sticking our noses where they don’t belong - and one of our favorite places to step beyond our expertise is the question of consciousness and free will. Sometimes our musings are insightful, sometimes...
PBS
Could the Higgs Boson Lead Us to Dark Matter?
The discovery of the Higgs boson ten years ago in the Large Hadron Collider was the culmination of decades of work and the collaboration of 1000s of brilliant and passionate people. It was the final piece needed to confirm the standard...
PBS
Why String Theory is Wrong
There’s this idea that beauty is a powerful guide to truth in the mathematics of physical theory. String theory is certainly beautiful in the eyes of many physicists. Beautiful enough to pursue even if it’s wrong? Hermann Weyl once said,...
PBS
How To Detect a Neutrino
Why is there something rather than nothing? Well the answer may be found in the weakest particle in the universe: the neutrino. For over half a century Fermilab has been the premier particle accelerator facility of the United States and...
PBS
Are We Running Out of Space Above Earth?
While recent news about the Chinese Long March 5 Rocket made a lot of people very nervous because a 22-ton rocket was going to fall out of the sky, this sort of thing happens all the time. Boosters, dead satellites, and sometimes even...
PBS
How Stars Destroy Each Other
Our galaxy is full of dysfunctional stellar relationships. With more than half of all stars existing in binary orbits, it’s inevitable that many stellar remnants will end up in parasitic spirals with their partners. Today we’re going to...
PBS
What If We Live in a Superdeterministic Universe?
Today we’re going to try to save reality - or at least realism. However this rescue effort has a price; one that you may not be willing to pay. Your very soul, or at least your free will, is on the line.
PBS
Do Black Holes Create New Universes?
Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants - like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces - just right for the emergence of...