Astronomers have gotten pretty good at calculating how fast the universe is expanding, but new measurements don’t line up with the predictions of well-tested laws of physics. Now scientists have a new question to ponder: Why are these...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how an object with mass placed in a gravitational field experiences a gravitational force. On the Earth this gravitational force is known as weight. The gravitational force is equal to the product...

I'm not saying it's aliens....and it's probably not aliens. Also, an update about the most recent SpaceX explosion!

You've felt cold before. Sometimes it's cold outside. But what if I told you that "cold" isn't real? There's no substance or quantity called "cold" in science. We can't measure the amount of "cold" in something. Instead it's about what's...

Scientists are trying to figure out if they can predict big earthquakes by simulating small quakes in labs and studying big quakes under the ocean. Thanks to the University of Rhode Island for...

Measuring 'intellect' is a difficult task. Check out one way scientists are attempting to make this endeavor more testable.

In this video Paul Andersen explains how thermodynamic and equilibrium reasoning can be related through changes in free energy and the equilibrium constant. When the delta G is negative the reaction shifts to the right or favors...

Sometimes science news is less about stuff that actually happened, as much as it is about people going "PAY ATTENTION TO ME" and space news is no exception. In fact this week there was probably as much hype as real news, all in the name...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent. He shows you too simple methods for calculated individual inertial mass and gravitational mass. Albert Einstein used this principle to build...

An oblate spheroid is a special case of an ellipsoid where two of the semi-principal axes are the same size.

Today we’re going to discuss what it means for a place to be “developed”. Development is often associated with economic success — that is countries with higher standards of living and material wealth like those found in Europe and North...

The current hurricane category scale doesn’t accurately convey the danger of a storm, because it doesn’t account for a hurricane's most destructive factors.

What we know today about global greenhouse gas emissions is mostly self-reported by countries, and those numbers (sometimes tallied manually on paper!) are often inaccurate and prone to manipulation. If we really want to get serious...

It's been one (tropical/sidereal/anomalous) year since I uploaded the very first It's Okay To Be Smart. Here's everything that's happened since!

Henrietta Swan Leavitt was one of a number of volunteer women astronomers who were allowed to serve as "computers" at Harvard College Observatory, doing tedious work male scientists wouldn't do, and ultimately making a discovery now...

The determinant has a very natural visual intuition, even though it's formula can make it seem more complicated than it really is.

If you: do laundry, are (or have been) pregnant, tidy up, shop for your household or do similar labor, then by GDP standards, you're unproductive. In this visionary talk, economist Marilyn Waring seeks to correct the failures of this...

The ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is always the same: 3.14159 and on and on (literally!) forever. This irrational number, pi, has an infinite number of digits, so we'll never figure out its exact value no matter how...

Mr. Andersen explains how carbon-14 dating can be used to date ancient material. The half-life of radioactive carbon into nitrogen is also discussed.

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the energy of a wave if directly related to the amplitude of a wave. The wave energy of a sound wave is the volume of the wave.

Today we’re going to talk about measures of central tendency - those are the numbers that tend to hang out in the middle of our data: the mean, the median, and mode. All of these numbers can be called “averages” and they’re the numbers...

e=mc2... it's a big deal, right? But why? And what about this grumpy cat in a box and probability? In this episode of Crash Course Physics, Shini attempts to explain a little more on the topic of Quantum Mechanics.

Last week, it was announced that we've detected gravitational waves on Earth. Now, Hank explains what that means for the future and why it's such a huge deal.

Like most quizzes on the internet, personality tests aren't what you would call "reliable."