Videos

The Saturn IB rocket was vital to the Apollo era, launching the first manned mission of the lunar landing program, all three Skylab missions, and the Apollo half of the Apollo-Soyuz mission.

According to NASA, more than 500,000 pieces of debris are tracked as they orbit the earth. Individual pieces can travel at speeds of up to 28,000 kilometers per hour, creating a potentially dangerous situation for both satellites and astronauts alike. In this episode of The Coundown, we look at some of the strangest proposals to combat the ever-growing cloud of space junk. One of them, an electrified tether created by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will launch on February 28th, 2014.

 

Anyone that's chopped into an onion is familiar with the noxious fumes and irritating pain induced by an otherwise delicious vegetable. Scientific American editor Ferris Jabr explains how this bulbous member of the Allium genus can bring us to tears.

Video credits: edited by Kathryn Free, produced by Eric R. Olson

Our love affair with chocolate is nothing new, but in recent years scientists have tried to uncover the source of our cocoa cravings. Scientific American editor Dina Fine Maron digs through the available evidence, looking for a morsel of truth.

Every week brings us news of another Web site taken out by hackers or even foreign governments. At the heart of all this digital mischief is the denial of service attack, which floods a Web site with fake requests. Scientific American tech editor Larry Greenemeier shows us how its done.

NASA is known for hi-tech wizardry when it comes to spacecraft, but some of its technology has floated back down to earth and made it into objects we use everyday. Here are five that surprised us!

We've put robots on both the moon and mars, but scientists have never tried to soft-land a robot on a comet--until now. In this episode of The Countdown, we cover everything you need to know about the European Space Agency's groundbreaking Rosetta mission.

A collection of outtakes from Scientific American's Instant Egghead series. A full list of episodes featured can be found here.

In this special episode of The Countdown we highlight the coolest, biggest and most important space stories of 2013.

Could Mars support life? In this episode of The Countdown, we run through five intriguing lines of evidence that the red planet was not always as desolate as it appears, and may even be habitable today.

With an estimated 70 oil spills every day in the U.S. and tons of plastic littering our oceans, humans could use some help cleaning up. Scientific American editor David Biello explains how bacteria and other microbes are lending a hand.

Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the phrase "the selfish gene" with his best-selling book of the same name. "Selfish," however, was an unfortunate word choice, because genes lack a will and can actually drive altruism. SA editor Eric Olson explains.