Videos

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  The Origin of Numbers

  Where did math come from? Which numbers arose first? Did math develop the same way across cultures? While the details are fuzzy, history shows that if people have ever needed to...

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  Cryptography: Cracking Codes

  “As soon as you’ve got something precious to hide, someone will want to steal it.” Science journalist Simon Singh sheds light on the dark nature of cryptography. He explains...

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  The Enigma Machine Explained

  As technology increases, so do the methods of encryption and decryption we have at our disposal. World War II saw wide use of various codes from substitution ciphers to employing...

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  Moth: The Long Ukrainian Winters

  Nobel Laureate and chemist Roald Hoffmann was a very young boy when the Third Reich came through his town in southeast Poland. Barely old enough to understand the danger and...

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  The Fallibility of 9/11 Memories

  How confident are you in your memories? After a dramatic, emotionally charged event such as the 9/11 terrorist attack, people describe their memories of the event as being...

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  How Many Stars Are There in the Sky?

  Travel back in time as Galileo Galilei (played by Mike Francis) relates the story of when he first turned his telescope to the sky in order to count the stars—and finds the task...

Blog Posts

• What Is Genius?

  Yesterday we discovered a biological mechanism in the brain which may play a key role in genius potential. In today's clip, Brian Greene poses the question, "What do we mean by genius?"