making the ingredients - Before our planet could form, all the stuff one would like to make a planet out of had to be made. Starting with hydrogen and helium, stars had to cook up the rest of the periodic table over a nice long period.

Just after the beginning - The standard model of cosmology has been worked out, slowly and painfully and oh so very carefully. Only trouble is, some recent observations don’t quite match what the theory predicts.

Figuring out the neighborhood - From the surface of Earth, the sun and moon look to be about the same size. Other planets are tiny specks of light, and everything seemingly spins around us. But that’s not what our solar system is really like. So,

The matter of dark matter - From the rotation of our own Milky Way galaxy, to the expansion of the universe, much of the night sky is moving in ways we can’t quite explain. To plug the wholes in our understanding we have dark energy and dark matter.

In the beginning, part 2. - After covering history and background in the last episode, we can relax and play with the strange ideas and concepts surrounding the theory of the big bang. The event horizon around our universe,

In the beginning, part 2. - After covering history and background in the last episode, we can relax and play with the strange ideas and concepts surrounding the theory of the big bang. The event horizon around our universe,

In the beginning, part 1. - Before 1923, the universe was thought to be static and eternal, unchanging and without beginning or end. Its size was likely just a few tens of thousands of lightyears across, with one large island of stars, our galaxy,

Logical, not biological - Evolution strategies, genetic algorithms, artificial neural networks—they’re all AI methods that were inspired by nature. But what about other methods that have nothing to do with the brain or natural selection,

Bits and brains and bots - If we could look closely at every last cell in your brain, and learn enough to simulate them on a computer, would a detailed enough simulation of your brain think? Today, we talk about artificial neural networks—an AI method...

Genetic algorithms and evolution on fast-forward - The dorg, the latest batch of digital organisms, will one day be placed in a little world to work out their destiny. The notion is to try and coax them into becoming intelligent.