oratory

Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute gives an Oxford physics talk on what exploratory engineering suggests about the Fermi paradox. He argues that von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are plausibly buildable and asks what traces advanced civilizations would leave.

In her final days as ISS commander, Sunita Williams gives an extensive tour of the station's modules and research facilities, narrating the work done aboard.

A lecture by Commodore Grace Hopper on the future of computing, posted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It includes her well-known nanosecond wire demonstration and humorous comparisons of device latencies.

The 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. on whether the American Dream comes at the expense of the American Negro. It is a historic recording of the two speaking.

A Seeker short documentary on a lab where robots run experiments with almost no human intervention, covering automation and active machine learning in drug discovery and synthetic biology.

NASA JPL engineers explain the final minutes of the Curiosity rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars, which combined aerobraking, a parachute and a skycrane. It lays out the tight sequence of events that all had to work automatically.

A University of Tokyo lab demonstrates a book scanner that flips pages automatically and scans over 250 pages per minute. It uses real-time 3D recognition of the flipped pages and then restores each one to a flat image.

Johns Hopkins APL shows Les Baugh, a bilateral shoulder-level amputee, controlling two Modular Prosthetic Limbs by thought after a short training period. Nerves rerouted to his chest drive the arms.

A University of Tokyo demo of a rock-paper-scissors robot that always wins, using high-speed vision to read the human hand and respond faster than people can perceive.

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, a design that could burn nuclear waste and use thorium as fuel. It draws on Oak Ridge National Laboratory work from the 1950s and 60s.

The 1965 Cambridge Union debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on race, justice and history in America. Baldwin argues that the American dream came at the expense of Black Americans.

Timothy Gowers thinks aloud, in real time, as he tries to understand why Pascal's determinant equals 1. He does not fully solve it in this episode, but shows his exploratory process.

A WGBH/NOVA re-enactment of Clifford Stoll's hunt for KGB-linked hacker Markus Hess, based on his book The Cuckoo's Egg. It starts from a 75-cent accounting discrepancy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Veritasium visits the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to see the world's strongest magnets and demonstrate effects like eddy currents. It covers what intense magnetic fields do to materials and objects.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks GPU gaming performance on Linux using the Bazzite OS, an exploratory first step toward establishing a Linux testing methodology. It compares results against Windows and notes where Linux still falls short.

A short Los Alamos National Laboratory safety video on how to use stairs, including handrail advice in a music-video style. It was posted as an example of government spending.