As we mentioned last episode, one of the best test spaces for building new AI systems are games. This is because games provide a great framework for an AI to learn an objective and slowly improve. In recent years, AI has made huge...

Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision protecting people's right to have an abortion in the United States, will be overturned within a year, says reproductive rights attorney Kathryn Kolbert. In this electrifying call to...

We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health,...

"I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means" examines scientific theories that have taken on a life of their own in popular culture & we help you understand what they really mean in scientific terms. Today we take on Schrodinger's...

If you could travel back in time, and you killed your grandfather, would you be killing your future self? What do physics, complexity theory, and computer science have to say about this famous murderous time-travel paradox?

Alice Dreger works with people at the edge of anatomy, such as conjoined twins and intersexed people. In her observation, it's often a fuzzy line between male and female, among other anatomical distinctions. Which brings up a huge...

More than 90 percent of children in the US see a doctor at least once a year, which means countless hours spent in waiting rooms for parents. What if those hours could be used for something productive -- like saving money? Through her...

We could realistically see people starting to live and work on the Moon in the next decade -- and how we do it matters, says space policy researcher Jessy Kate Schingler. In this fascinating talk, she discusses the critical issues that...

In which John Green teaches you about Reconstruction. After the divisive, destructive Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had a plan to reconcile the country and make it whole again. Then he got shot, Andrew Johnson took over, and the...

At the end of the Civil War, the United States was still a very divided place. 700,000 people had died in a bitter fight over slavery. Reconstruction was the political process meant to bring the country back together. It was also the...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Ghanaian economist George Ayittey unleashes a torrent of controlled anger toward corrupt leaders in Africa -- and...

Parallel Universes - Many Worlds

There is a mind-boggling amount of data floating around our society. Physicists at CERN have been pondering how to store and share their ever more massive data for decades - stimulating globalization of the internet along the way, whilst...

Scientific discoveries, futurist Juan Enriquez notes, demand a shift in code, and our ability to thrive depends on our mastery of that code. Here, he applies this notion to the field of genomics.

ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas. These three very different groups are known for violence — but that’s only a portion of what they do, says policy analyst Benedetta Berti. They also attempt to win over populations with social work: setting up...

Our brains aren't exactly like a computer's hard drive, but it can still be fun to think about just how much storage space we have in our noggins.

Behind the everyday bargains we all love -- the $10 manicure, the unlimited shrimp buffet -- is a hidden world of forced labor to keep those prices at rock bottom. Noy Thrupkaew investigates human trafficking – which flourishes in the US...

There is a corruption at the heart of American politics, caused by the dependence of Congressional candidates on funding from the tiniest percentage of citizens. That's the argument at the core of this blistering talk by legal scholar...

Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He demos Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. Then he does something really amazing.

Today, Craig is going to wrap up our discussion of discrimination by looking more closely at those “discrete and insular minorities” referenced in the 14th Amendment. We’ll talk about instances of discrimination of Asian, European, and...

Hank tells us how some gamers are outperforming sophisticated computer programs to help solve the puzzle of protein folding and to assist scientists in finding better treatments for HIV/AIDS, cancer, and Alzheimer's.

A million refugees arrived in europe this year, says Alexander Betts, and "our response, frankly, has been pathetic." Betts studies forced migration, the impossible choice for families between the camps, urban poverty and dangerous...

Jedidah Isler dreamt of becoming an astrophysicist since she was a young girl, but the odds were against her: At that time, only 18 black women in the united States had ever earned a PhD in a physics-related discipline. In this personal...

The face of nuclear terror has changed since the Cold War, but disaster-medicine expert Irwin Redlener reminds us the threat is still real. He looks at some of history's farcical countermeasures and offers practical advice on how to...