If you've ever tried to make out something that was really far away, odds are you squinted while doing it. It's basically involuntary! But does narrowing your field of vision really help you see things better?

As natural garbage collectors, vultures are vital to our ecosystem -- so why all the bad press? Why are so many in danger of extinction? Raptor biologist Munir Virani says we need to pay more attention to these unique and misunderstood...

In this edition of IDTIMWYTIM, Hank explains why the common understanding of "equinox" is wrong, what the equinox actually is, and then rages a little against astronomers and their stupid confusing Latin terms.

At the center of a galaxy more than 55 million light-years away, there's a supermassive black hole with the mass of several billion suns. And now, for the first time ever, we can see it. Astrophysicist Sheperd Doeleman, head of the Event...

When we throw away our plastic trash, where does it go? In this hard-hitting talk, Van Jones shows us how our throwaway culture hits poor people and poor countries "first and worst," with consequences we all share no matter where we...

There's a parallel Internet you may not have run across yet -- accessed by a special browser and home to a freewheeling collection of sites for everything from anonymous activism to illicit activities. Jamie Bartlett reports from the...

Our knowledge of specific technologies or techniques can sometimes be lost to time. And that can be because of changing economic conditions, or, sometimes, it's because the technology was so deadly that only a few were allowed to know it.

The DNA inside our cells almost exclusively twists in one direction, but the reason for this might be out of this world!

Farida Nabourema has dedicated her life to fighting the military regime in Togo, Africa's oldest autocracy. She's learned two truths along the way: no country is destined to be oppressed -- and no country is immune to dictatorship. But...

The gastric brooding frog lays its eggs just like any other frog -- then swallows them whole to incubate. That is, it did until it went extinct 30 years ago. Paleontologist Michael Archer makes a case to bring back the gastric brooding...

We’ve known how to cure malaria since the 1600s, so why does the disease still kill hundreds of thousands every year? It’s more than just a problem of medicine, says journalist Sonia Shah. A look into the history of malaria reveals three...

Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than two percent chance of survival. How could this be? Jack Andraka talks about how he developed a promising early detection test for pancreatic cancer...

Privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian sees the landscape of government surveillance shifting beneath our feet, as an industry grows to support monitoring programs. Through private companies, he says, governments are buying technology...

Where does OK Go come up with ideas like dancing in zero gravity, performing in ultra slow motion or constructing a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg machine for their music videos? In between live performances of "This Too Shall Pass" and...

In 1956, a team of scientists conducted an experiment that, seemed kind of trivial, but the results would challenge one of our fundamental beliefs about the entire universe.

Scared of superintelligent AI? You should be, says neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris -- and not just in some theoretical way. We're going to build superhuman machines, says Harris, but we haven't yet grappled with the problems...

Are parrots just good at imitating sounds or is there something else that separates them from other birds?

Who is listening in on your phone calls? On a landline, it could be anyone, says privacy activist Christopher Soghoian, because surveillance backdoors are built into the phone system by default, to allow governments to listen in. But...

It’s hard to say 'no' to puppy eyes, so here’s some information you can share with your pets next time you unwrap that chocolate bar

If you've ever talked to a vinyl purist (or are one yourself) you know that people can be pretty passionate about what format is king when it comes to music. And based on how much people like to brag about what band they saw live and how...

Take a trip through our star area, using only the ten hundred most used words, inspired by Randall Munroe of XKCD.

Henry Markram says the mysteries of the mind can be solved -- soon. Mental illness, memory, perception: they're made of neurons and electric signals, and he plans to find them with a supercomputer that models all the brain's...

There are lots of reasons stinky things don’t smell as strong in cold weather. You can maybe guess some of the reasons, but others may surprise you!

Unless you saw the spider bite you, that swollen, bite-looking lesion on your arm is probably something else, and blaming it on an innocent 8-legged critter might do more harm than good.