Disruptive technologies uproot culture, can precipitate wars and even topple empires. By this measure, human history has seen nothing like the internet. From social upheaval and ever-shifting privacy standards to self-driving cars and networked groceries, this eye-opening program provides a stunning glimpse of what’s around the corner.

Watching ants and playing with robots is biologist Simon Garnier’s Cool Job as he studies how people and animals swarm in large groups. Garnier discovers these animals work together to …

From a bee’s hexagonal honeycomb to the elliptical paths of planets, symmetry has long been recognized as a vital quality of nature. Today’s theorists are pursuing an even more exotic symmetry that, mathematically speaking, could be nature’s final fundamental symmetry: supersymmetry.

Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality.

Meet Dr. Nora Volkow, whose research on drugs and the brain helped us understand addiction as a disease. Nora Volkow is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. …

Is the human brain an elaborate organic computer? Since the time of the earliest electronic computers, some have imagined that with sufficiently robust memory, processing speed, and programming, a functioning human brain can be replicated in silicon.