What makes Mona Lisa’s smile so intriguing? What makes Picasso’s portraits so compelling? Kurt Andersen hosts artists Chuck Close and Devorah Sperber, with neuroscientists Margaret Livingstone, Chris Tyler and Ken Nakayama, as they examine the power of brain imaging technology to illuminate how we perceive the most intimate yet public of features, the human face.

In what many call a “golden age of cosmology”, astronomers can now observe the universe with unprecedented precision, resulting in spectacular progress in the search for the origin of the universe. Yet, for all the impressive progress, fundamental questions remain. What is the mysterious “dark energy” driving space to rapidly expand?

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.

What if your brain at 77 were as plastic as it was at 7? What if you could learn Mandarin with the ease of a toddler or play Rachmaninoff without …

How fast is the universe expanding? Two prominent approaches are finding different answers, propelling cosmology toward a crisis. Wendy Freedman, a renowned astronomer who has spent decades seeking the expansion …

This video is part of our Brilliant Breakthroughs series: our new 20-episode mini-series exploring the “Eureka!” moments and proud accomplishments of the greatest scientific minds of our time. Join us …