Why can’t we see evidence of alien life?

Chris Anderson explores the question of Fermi’s Paradox for TED-Ed. Some of the answers are frightening, and some are hopeful. Perhaps intelligent life, in quest to increase efficiency, tends toward smaller scales that are, ultimately, much harder for us to detect?

Goes hand-in-hand with my episode “The Odds of Finding Life and Love”, which has a Carl Sagan cameo in it and explores the most modern exoplanet stats.

After you’ve aimed your mental radio telescopes at both of those, check out this SETI/TED collab video from Jill Tarter and learn more about how the odds of intelligent life are calculated.

Source: youtube.com

explore-blog:

The tricky part in designing [the algorithm] was how to take something mysterious — human attraction — and break it into components that a computer can work with.

How OKCupid’s love-matching algorithms work. Also see the math of finding love and how one woman hacked the algorithms of online dating to find her soulmate.

I love this look behind the curtain of finding a match in the modern age. Analyzing the scientific nature of love does not diminish its beauty and passion, but instead unlocks a new appreciation for how special that combination of neurochemistry, mathematics and human evolution truly is.

Combine this with my latest YouTube episode: The Odds of Finding Life and Love (with a Sagan cameo!)

How polarity makes water behave strangely

Polarity can be a bad thing when we’re talking about politics or family drama, but it’s essential to the workings of the chemical world.

That’s especially true for water, whose uneven distribution of positive and negative charges is quite literally the reason that life exists in Earth. It makes everything from our DNA to proteins stay soluble, it helps balance the salts and minerals that are essential to our most core functions, and it’s a sidekick to almost every biochemical reaction.

And it’s not just essential on the smallest scale! Insects use surface tension to walk across its surface, and fish survive frozen winters thanks to its density. It’s no coincidence that water is the key ingredient for life. And it’s polarity that made it so.

Enjoy this lesson by Christina Kleinberg by TEDEducation. Try to overlook the fact that she says “wooter” :)

Source: youtube.com

DNA: The Book of You

Oh hey, some guy with the same name as me and who sounds exactly like me wrote and narrated this video for TED-Ed all about the scale, structure and organization of the human genome.

Oh wait… it IS me! Enjoy the sciencey sounds of my voice telling you all about how big the human genome is.

Although 20,000 genes sounds like a lot, it’s far less than the number scientists initially predicted. We end up getting lots of variants out of fewer genes thanks to something called alternative splicing. Although none of it is “junk”, about 8% of our genome is inactive virus DNA (which we stole genes from in order to be born), and more than half is other kinds of insertions from ancient, jumping “selfish genes” called retrotransposons.

Enjoy!

(A note: Most of the numbers in this lesson are for one copy of the human genome. Remember that you actually have two copies of the human genome in every cell, so the length of DNA and number of bases, etc. it actually DOUBLE that! If you want to know more details about any of the facts and figures in the video, leave me a note in the YouTube comments or send me a message here or on Twitter.)

Source: youtube.com

A Needle in Countless Haystacks

In a universe of billions of galaxies filled with billions of stars, how do we go about finding habitable planets?  It seems like barely a  week goes by before another frustratingly uninformative headline pops up saying something like “Earth-like planet orbiting distant star?”

Earth is the only living planet that we know of, so we use it as a model for the rest of the universe. Here’s how astronomers do it, thanks to TED Ed.

Source: youtube.com

explore-blog:

The twisting tale of DNA, animated. 

A fine tale of the basic structure at the root of our genome, and how each little book writes a different set of instructions.

The number of human genes referenced in the video is a little high, though. Current estimates say that we probably only have around 20,000 genes, with only about 1.5% of the 3.2 billion bases in our genome actually coding for proteins!