English novelist and scientist C. P. Snow classed certain scientific ideas with the works of Shakespeare as things every educated person should know. The lectures in this series explore the fundamental discoveries and principles of the physical and biological sciences--physics, genetics, biology, astronomy, chemistry, meteorology, thermodynamics, and more--providing a comprehensive and integrated introduction to all of science. The Joy of Science,...

Professor Michael Starbird of the University of Texas at Austin, covers the concepts of Calculus.

Presents lectures (each 30 minutes in length), offering a biopsychological perspective on the way we humans navigate and react to the world around us in a process that is ever-changing. Our experiences are vastly different today than they were when we were children and our senses and brains were still developing; and those experiences are becoming ever more different as we age, when natural changes alert us to the need to compensate, often in ways...

The body is a fortress under constant assault. It faces threats from infectious diseases, parasites, allergens, environmental toxins, physical trauma, and natural disasters from without, to overzealous allergic, immune, and inflammatory responses, and cellular mutations from within. This course is an introduction to the field of pathophysiology--the study of the disruptions in a normal body's functions caused by disease or injury. Beginning with...

"The 24 lectures of Zero to Infinity: A History of Numbers explore this fascinating question and the equally fascinating history of numbers. Award-winning Professor of Mathematics Edward B. Burger's historical, global, and conceptual approach to numbers gives you not only a revealing tour of mathematical history but shows how and why numbers evolved, as well as the transforming implications of each advance for both mathematics and society"--Publisher's...

Nearly everyone has heard of black holes, but few people outside of complex scientific fields understand their true nature and their implications for our universe. This lecture course makes this cosmological subject graspable, with 12 lavishly illustrated lectures by veteran Great Courses Professor Alex Filippenko, a distinguished astronomer and award-winning teacher at the University of California, Berkeley.

An undergraduate course for nonscience majors that treats the atom as a tool for revealing the quantitative history of everything--from the human diet and works of art to Earth's climate and the universe.

A journey surveying the remarkable innovations that transformed humankind into the sole agriculturists on our planet. Inasmuch as humankind has changed the species it domesticates, so have the plants and animals we cultivate and tend changed the shape of our history and lives. These interactions are the key not only to our rise but also our continued success on this planet. It's been suggested that if contributions from our domesticates suddenly stopped,...

An overview of significant evolutionary transitions in the 4 billion-year history of life.

Twelve lectures of thirty minutes each, by David M. Meyer, professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University.