Population III stars were the very first stars in our universe and far larger than any we can see today. Where are they now?

Is our universe a definitive single reality or is it merely one within an infinitely branching multiverse?

If you haven't had a chance to play with Microsoft's Kinect, you're missing out on some great video games and some amazing art! The Kinect is a crazy awesome piece of XBox 360 hardware that maps your physical movements onto any screen....

What happened when a gambler asked for help from a mathematician? The formal study of Probability.

After taking you on a journey through geologic time, we've arrived at the Cenozoic Era. Most of the mammals and birds that you can think of appeared during this era but perhaps more importantly, the Cenozoic marks the rise of organisms...

Part of why we're so fascinated with extinct dinosaurs it's just hard for us to believe that animals that huge actually existed. And yet, they existed! From the Jurassic to the Cretaceous Periods, creatures as tall as a five-story...

Our image of dinosaurs has been constantly changing since naturalists started studying them about 350 years ago. Taken together, these pictures can tell us a whole lot about just how much we have learned. Let's explore the history of...

The search for our origins go back to a single common ancestor -- one that remains shrouded in mystery. It's the ancestor of everything we know and today scientists call it the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA.

The study of natural history is the study of how the world has changed but Earth itself is in a constant state of flux -- because the ground beneath your feet is always moving. So if we want to know how we got here, we have to understand...

Experts are still arguing over whether Archaeopteryx was a true bird, or a paravian dinosaur, or some other kind of dino. But regardless of what side you're on, how did this fascinating, bird-like animal relate to today's birds? It turns...

Are matter, mass, and time real?

420 million years ago, a giant feasted on the dead, growing slowly into the largest living thing on land. It belonged to an unlikely group of pioneers that ultimately made life on land possible -- the fungi.

The first era of our current eon, the Paleozoic Era, is probably the most deceptively fascinating time in Earth's history. With near constant revolutions in life, punctuated by catastrophic extinctions, it is also one of the most chaotic.

Zombies are EVERYWHERE!! Wait, don't panic- we mean in pop culture, not outside your window. But why is that? Bad guys and monsters seem to go through phases: one decade there's a dozen movies about aliens, ten years later it's vampires....

Reptiles emerged from the Paleozoic as humble creatures, but in time, they grew to become some of the largest forms of life ever to stomp, swim, and soar across the planet. This Age of Reptiles was a spectacular prehistoric epic, and it...

Math is invisible. Unlike physics, chemistry, and biology we can't see it, smell it, or even directly observe it in the universe. And so that has made a lot of really smart people ask, does it actually even EXIST?!?!

What exactly will happen when the sun dies?

Fomalhaut is a massive young star surrounded by a ring of dust debris that can tell us a great deal about the formation of our own solar system.

What happens if you multiply things that aren't numbers? And what happens if that multiplication is not associative?

Why is there a hexagonal structure in honeycombs? Why not squares? Or asymmetrical blobby shapes? In 36 B.C., the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro wrote about two of the leading theories of the day. First: bees have six legs, so they...

Only 4 steps stand between you and the secrets hidden behind RSA cryptography. Find out how to crack the world's most commonly used form of encryption.

Though the TV show Community has never achieved huge ratings, it has a passionate cult following, including us here at Idea Channel. The show plays with genre and narrative in such a creative way that it brings to mind the cultural and...

Set theory is supposed to be a foundation of all of mathematics. How does it handle infinity?

Purgatorius, a kind of mammal called a plesiadapiform, might've been one of your earliest ancestors. But how did we get from a mouse-sized creature that looked more like a squirrel than a monkey -- to you, a member of Homo sapiens?