In this video Paul Andersen shows you how to use mathematical and computational thinking in a mini-lesson on computational representations. Two examples are included in the video and two additional examples are included in the linked...

It's not just fictional sitcom characters who struggle with navigating an oversized sofa around a tight corner. Mathematicians have their own version of the problem, and have spent the last six decades trying to not just find the...

Picture this: you’re wearing a normal-looking pair of glasses, but they give you the ability to quickly summarize a book, translate between languages or remember where you left your keys. In a live demo of unreleased technology, computer...

For some people who stop taking an SSRI or SNRI antidepressant, they can get a weird side effect called brain zaps. And even though we've known about them for decades, we still don't know exactly why brain zaps happen.

If you've been prescribed an expensive, cumbersome CPAP machine, you might want to know if it actually works. And while sleep doctors insist CPAP is the standard of care, out there in the real world, it's a little more complicated.

There are many conventional ways to treat oil spills, both at sea and on land, but some of the strangest include human hair and chicken manure.

How do Newton's Cradles connect to cancer treatments? Let's unpack the physics of some of our favorite desk toys, from dippy birds to perpetual motion machines, and explore how these scientific principles can be used beyond an office desk.

Mercury, a.k.a. quicksilver, is famous for being a liquid at room temperature...and also below room temperature. But you can't use a high school chem class to explain why. Instead, we need a little help from Einstein.

The metaverse could be our key to making real progress in the fight against climate change, says engineer Cedrik Neike. Examining how AI-powered modeling eliminates the trial and error of wasteful industries, he explores how this...

Inattentional blindness is a phenomenon where we can be so focused on a given task, we completely miss some pretty bizarre object cross our line of vision. Like a gorilla in the middle of a basketball game. But exactly why it happens is...

Movies. Video games. YouTube videos. All of them work because we accidentally figured out a way to fool your brain’s visual processing system, and you don’t even know it’s happening. In this video, I talk to neuroscientist David...

You may not be an expert, but perhaps you feel pretty confident that you could ride a motorcycle, or give someone a decent haircut - if you absolutely had to - right? Not so much, according to the psychological phenomenon known as the...

Sometimes the world's biggest issues can seem so intractable that meaningful change feels impossible. But what if the answer has been right in front of us all along? What if the answer is actually throwing money at the problems? In this...

AI can be a transformational tool in our fight against climate change, says Sims Witherspoon, a leader at the AI research lab Google DeepMind. Using wind power as her case study, she explains how powerful neural networks can help us...

How is AI changing the nature of human imagination and creativity? Through a mind-bending tour of new techniques he's been tinkering with, creative technologist Bilawal Sidhu shows how anyone can use AI-powered tools -- like 3D scans...

The lab mice we use for genetic studies are not only closely related, but live out their whole lives in a sterile environment, so they don’t tell us everything we need to know about actual humans. The answer might be grabbing a wild...

If you've received a vaccine that's 95% effective, that does not mean you have a 5% chance of getting sick. That’s just not how the numbers are calculated. So let’s take a closer look at how it does work, why we can’t compare these...

Fasten your seat belt as software engineer Alex Koster takes us on a journey in what he calls the "software dream car" of the future. He breaks down how massive technological shifts are transforming the automotive industry and paints a...

Today we're going to talk about robots! Robots are often thought as a technology of the future, but they're already here by the millions in the workplace, our homes, and pretty soon on the roads. We'll discuss the origins of robotics to...

You've always been told that pi is 3.14. This is true, but this number is based on how we measure distance. Find out what happens to pi when we change the way we measure distance.

Today's math curriculum is teaching students to expect -- and excel at -- paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that...

Can art save lives? Not exactly, but our most prized professionals (doctors, nurses, police officers) can learn real world skills through art analysis. Studying art like Rene Magritte's Time Transfixed can enhance communication and...

How does bitcoin work? What is a "block chain"? What problem is this system trying to solve, and how does it use the tools of cryptography to do so?

In the 1930s, broadcast radio introduced an entirely new form of storytelling; today, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter are changing the scene again. Andrew Fitzgerald takes a look at the (aptly) short but fascinating history of new...