Animals as simple as bees and as complex as you and me… like to have fun. But what’s the point of fun? Do all animals have fun? And for that matter, what is fun?

500 years before the Scientific Revolution, the mathematician Al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham spent hours in a dark room studying the light that filtered in. Not only did he revolutionize how we literally see the world, he pioneered the scientific method that is now the backbone of modern science.

Why do we see rainbows in soap bubbles? What makes an oil slick so oddly beautiful? Iridescent colors, which transform depending on the angle you look at them, are all over nature. How does physics make these shifting rainbows? We’re going to find out with the help of the National Museum of Natural History's most spectacular specimens – from bird feathers and beetle wings to fossils and gemstones.

As the Earth warms due to human-caused climate change, billions of people in the developing world will face life-threatening heat waves, raising the demand for air conditioning. But powering all of that cooling is going to take more energy, which will require burning more fossil fuels! Are there new air conditioning technologies on the horizon that could solve this paradox?

In the race to survive, both predators and prey use visual tricks to get ahead. One nearly universal trick is countershading, a color pattern that helps animals erase their own shadows or blend into different backgrounds. It’s worked well enough that nature has produced this pattern over and over again, all over Earth, for at least tens of millions of years.

The biggest (and most mysterious!) migration in the world happens every night in the ocean as 10 billion tons of zooplankton swim to the surface to feed. This undersea journey is known as Diel vertical migration, and it occurs in every ocean in the world. By learning more about why this happens, science can unlock the secrets behind other phenomena, like our biological clocks…and even climate change.

Nothing can travel faster than light — in a vacuum. But when light slows down, sometimes matter can blaze past that speed limit, creating a stunning glow called Cherenkov radiation. We can see this glow in a nuclear reactor as high-energy particles speed by. It offers us a window into a realm of the universe that is usually invisible to us.

Human language is an incredible thing: a combination of mouth sounds that we combine into words, sentences, poems, and constitutions. They carry meaning, emotion, and power. But underneath it all, language is really just physics. In this episode, we explore how physics is at the core of every syllable, starting with the first word most of us ever speak.

A few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a top-secret, first-of-its-kind US spy satellite program was declassified, leading to the unexpected story of how former enemies became scientific allies, and technology invented for Cold War espionage was repurposed to study and combat the newest and greatest threat to human civilization: Climate Change.

Life’s been around on Earth for at least 3.7 billion years. But for most of that time, it was incredibly boring — just simple little cells squirming around in water. It only got interesting in the last few hundred million years. And that might never have happened without the help of a deadly, but also life-giving, element.

Our appetite for meat is one of the greatest environmental challenges we face. Join me on a mind-blowing visit to UPSIDE Foods, the world's most advanced cultivated meat production facility, as we ask whether cultivated meat can deliver on its promises to help the environment while keeping meat on our plates.

Scorpions have been terrorizing other creatures on Earth for hundreds of millions of years. They’ve evolved a perfect cocktail of venom that can mess up both predators and prey. But they are also an evolutionary marvel that could show us the way to some powerful new life-saving medicines.

Does any other creature on Earth undergo a life transformation as dramatic as the butterfly? I think not. Unfortunately, children's books about very hungry caterpillars skip all the COOL and WEIRD and GROSS stuff that happens along the way. It's time to dig into all the mind-blowing biology behind metamorphosis!

Over 200 years ago, scientists were looking at sunlight through a prism when they noticed that part of the rainbow was missing. There were dark lines where there should have been colors. Since then, scientists have unlocked the secrets encoded in these lines, using it to uncover mind-boggling facts about the fundamental nature of our universe and about worlds light-years away.

The idea of the lone genius creating everything isn’t just misleading. It’s harmful and wrong. Innovation thrives when people work together, and rather than nice linear paths, new ideas come from chance events and unexpected connections. This video tells the story of one such invention, and offers a new idea about how new ideas are really born.

We may not know it, but averages affect our lives every day. Designers and manufacturers use averages to make our houses, cars, shoes and airline seats safer and more comfortable(ish). But calculating averages is way more complicated than one might think! And as long as we are at it - let’s talk about what the most average thing in the known universe might be!

Humans can develop intense relationships, even obsessions, with the things we’re fans of. A huge part of our identities, our emotions, and our lives get tied up in these things. Why are we like this?

No one ever wants to get in a car crash. But if you ever do, be very thankful for the engineers who crash test cars. You may have seen crash test simulations on TikTok using physics engines like BeamNG but I promise you they are nothing compared to the real thing! Join us for this DEEP dive into the physics of car crashes and the ways that engineers hack Newton's laws to keep you safe.

When people picture New York City they see skyscrapers, subways, and a concrete jungle. But the Big Apple is really a seaside city built on an archipelago. In the wake of a century of industrial pollution and climate change-fueled superstorms like Hurricane Sandy, New York’s waterways need help. Learn how Billion Oyster Project is working to restore one of the world’s greatest lost ecosystems in order to clean up New York’s water and protect it from an uncertain climate future.