This week, Hank elaborates on why Fugu can kill you by illustrating the ideas of solutions and discussing molarity, molality, and mass percent. Also, why polar solvents dissolve polar solutes, and nonpolar solvents dissolve...

Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and...

Adriene and Jacob teach you all about markets. So, in free market(ish) economies like the United States and most of the world, markets are a big deal. Markets work to produce the stuff that consumers want, and that society needs. Today...

In which John Green continues discussing George Orwell's 1984. Today we're talking about what the novel 1984 has to say about what some have called today's surveillance society. We'll also look at the idea that language can be used as a...

the Catlin Seaview Survey will be taking thousands of 360 degree panoramas of the Great Barrier Reef, not just for science, but so that every person with an internet connection can experience the world's largest structure...at least...

The vast majority of people who've lost a limb can still feel it - not as a memory or vague shape, but in complete lifelike detail. They can flex their phantom fingers and sometimes even feel the chafe of a watch band or the throb of an...

It's the final episode of our History of Science series and we thought it would be good to talk a little about some of the people we couldn't get to and some of the reasons we need to talk about diversity in scientists. Thanks for the...

Cheyenne Cochrane explores the role that hair texture has played in the history of being black in America -- from the heat straightening products of the post-Civil War era to the thousands of women today who have decided to stop chasing...

Remember how Darwin and Mendel lived around the same time, but everyone forgot about Mendel until 1900, and even then biologists saw Darwinism and Mendelism as two competing grand theories about how life works?

Well, in this episode...

Consider a bat that is infected with several deadly viruses, including ones that cause rabies, SARS, and Ebola. While this diagnosis would be lethal for other mammals, the winged wonder is totally unfazed, and may even spend the next 30...

We love the internet! It's a wealth of information where we can learn about just about anything, but it's also kind of a pit of information that can be false or misleading. So, we're partnering with Mediawise and the Stanford History...

In 1910, 90% of Black Americans lived in the South. By 1940, around 1.5 million Black Americans had left their homes, and 77% lived in the South. By 1970, 52% of Black Americans remained in the South. People moved away for many reasons,...

A bit of the history behind how we came to use the symbol "pi" to represent what it does today, and how Euler used it to refer to several different circle constants.

What is matter, anyway? What does it have to do with math? And why aren't you made of Jesus? Delving deeper into the theory of (almost) everything - the Standard Model of particle physics.

Settle in for a smörgåsbord of brain facts.

The Radium Girls were the first people who worked, for years, with one of the world's most radioactive substances -- and suffered the consequences.

As more and more parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children or are vaccinating them later, diseases like measles are making a comeback. Are vaccines safe? How do vaccines work? Why do some people claim there is a link between...

Did you know that gold is extraterrestrial? Instead of arising from our planet's rocky crust, it was actually cooked up in space and is present on Earth because of cataclysmic stellar explosions called supernovae. CERN Scientist David...

How did we get here? Well, in terms of Atomic Chemistry, Hank takes us on a tour of the folks that were part of the long chain of other folks who helped us get to these deeper understandings of the world. From Leucippus to...

Have you ever wondered how our earth was created? Here is a brief history about the Earth.

In the past few years the rise of crowdfunding has allowed for some pretty cool stuff to start existing, and today Hank is excited to announce another awesome Kickstarter - Planetary Resources (of asteroid mining fame) in partnership...

After a friend of mine got a tattoo with a representation of the cosecant function, it got me thinking about how there's another sense in which this function is a tattoo on math, so to speak.

Exams can be terrifying. It's easy to feel like the weight of the world rests in these moments - like this one test determines your grades and, in turn, your whole future - even if you know, rationally, that this isn't really the case....

While the weather in Iceland is often cold, wet, and windy, a nearly endless supply of heat bubbles away below the surface. In fact, almost every building in the country is heated by geothermal energy in a process with virtually no...