Stories have existed in many forms—cave paintings, parables, poems, tall tales, myths—throughout history and across almost all human cultures. But is storytelling essential to survival?

As long ago as the early 19th century, the poet Keats bemoaned the washing away of the world’s beauty and mystery in the wake of natural philosophy’s reductionist insights—its tendency …

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.

Humans are heading back to the moon…and this time, they have plans to stay. National and international space agencies, and private enterprise, are joining forces with the goal of establishing …

By 2050, one of every four people on Earth will go hungry unless food production more than doubles. Science-based agriculture has proposed unconventional new tools—earthworms, bacteria, and even genes from sunny daffodils—to meet this towering challenge. But will such innovative ideas be enough?

Stephen Wolfram joins Brian Greene to explore the computational basis of space, time, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and reality itself. This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported …