July 31, 2018
Richard Feynman's Lecture On Entropy

Nobel Prize winning physicist delivers a detailed lecture on the distinction between the past and future, the law of entropy and history of the universe.

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July 30, 2018
You Gotta Believe

A except from the film Seder-Masochism by Nina Paley.

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July 27, 2018
Who Is Patriotic?

Bernie Sanders asks who is patriotic? And who is not? That is a question we must discuss.

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July 26, 2018
What Makes Jimi Hendrix Such a Good Guitarist

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July 25, 2018
Why the Wars America Starts Are Unwinnable

Danny Sjursen—a prominent U.S. Army strategist and also a former history instructor at West Point Academy—posits that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't winnable. So... why don't we leave? As he puts it: "We have the inertia of a military-industrial complex, which makes a lot of money for a lot of people and keeps a lot of people employed, on one end, and then we have the sunken cost fallacy on the other side, where we say “We’ve committed so much we can’t possibly leave.”

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July 24, 2018
How Science Separates Fact and Emotion

Heather Heying knows that a true understanding of the world comes not from the answers alone. Sure, they help, but the questions are of equal importance. And the right questions can make science that much more appealing and three-dimensional.

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July 23, 2018
Wet Book Rescue

How to rescue a book that has been water damaged.

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July 20, 2018
White Fright

In 2015, the community of Islamberg discovered that a Tennessee minister was plotting the deadliest attack on US soil since 9/11 against their village. Why have Americans heard nothing about him, and why has the safety of their community been ignored?

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July 19, 2018
Why Asking Childlike Questions is So Important to Science

Anne Hope Jahre, an American geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo, known for her work using stable isotope analysis to analyze fossil forests dating to the Eocene, explains the wonders of science.

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July 18, 2018
The (Mostly) True Story of Hobo Graffiti

What we know about hobo graffiti comes from hobos — a group that took pride in embellishing stories.

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July 17, 2018
Blood Island

The incredible true story of the New York Blood Center's abandoned lab chimps, Blood Island is a BAFTA award winning short documentary.

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July 16, 2018
How the Geography of the US is Weirder Than You Think

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July 13, 2018
That Time It Rained for Two Million Years

At the beginning of the Triassic Period, with the continents locked together from pole-to-pole in the supercontinent of Pangea, the world is hot, flat, and very, very dry. But then 234 million years ago, the climate suddenly changed for the wetter.

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July 12, 2018
Do Animals Appreciate Music?

Animals might be music lovers, but how can we know? Is the ability to perceive and appreciate music a shared human and animal experience?

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July 11, 2018
When Insects First Flew

Insects were the first animals to ever develop the ability to fly, and, arguably, they did it the best. But this development was so unusual that scientists are still/working on, and arguing about, how and when insect wings first came about.

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July 10, 2018
Rev. Traci Blackmon: Families Belong Together Rally

"We must always remember, that this is not as much about safe immigration policy as it is about separatist ideology." – Rev. Traci Blackmon

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July 9, 2018
Karl Popper's Falsification

Science is based on fact. Isn't it? Karl Popper believed that human knowledge progresses through 'falsification'. A theory or idea shouldn't be described as scientific unless it could, in principle, be proven false.

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July 6, 2018
The Extraordinary Life and Times of Strawberry

Follow the journey of a strawberry from the farm to the refrigerator to understand all that it takes to bring your food to you. Did you know that 40% of our food ends up wasted? Wasted food is the single largest contributor to landfills in the US—not to mention that it wastes water, labor, fuel, money, & love!

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July 5, 2018
Plastic Pollution: How Humans are Turning the World into Plastic

Modern life would be impossible without plastic – but we have long since lost control over our invention. Why has plastic turned into a problem and what do we know about its dangers?

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July 4, 2018
The 5 Principles of True Patriots

Robert Reich explains the meaning of real patriotism.

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July 3, 2018
How to Prevent Future Trumps

Robert Reich explains how we can stop the rise of more Trumps in the future.

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July 2, 2018
Why Incompetent People Think They're Amazing

How good are you with money? What about reading people’s emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. David Dunning describes the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Video Clip of the Day Archive