Hank and his brother John discuss heredity via the gross example of relative ear wax moistness.

Today we’ll cover the fourth and final of our core disciplines of engineering: chemical engineering. We’ll talk about its history and evolution going from soda ash competitions to oil refineries and renewable energies. We’ll also discuss some newer and emerging fields like biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.

With a solid understanding of biology on the small scale under our belts, it's time for the long view - for the next twelve weeks, we'll be learning how the living things that we've studied interact with and influence each other and their environments. Life is powerful, and in order to understand how living systems work, you first have to understand how they originated, developed and diversified over the past 4.5 billion years of Earth's history. Hang on to your hats as Hank tells us the epic drama that is the history of life on Earth.

In order to understand the history of media literacy we have to go all the way back to straight up literacy. In the first half of our look at the history of media literacy, Jay takes us all the way back to Ancient Greece and forward through the printing press, newspapers, and Yellow Journalism.

Jay continues our journey through the history of media literacy with the arrival of movies, television, and the other screens that now permeate our lives – along with some of the different approaches to media literacy that these inventions brought with them.

Prepare to be horrified, and to look into the face of inhumanity with the Grand Guignol. Mike Rugnetta teaches you about one of theater history's most horrible chapters. The Grand Guignol was a French theater based in Paris from the late 19th century until 1962. The troupe, led by writers like Andre de Lorde and Alfred Binet put on dark, violent, bloody shows that were a precursor of the horror media that we love to consume today. You'll learn about stage effects, makeup, and maybe even why humans like to stare into the darkness and terrify themselves.

Today we're going to talk about a fundamental part of all modern computers. The thing that basically everything else uses - the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (or the ALU). The ALU may not have to most exciting name, but it is the mathematical brain of a computer and is responsible for all the calculations your computer does! And it's actually not that complicated. So today we're going to use the binary and logic gates we learned in previous episodes to build one from scratch, and then we'll use our newly minted ALU when we construct the heart of a computer, the CPU, in episode 7.

In this episode we looked at robots and the engineering principles of robots. We learned how robots use sensors to interpret their environment, how actuators and effectors allow a robot to manipulate the objects around it to accomplish a task, and how computers coordinate the efforts of the two.

Today we’re going to explain how exchangers...exchange heat. We’ll look at concentric tubes, finned tubes, plate heat exchangers, and shell-and-tube heat exchangers. And we’ll look at some equations to help us sort through heat transfer and decide what heat exchangers are best suited for our designs.

So we know that sociology is the study of society, but what exactly *is* a society? Today we’re going to find out. We’ll look at Gerhard Lenski's classification of societies into five types, and the technological changes that turn one into another. We’ll also return to Marx, Weber, and Durkheim to consider how they understood societal change. Finally, we’ll explore Durkheim's concept of social solidarity.

Today we're going to begin our three-part unit on p-values. In this episode we'll talk about Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (or NHST) which is a framework for comparing two sets of information. In NHST we assume that there is no difference between the two things we are observing and and use our p-value as a predetermined cutoff for if something seems sufficiently rare or not to allow us to reject that these two observations are the same. This p-value tells us if something is statistically significant, but as you'll see that doesn't necessarily mean the information is significant or meaningful to you.

If being alive on Earth were a contest, humans would win it hands down. We're like the Michael Phelps of being alive, but with 250,000 times more gold medals. Today Hank is here to tell us the specifics of why and how human population growth has happened over the past hundred and fifty years or so, and how those specifics relate to ecology.

In which Stan Muller subs for John Green and teaches you about energy and humanity. Today we discuss the ideas put forth by Alfred Crosby in his book, Children of the Sun. Historically, almost all of the energy that humans use has been directly or indirectly generated by the sun, whether that be food energy from plants, wind energy, direct solar energy, or fossil fuels. Stan looks into these different sources, and talks about how humanity will continue to use energy in the future as populations grow and energy resources become more scarce.

Hank introduces us to biogeochemical cycles by describing his two favorites: carbon and water. The hydrologic cycle describes how water moves on, above, and below the surface of the Earth, driven by energy supplied by the sun and wind. The carbon cycle does the same... for carbon!

In which Stan Muller talks about some of the problems in Intellectual Property law as it exists today. He'll also teach you a little about how IP law applies to everyone's favorite media platform, YouTube. Lastly, he'll do a little prognosticating, and try to predict how IP law might change in the future.

This week we are building on last week’s outline of American stratification to explore how class differences affect people’s daily lives. We’ll explore variations in everything from values & beliefs to health outcomes, and look at how these things can perpetuate inequality across generations.

In which John Green teaches you about European Imperialism in the 19th century. European powers started to create colonial empires way back in the 16th century, but businesses really took off in the 19th century, especially in Asia and Africa. During the 1800s, European powers carved out spheres of influence in China, India, and pretty much all of Africa. While all of the major (and some minor) powers in Europe participated in this new imperialism, England was by far the most dominant, once able to claim that the "sun never set on the British Empire." Also, they went to war for the right to continue to sell opium to the people of China. Twice. John will teach you how these empires managed to leverage the advances of the Industrial Revolution to build vast, wealth-generating empires. As it turns out, improved medicine, steam engines, and better guns were crucial in the 19th century conquests. Also, the willingness to exploit and abuse the people and resources of so-called "primitive" nations was very helpful in the whole enterprise.

Hank describes how cells regulate their contents and communicate with one another via mechanisms within the cell membrane.

You might have recognized the names of some of the Greek natural philosophers. They were individuals with quirky theories, and we have records about them. But they weren’t the only people making knowledge back in the day. Today, Hank takes us to India to talk Vedas, Maurya Empires, and some really good doctoring.

In which John Green teaches you about the Indus Valley Civilization, one of the largest of the ancient civilizations. John teaches you the who, how, when, where and why of the Indus Valley Civilization, and dispenses advice on how to be more successful in your romantic relationships.