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.

Powerful new genetic tools allow scientists to alter the DNA of any organism—with tests on human embryos already underway. Even more ambitious, synthetic biologists on the verge of creating the genetic material for a living organism from scratch are setting their long-term sites on fashioning a fully synthetic human genome.

We once shared the planet with Neanderthals and other human species. Some of our relatives may have had tools, language and culture. Why did we thrive while they perished?

See how engineer and art historian Maurizio Seracini uses his pioneering multispectral imaging techniques and other tools to uncover the long-hidden stories behind masterpiece paintings. Episode filmed live at the …

The nature of time is an age-old conundrum for physicists, philosophers, biologists and theologians. The Newtonian picture of time—a kind of cosmic clock that ticks off time in a manner that applies identically to everyone and everything—tightly aligns with our experience. But with special and general relativity, Einstein showed the fallacy inherent in experience.

Renowned Caltech physicist John Preskill joins Brian Greene for an in-depth discussion of quantum mechanics, focusing on where we are and where we’re headed with quantum computing. This program is …