These Galaxies Appear Older Than the Universe. That’s Not Possible.

Posted: April 30, 2026 by

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The James Webb Space Telescope found galaxies that are too ancient-looking for our young universe. You may have heard that, but it keeps finding them, and our recent efforts to solve this conundrum point in wildly different directions. Have we found galaxies older than the universe, or did we just learn something incredible about how galaxies form?

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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by Matt O’Dowd
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Earth’s Core Should Be Impossible. A New State of Matter Explains It.

Posted: April 16, 2026 by

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Is Earth’s core a solid or a liquid? Yes. The mysteries of our own planet’s interior have, in many ways, been harder to crack than those of the rest of the cosmos. We can send probes to the edge of the solar system, and the 42 billion light years to the cosmic horizon are largely transparent—a big enough telescope can see the most distant galaxy. But the 6400km to Earth’s center are both opaque to light and far beyond the reach of any conceivable drill. The best we can do for most of our planetary depths is to listen to the faint rumblings of distant earthquakes and then try to piece together how those seismic waves bounce around the interior.

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Hosted by Matt O’Dowd
Written by: Richard Dyer & Matt O’Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: Mike Martin

Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2026 PBS. All rights reserved.

End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

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Vinnie Falco

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Glenn Sugden
Grace Biaelcki
Justin Lloyd
Mark Heising
Stephen Wilcox
Tristan Lucian Claudius Aurelius Tyacke

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The Time Travel Paradox Hidden Inside Einstein’s Relativity

Posted: April 2, 2026 by

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Kurt Gödel discovered a solution to General Relativity that allows time travel without any exotic physics, revealing that the theory doesn’t actually guarantee a consistent chain of cause and effect . His “Gödel universe” shows that under certain conditions, the structure of spacetime itself can loop back on itself—blurring the line between past and future and exposing a deep limitation in our understanding of reality.

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This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
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End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

Big Bang

Adam Van Winkle
Alexander Tamas
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Peter Barrett
Vinnie Falco

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Glenn Sugden
Grace Biaelcki
Justin Lloyd
Mark Heising
Stephen Wilcox
Tristan Lucian Claudius Aurelius Tyacke

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Martian Soil Is Deadly. And That’s Why It Might Support Life.

Posted: March 19, 2026 by

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The tardigrade—capable of surviving extreme drying, freezing, heat, radiation, the vacuum of space, maybe even the asteroid impact. Who knows, maybe some have hitchhiked on impact ejecta to Mars. And according to a new study, the tardigrade can survive most of the ravages of the Martian surface. Most. When the researchers added a chemical that’s both abundant on Mars and horrifically toxic, even the tardigrade wound down. So if Earth’s most intrepid extremophile can’t handle the hostility of the red planet, can anything? Maybe, yes, even today. Let’s see where Martian life and tardigrade astronauts may still be hiding.
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This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
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End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

Big Bang

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Vinnie Falco

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Ethan Cohen
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Grace Biaelcki
Justin Lloyd
Mark Heising
Stephen Wilcox
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The Particle That Could Open a Portal to the Dark Universe

Posted: March 5, 2026 by

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Some people worried that the large hadron collider would smash particles together so hard it would make black holes that would swallow the earth, open wormholes to other dimensions. It didn’t and won’t. But it may be making a different kind of portal. A portal to the dark sector. This isn’t the Rather, it’s a hypothetical family of elementary particles that exists in parallel to the familiar particles of the standard model, but are invisible to it. Invisible to us, and so could be the answer to the dark matter conundrum. And what is this portal? It’s the particle that the LHC was built to find in the first place – the Higgs boson.

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Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
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End Credits Music by J.R.S. Schattenberg: https://www.youtube.com/user/MultiDroideka

Space Time Was Made Possible In Part By:

Big Bang

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You Can’t Feel Wet

Posted: March 2, 2026 by M3-9000

Put on a glove and dip your hand into icy water. You’ll notice it still feels wet?

But the glove is waterproof, how does this work?

That’s because wet isn’t a feeling, we use other sensory information to feel water…

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The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew

Posted: February 25, 2026 by M3-9000

How a single hack infected the world’s most important operating system. Sponsored by NordVPN – Get exclusive NordVPN deal here: https://NordVPN.com/veritasium It’s risk free with Nord’s 30 day money-back guarantee!

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▀▀▀
0:00 The Free Software Foundation
5:03 Why is Linux so popular?
9:57 The XZ Weakness
12:07 End To End Encryption – SSH
18:40 How To Compress Data
23:47 How The .XZ Hack Worked
34:24 A Bug In Jia’s Code
38:27 Henry Hacks Derek
43:16 The Back Door Is Exposed
47:16 Who is Jia Tan?
50:33 Open Vs Closed Source

▀▀▀
A huge thank you to everyone who made this possible:

Rich Jones for his openness throughout this project.

Denzel Farmer for his incredible breakdown – https://youtu.be/Q6ovtLdSbEA?si=qlbcg6skR-BoS5z1

Karsten Nohl @hackingmatters, Yannis Hofmann, and Matthias Marx at SRLabs for their help throughout this project.

Fabian Fäßler @LiveOverflow Alex Schlögl and the rest of the Cure53 team for their technical insights on the project.

Tom Scott, and Computerphile for their excellent videos on compression.

Josh at @breakfastserial for the filming inspiration.

Planet Money for a podcast that helped inform our research and @fern-tv for inspiration.

Thomas Roccia for his technical feedback on the video. And Ed at @LowLevelTV for helping out early on!

▀▀▀
References: https://ve42.co/XZHackRefs

▀▀▀
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▀▀▀
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Music from Epidemic Sound

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We Timed a Cosmic Explosion. It Might Solve Dark Energy.

Posted: February 19, 2026 by

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We’ve known that the universe is expanding since 1929, and that its expansion is accelerating since 1998. The culprit behind the acceleration is unknown, so we live with a stand-in term “dark energy”. Our modern cosmological model assumes that dark energy has a constant density–always the same amount of the outward-shoving stuff per volume. But there’s recent evidence to the contrary–which may be why our primary efforts to measure the expansion rate of the universe disagree with each other.

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Grace Biaelcki
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