It's been a long road to the discovery that Earth is not the center of the Solar System, the Milky Way, or the universe; great thinkers from Aristotle to Bruno have grappled with it for millennia. But if we aren't at the center of the...

On this Space Time Journal Club we look at how gravitational waves can be used to search for extra dimensions of space!

If water just keeps getting recycled by a closed system on Earth, how did it get here in the first place? Where did the cycle begin?

What is a vector space? Even though they are initial taught in the context of arrows in space, or with vectors being lists of numbers, the idea is much more general and far-reaching.

The Greeks had a simple and elegant formula for the universe: just earth, fire, wind, and water. Turns out there's more to it than that -- a lot more. Visible matter (and that goes beyond the four Greek elements) comprises only 4% of the...

Knots are everywhere in our daily lives, but a new branch of mathematics is taking things to the next level.

Here are some handy keywords to get your googling started:



Reaction-diffusion system: A hypothetical system in which multiple chemical substances diffuse through a defined space at different rates and react with one...

We don’t know what happens to stuff when it gets sucked into a black hole, but in the same instance, we don’t know what happens to the black hole. There’s a possibility that sucked up stuff might actually give the black hole “quantum hair”.

Have you heard of Alexander von Humboldt? Not likely. The geologist turned South American explorer was a bit of an 18th century super scientist, traveling over 24,000 miles to understand the relationship between nature and habitat....

Certain people can hear particular animated gifs despite them containing no audio information, and scientists have some leads on what might cause this seemingly impossible phenomenon.

Why do people do bad things? Is it because of the situation or who they are at their core? In this week's episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank works to shed a little light on the ideas of Situation vs. Personality. Oh, and...

We welcomed new science and discoveries in 2018, but unfortunately, we also had to say goodbye to some important figures in the scientific community.

When you think about Einstein and physics, E=mc^2 is probably the first thing that comes to mind. But one of his greatest contributions to the field actually came in the form of an odd philosophical footnote in a 1935 paper he co-wrote...

The source of earth's water is something of a mystery, and some scientists are starting to think that the sun might have provided the special ingredients to help.

What happens when you don't sleep? And why do we need to do it anyways? Hank explains the science of sleep: the cause, the benefits, and who holds the record for going without it!

How does education work? Where does the money come from? Who pays for it? Is going to college a good investment? Adriene and Jacob are talking today about the economics of education. Most countries require that their citizens get some...

Let's look further into what we don't yet know about the Big Bang, and how the theory could progress in the future. Since there is a discrepancy between general relativity and quantum mechanics, we continue to search for a grand unifying...

This week, some rather confusing news from the Moon, and details about how ordinary folks like you helped classify 2 million celestial objects in just five days!

Every star we see in the sky has at least one planet orbiting it, says astronomer Sara Seager. So what do we know about these exoplanets, and how can we find out more? Seager introduces her favorite set of exoplanets and shows new...

The 2007-2008 financial crisis, you might think, was an unpredictable one-time crash. But Didier Sornette and his Financial Crisis Observatory have plotted a set of early warning signs for unstable, growing systems, tracking the moment...

What can we learn from the world's most enduringly creative people? They "slow-motion multitask," actively juggling multiple projects and moving between topics as the mood strikes -- without feeling hurried. Author Tim Harford shares how...

COVID-19 has the potential to ebb and flow with the seasons, but because it's a novel pandemic, that doesn't mean we're off the hook this summer.

Do you ever think of what could cause the next big extinction? How about a super massive tropical storm that sweeps over continents? Hey, it could happen! Check out this SciShow Dose to see how a hypercane would be possible.

If vacuum energy really does have the enormous value predicted by quantum field theory then our gently expanding, geometrically flat universe shouldn't exist. This is the vacuum catastrophe.