Author: trom

Learning a new language opens a wealth of opportunities. But there’s one language family that provides benefits like no other: the languages of computer programming. Now widely taught in schools—even in elementary schools—programming is an eminently learnable skill that gives you unrivalled problem-solving power you can apply in all areas of life. Programming is also a fun, creative activity that imparts deep insights into how we control the devices that influence virtually every aspect of our lives.

There is a hidden order in the ceaselessly changing world around us. It’s called classical physics, and it’s about how the world is put together. Classical physics is about how things move, why they move, and how they work. It’s about making sense of motion, gravity, light, heat, sound, electricity, and magnetism, and seeing how these phenomena interweave to create the rich tapestry of everyday experience.

Become a more thoughtful consumer, save money, and reduce your ecological footprint with this course that teaches you how integrate sustainable practices into your everyday life. By learning specific knowledge and techniques on how to work more efficiently with the energy, water, and food you consume, you can live a more balanced and sustainable lifestyle that also positively impacts the world around you.

You live with it 24 hours a day. But how well do you really know it? These 32 lectures are your owner’s manual to a remarkably complex, resilient, and endlessly fascinating structure: the human body. Your guide is Dr. Anthony A. Goodman—surgeon, professor, and writer—who takes you step by step through the major systems of the body, explaining exactly how things work and why they sometimes don’t.

You’re a doctor 11 hours into your shift, and you’ve just walked into a waiting area packed with patients. There’s an elderly man complaining of mild chest pain, a teenage girl whose arms are swollen with bee stings, and an ambulance that is bringing in two unresponsive kids from a car crash. What do you do next?

If you’ve ever sneezed while driving your car, did you immediately think, “Cars Cause the Common Cold!”? No, of course not. A headline like that wouldn’t make any sense. And yet, some of the sources we rely on for health and medical news are not much better. Many media outlets are perfectly happy to grab us with a wacky headline or an article that reflects none of the nuance of the study on which it’s based—as long as we buy the magazine or click through to the article. And we do. We take the bait. With 50,000 scientific studies published each week in English, many media outlets don’t put in the time and effort to adequately decipher and report on even a tiny fraction of those studies. But they publish news about them, anyway.

Evidence for the birth of the universe is raining down on you. It’s called the cosmic microwave background, and it’s had quite a journey. Born in the stupendous annihilation of matter and antimatter seconds after the big bang, trapped in the hot plasma of the expanding universe for 380,000 years, and then suddenly released when the universe cooled to the point that atoms could form, this echo of creation has been on an uninterrupted voyage through space for 13.7 billion years—until it reached you. The cosmic microwave background is just one of the many clues about the history and nature of our universe that make the science of cosmology a wondrous, fascinating, and philosophically profound field of study.

The force of gravity rules the universe. It governs our everyday lives on Earth and it controls the motions of the heavens above. Yet it is one of the least understood of all the forces of nature. To endeavor to understand this fundamental force is to experience anew something as simple as getting out of bed, throwing a ball, or diving into a pool; and it gives deep insight into the central organizing principle of the cosmos.

When we consider ourselves, not as static beings fixed in time but as dynamic, ever-changing creatures, our viewpoint of human history becomes different and captivating.

Many students struggle in high school chemistry. Even if they succeed in earning a good grade, they often still feel confused and unconfident. Why is this? And what can be done to help every student succeed in this vitally important course? Success in chemistry, according to veteran science teacher Professor Frank Cardulla, doesn’t require any special intellectual gifts or talents or advanced mathematical skill. All it requires is a genuine understanding of the ideas that students encounter in the high school chemistry classroom. If students truly understand what they are learning, they will do more than just succeed in high school chemistry; they will find lasting success as they continue to study chemistry in college and beyond.

On a dark, clear night, a magnificent band of hazy light arches overhead that ancient Greeks likened to a trail of milk spilled across the sky. It is the Milky Way, the galaxy where we live, seen edge-on from our vantage point on the inside. There are countless stars at all stages of stellar life, vast clouds of interstellar gas and dust, star clusters, and even satellite galaxies, but no close-up view can match that of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been surveying the wonders of the Milky Way for three decades.

A few hundred miles above Earth, there is a remarkable telescope with a crystal-clear view across the universe. For two decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has been amassing discoveries that rival those of history’s greatest scientists and explorers, making it the most important and productive scientific instrument ever built.