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Measuring the length of a second might seem simple, but this history of the time unit from TED-Ed shows how the road to the modern, standardised second was anything but. Written by John Kitching, a Fellow at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, the video details how the advent of global communications and transit systems left the world in need of a more precise and universal understanding of a second – and how that search ultimately led to the atomic clock.
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Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
8 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes
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Anthropology
Why are witchcraft accusations so common across human societies?
4 minutes
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Wellbeing
Born in China, Zee seeks a gender-affirming life in the American Midwest
11 minutes
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Chemistry
Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?
12 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
A whale hunt is an act of prayer for an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle
8 minutes
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Cosmology
Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse
11 minutes
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Astronomy
The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t
34 minutes
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Politics and government
How it looked to Afghan women to see the Taliban return to power
33 minutes