Alan Alda has issued this year’s challenge to the world’s top scientists: What is sound? In an action-packed hour of interactive demonstrations, Alan and a team of communication experts invite the audience to explore what we hear, how we hear, and what that means for different species.

Stuntman and special effects coordinator Steve Wolf shows how actors can fall from a 20-story building without injury and how houses can be set ablaze safely in movies…all through science. …

IBM’s Watson has the ability to make a diagnosis. Apps can track and monitor patient emergencies. Our phones may soon be our medical advisers. Preventive and diagnostic medicine is on the cusp of an AI revolution that will no doubt save lives.

It’s an old question: What is consciousness? Today, sophisticated brain imaging technologies, clinical studies, as well as the newfound ability to listen to the whisper of even an individual nerve cell, are bringing scientists closer than ever to the neurobiological basis of consciousness.

“Because it’s there” was George Mallory’s famous explanation for why he risked (and lost) his life trying to become the first person to summit Everest. We don’t all want to …

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.