There are so many amazing technologies that could push our society forward into a multitude of better futures. But what if none of them happened? In this, the final episode of Miniseries 3: The Technology of Tomorrow we look at where technology is today or will be soon and how it can be used to better our lives in small ways, leading to a huge chan…

Space is big, really big. Are their aliens? Is the truth out there, and if it is, would we be able to tell it apart from just noise? To answer that we look to the structure of information, our language, and how we’ve learnt about the stars and planets closest to us. There are billions of stars in our galaxy, millions of planets, and a pattern to la…

Could you live forever, and given the choice, would you take it? Being able to upload our brains to computers could happen within the next thirty years and the implications are enormous. But how would we get there? How close are we today? By exploring the technologies we have today, we try to predict how brain upload could become a reality, how lon…

Few technologies could revolutionize the world as completely as nanotechnology. Artificial intelligence would help us work smarter, solve complex problems, and perhaps even educate us while quantum computing has untold potential to quickly solve repetitive tasks and could be harnessed to better our lives in a myriad of ways. Nanotechnology could ou…

Originally released four months ago, Episode 6: Statistics, Philosophy, and Science took the information from the first five episodes of Miniseries 1: “What is Science and How Does It Work?” and build on their foundation. We covered all new information including standard deviation, when scientists were allowed to say they had “discovered” the Higgs…

Quantum Computing was only discovered in the past forty years even though quantum physics was born about one hundred years ago. During these past forty years, scientists have tried to understand how we could use it and what benefits it would bring us. It’s a completely different way of computing, and makes a perfect addition to Miniseries 3: The Te…

Over the past two miniseries we’ve discussed how to conduct good science and how humans make mistakes. In this miniseries we wanted to look ahead at how technology could completely transform our world and revolutionize our lives. In this episode we discuss artificial intelligence, how it could come about, the impact it would have on our lives, and …

The brain is our most complex organ and does an amazing job of processing all the sensory information we perceive. In Episode 7 we talked about tetrachromacy in women and this episode we discuss why there might be so few recognized tetrachromats. Following up our discussion in Episode 8 on the structure of the eye, we dive into how language can aff…

We celebrate our tenth official episode in our fourth part of Miniseries 2: “How Humans are Fallible”. The transmission of information from you fingertips to your brain is incredibly fast but a complicated journey that can be altered by what you eat, drink, how much you exercise, and even how much sleep you’ve gotten. Some information travels 50 ti…

With the eye taking two episodes to cover, we wanted to discuss the other senses in this, the third episode of “How Humans are Fallible”. Our hearing allows us to detect threats from far away, our sense of smell tells us about threats that we can’t hear or see, touch includes pain and heat perception, and taste is a complicated tangle of sensations…