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Videos

  • Do You Want to Live Forever?

    What happens to life if you remove death? How do our decisions change when the “long term” becomes “indefinite”? These are the sort of things that one asks themselves when...

  • Rise of the Grey Nations

    As people live longer, will the world become more crowded? What will be the problems nations face as their populations get older? How does life expectancy affect birth rates?...

  • 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...

  • Why Are We Here and Not There?

    Proponents of the anthropic principle claim that the universe is fine tuned for life on earth, as if it was made for us. But the truth is, if it was any other way, we wouldn’t be...

  • Greetings from the People of Earth

    This video, by Claire Evans, opened the online broadcast of the 2010 festival program The Search for Life In the Universe. In 1977, taking advantage of a fortuitous alignment of...

  • Are We Blinded by Life?

    Does our understanding of life limit our ability to recognize it in other forms? David Charbonneau, an astronomer at Harvard University, seems to think so. He elaborates that we...

  • Guestimating Exoplanets

    Just how many stars are out there? How many of them have planets? Astronomer David Charbonneau makes a living out of finding distant extra-solar planets, but that doesn’t make the...

  • The Hatchery of Life

    Chemical reactions—such as the ones that formed the early building blocks of life, hydrocarbons—don’t usually happen on their own. It takes thermal and chemical potentials, as...

  • The Ant Cemetery

    After checking the pulse or the brain activity, the doctor officially pronounces a person dead; and then that person is buried. But what do ants do with their dead comrades? How...

  • Order out of Chaos: Ant Communication

    An ant colony is a frenzy of activity. Somehow, in the midst of what appears to be a sea of chaos, the ants manage to work together to create an orderly home. Does this...

  • What Biodiversity Really Means

    At the present rate of extinction, some biologists predict that we could lose half of the species on the planet by 2100. Every individual’s very existence, every single day, is...

  • Spinning Spider Yarns

    Mark Moffet is an ecologist and wildlife photographer by trade, but he is also naturally gifted in spinning yarns. Here, Moffet shares exceptional stories about...

  • Fighting Ant Foes

    Ants may seem, at first look, to be cooperative—or even harmonious—with their fellow ants.  However, here the legendary evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson shares footage of...

  • Why Search for Life?

    What’s the point of searching for life beyond our own planet? What would we learn? How would it change our perspective as a society? Planet hunter David Charbonneau,...

  • The Search for Life in the Universe

    Are we alone? It’s a question that has obsessed us for centuries, and now we have the technology to do more than wonder. Scientists on the hunt for distant planets and...

  • First Contact

    Science fiction writers have often speculated on what alien life would be like. Sometimes they’re anthropomorphic humanoids on a similar technological level to our heroes, other...

  • Life Needs Water

    There is an entire ecosystem that thrives in dark corners of the ocean, miles below the surface.  Huddled around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, the bacteria, tubeworms, clams, and...

Blog Posts

  • Presenting The Moth: Janna Levin

    Physicist and WSF alum Janna Levin is accustomed to the mind-bending turns that the theoretical far reaches of the universe can take. But for all the unpredictability of space-time, it was life here on Earth that threw her for a loop.

  • Instant Reaction: Longevity

    Astounding developments in the science of longevity necessitate the questions: can and should we manipulate human lifespan? Molecular, cell, evolutionary, and gerontological biologists battled it out on Thursday night at the World Science Festival.

  • Science’s Most Elusive Women: Rosalind Franklin

    The mysterious story of molecular biologist Rosalind Franklin will be explored next week at the World Science Festival’s The Secret Behind the Secret of Life: Facts and Fictions with The Ensemble Studio Theatre Production of Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51. The photo itself...

  • How Did Life Get Started?

    Chemical reactions—such as the ones that formed the early building blocks of life, hydrocarbons—don’t usually happen on their own. It takes thermal and chemical potentials, as well as a good kick to get the process started. Astrobiologist Michael Russell explains how the...

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