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.

Can marching ants, schooling fish, and herding wildebeests teach us something about the morning commute? Robert Krulwich guides this unique melding of mathematics, physics, and behavioral science as Mitchell Joachim, Anna Nagurney and Iain Couzin examine the creative and sometimes counter intuitive solutions to one of the modern world’s most annoying problems.

#YourDailyEquation with Brian Greene offers brief and breezy discussions of the most pivotal equations of the ages. Even if your math is a bit rusty, these accessible and exciting stories …

Reader’s Digest has called “Mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin “America’s Best Math Whiz.” Returning in an encore presentation, Arthur Benjamin displays feats of mental mathematical gymnastics and shares the secrets behind his skills.

Extra dimensions of space — the idea that we are immersed in hyperspace — may be key to explaining the fundamental nature of the universe. Relativity introduced time as the fourth dimension, and Einstein’s subsequent work envisioned more dimensions still — but ultimately hit a dead end.

Evolutionary paleogeneticist Beth Shapiro travels to the cold reaches of the world to find DNA samples of long extinct animals, such as mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. She hopes to learn …