Astrobiologist Betül Kaçar on why the simple act of asking questions (without needing a reason) is one of the most powerful things a human can do.

"It's a very, very beautiful calculation, but it's the best example I know of the relationship between these rather abstract quantities perhaps and something that you can look at in a telescope."

These microbes endured the unlivable. The NASA astrobiologist who studies them reveals what that means for us today

“We don't have enough knowledge to precisely calculate what is going to happen, and so we assign probabilities to it, which reflects our ignorance of the situation.”

"We are all in orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. How big is this collection of stars? Somewhere between 200 and 400 billion suns in the Milky Way galaxy, about 100,000 light years across."

"Everything that we care about, everything we experience, everything we know, we know it through our conscious awareness of it."

Statistician Talithia Williams on how math is the clearest path to understanding our existence.

How do scientists measure and define life in the natural world? Dr. Lee Cronin gives us a definition, in 4 minutes:

When one path is blocked, a new one must be paved. How Einstein, Heisenberg and Gödel used constraints to make life-changing discoveries:

Science writer George Musser on the unsung role of friendship in science’s biggest discoveries.

Consciousness isn’t just a problem for philosophers. On this episode of Dispatches, Kmele sat down with scientists, a mathematician, a spiritual leader, and an entrepreneur, all trying to get to the heart of “the feeling of life itself.”

NASA’s Michelle Thaller explains what happens when the densest stars in the galaxy collide.

A physicist discusses the boundaries of reality and experimentation.

Quantum wormholes are mathematically possible — but might also be physically impossible. Physicist Janna Levin explains Hawking’s famous information paradox.

Evolution doesn’t fix things — it reinvents them. A biologist explains.

Science has opened so many doors to humanity’s understanding of the world. Scientism shuts them. Here’s how to tell the difference.

Frank Wilczek is celebrated for his investigations into the fundamental laws of nature that have transformed our understanding of the forces that govern our Universe. In this video, the MIT […]

Astronomer Michelle Thaller explains the healing power of physics after losing her husband.

Why do so many cultures celebrate holidays at the same time of year?

How did complex systems emerge from chaos? Physicist Sean Carroll explains.

Can psychedelics solve the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness? A Johns Hopkins professor explains.

Debates about the existence of free will traditionally have been fought by two competing camps: those who believe in free will and those who don’t because they believe the Universe […]

Exercise culture is crazy. But what you need to do is exceedingly simple.

Some scientists see religion as a threat to the scientific method that should be resisted. But faith "is really asking a different set of questions," says Collins.

“If 90% of children had ADHD and only 10% of children could sit still at a desk, how would we design school?”

Basic and breath-taking – Dr. Frank Wilczek addresses symmetry’s critical role in nature’s laws and what we consider to be beautiful.

Is this video four minutes long? Not necessarily.

Dr. Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, who is questioning the very nature of life and how we’re attempting to find it elsewhere.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman shares what he learned by studying the brain waves of Olympic-level meditators, and his findings are unprecedented.

To understand the edges of our universe, we’ll need to explore the edges of our own philosophies.