All Videos — March 11, 2011

Why Your Boyfriend Won’t Look at You

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

There may be an evolutionary reason that men prefer to have intimate discussions without making eye contact with their partner.

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Arms burdened with a large stack of papers, folders, and rolled-up documents, a person exemplifies toxic productivity. Their black bag hangs precariously from their arm as they navigate the weight of their workload.

The Learning Curve

How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle

Psychotherapist Israa Nasir explains how a “value-aligned life” can help us crush our goals — without being crushed by the need to accomplish more.

A golden-brown turkey being carefully lowered into a metal pot outdoors, ready for a deep fry amidst the grassy area and wooden fence.

Starts With A Bang

What happens if you deep fry a frozen turkey?

It’s the ultimate setup for a Thanksgiving Day disaster. The physics of water and its solid, liquid, and gas phases compels us not to do it.

A green and abstract background with connected molecular diagrams and labeled sections: "Building block" and "Assembly pool," with an "Assembly index: 8.

13.8

The pre-life puzzle: Tracing the rise of complexity in a lifeless world

We need a “theory that explains the evolution of evolution,” argues theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker.

A silhouette of a person with glowing orange eyes against a brightly lit office window exudes an aura of power, casting dramatic shadows that heighten the room's awareness.

Business

How leaders can avoid a power-driven descent from hero to villain

If you have any sort of power for any reasonable length of time, you will be changed by it — awareness of the effects is crucial.

Under the night sky, where the Milky Way galaxy glows above a silhouette of trees and a mountain, stars scatter across the deep blue and purple expanse. It's an ideal backdrop for alien hunting, sparking curiosity about potential biosignatures hidden among those distant celestial wonders.

Hard Science

Doubts grow about the biosignature approach to alien-hunting

Recent controversies bode ill for the effort to detect life on other planets by analyzing the gases in their atmospheres.

Up Next

Guest Thinkers

On earthquakes, eruptions and the Moon

There has long been a desire to prove a connection between Earth’s geological activity and the gravitational resonance of the moon and the sun. Is there any truth to this claim?