PBS

When did makeup ads become less about beauty and more about science? And is that science even legitimate? Or is it just another ploy by the $445 billion cosmetics industry to get you to buy more products? This week Danielle digs into the history of makeup advertising to find out.

They say everyone has a doppelgänger, but is that really true? This week we meet a young woman who found her own look-alike, and figure out how we actually recognize faces.

Today, our closest evolutionary relatives, the apes, live only in small pockets of Africa and Asia. But back in the Miocene epoch, apes occupied all of Europe. Why aren’t there wild apes in Europe today?

For more than 10 million years, Megalodon was at the top of its game as the oceans’ apex predator...until 2.6 million years ago, when it went extinct. So, what happened to the largest shark in history?

Let’s talk about the mysterious zero-point energy and what it really can, and really can’t do.

Let’s take a moment to remember the selfless sacrifices made by some amazing robotic explorers.

Energy is the most powerful and useful concept in all of physics, but what exactly is it?

What exactly will happen when the sun dies?

Will the future of space exploration be guided by public or private entities? Which is better?

It’s the most famous prediction of perhaps the most famous genius of our time ... Stephen Hawking's theory of Hawking Radiation.

What do the first stars in the universe, dark matter, and superior siege engines have in common?

The great advances in any science tend to come in sudden leaps. April 25th of 2018 marks the beginning of just such a leap for much of astronomy. In the early hours of the morning, the Gaia mission’s second data release dropped. Our understanding of our own galaxy will never be the same again.

Conservation laws are among the most important tools in physics. They feel as fundamental as you can get. And yet they’re wrong - or at least they’re only right sometimes. These laws are consequences of a much deeper, more fundamental principle: Noether’s theorem.

If you have perfect knowledge of every single particle in the universe, can you use the laws of physics to rewind all the way back to the Big Bang? Is the entire history of the universe perfectly knowable? Or has information somehow lost along the way?

Black holes are the result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon- not matter, not light, not even information.

Black holes are the result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon- not matter, not light, not even information.

When it comes to giving birth, the first image that comes to mind is a woman lying down on her back, but this wasn’t always the case. In fact the origin of the position we now most associate with women giving birth started as a procedure to remove gall stones in 18th century France. So how did this position become the gold standard for bringing newborns into the world?

If your family is in the traditional nuclear family formation (2 parents + kids living in a single home) then you’re in a pretty common formation. But if your family ISN’T a traditional nuclear family, then you’re also in a pretty common formation.

Where do artificial flavors come from? Well whether it’s your average store bought yogurt, granola bar, or even butter, a lot of food we eat today is full of artificial flavoring. Why did this happen? Well it actually has to do with the strange history of vanilla (yes! boring old vanilla) and the human perception of taste. How does it all work? Watch the episode to find out!

Today, we think of computer science as a field dominated by men, but the women have a long and important history in the field. In fact women were many of the very first computer programmers, played a hugely important part in the development of computing during World War II and the space race, and ran the one of the first computer software companies. So what changed? Watch the episode to find out!

Climate change is amplifying extreme weather events like hurricanes, heatwaves and other disasters. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of how best to prepare for this stuff? Moving inland? Buying flood insurance? Stockpiling water? Building stronger relationships might not be high on that list, but maybe it should be.

We don’t hear much about the hole in the ozone layer anymore. That’s because we’ve all but fixed it, thanks to consumer choices and a massive international agreement called the Montreal Protocol. Can we learn anything from this environmental success story that will help us fix climate change?

We have enough fossil fuels to make Earth intolerably hot & wet, so we’ll have to choose to not burn them all.

Beef production emits more greenhouse gases than basically anything else we eat, so let’s look at the scale and impact of our bovine pals - and importantly, what we can actually do to make beef less bad.

Over the past few centuries, a handful of countries reaped the benefits of fossil fuels and developed their economies, emitting a lot of greenhouse gases along the way. We now know these gases have changed the climate. But since the mid-2000s, an interesting shift has occurred. The majority of greenhouse gas emissions are now coming from large developing countries.