"Hey kids," said physicist Tadashi Tokieda, "Wanna see a magic trick?" He pulled out a Slinky and did something that amazed the kids, & their dad Steve Strogatz. Steve, along with Neil deGrasse Tyson, explains what the gravity-defying Slinky trick reveals about the nature of all things great and small (including us).

In the late 1800's, mathematicians fantasized about a machine that could answer any math question at all. But Steve Strogatz explains -- by way of Sesame Street and a thought experiment involving a conflicted barber -- that their dreams were dashed by a scrawny little German guy. Then, theoretical ...

In the early 60s, Robert Axelrod was a math major messing around with refrigerator-sized computers. Then a dramatic global crisis made him wonder about the space between a rock and a hard place, and whether being good may be a good strategy. With help from Andrew Zolli and Steve Strogatz, ...

Are living things really just machines made of little genetic parts? Are genes just like little software programs that we can plug into living things? That’s how synthetic biologists think about life. Brian Baynes gives us a tour of his company, Codon Devices, where they make and sell genes. Then ...

Biology class is all about putting living things into categories, based on their differences. And creatures are different because they have different genes. But life wasn’t always like that. In this segment, Steve Strogatz, an applied mathematician at Cornell, tells us about a radical theory that says that way back ...