Science lessons & courses
51 lessons · 11 learning paths · free, quiz-checked, no signup required
Quantum computing, genome editing, energy systems, and other frontier science explained at the mechanism level: what a qubit is, how CRISPR cuts, why grids need inertia. PhD-adjacent depth without requiring the PhD.
Learning paths
Microbiology: the cell that plays by different rules
Bacteria share almost no structure with your cells, and every difference matters. Work through the bacterial envelope and genome, then the arithmetic of exponential growth and why a plate count lies to you, then how antibiotics exploit those differences and how resistance defeats them, and finally how sequencing reads the vast majority of microbes nobody can grow. You will finish able to read a growth curve, work a viable count, and explain why a resistant infection is a population event rather than a patient one.
Materials Science: Why Things Break
A perfect copper crystal should yield at 7 GPa and real copper gives way at 10 MPa, and closing that gap took thirty years and produced most of modern metallurgy. This path builds mechanical behaviour from defects: dislocations that let metals bend and ceramics shatter, cracks that make a part fail far below its yield strength, and the material index that ranks candidates for a job instead of ranking them in the abstract.
Quantum Cryptography: QKD, Its Limits, and What Ships Instead
Quantum cryptography and post-quantum cryptography share a name and almost nothing else: one uses physics and needs hardware, the other is classical maths and ships as a software update. This cursus builds QKD properly, from no-cloning through BB84 to the error threshold and Ekert's Bell-test version. Then the gap between an unconditional proof and a product: the authentication it cannot bootstrap, trusted nodes, attacks on real detectors, and why NSA and NCSC advise against it. It ends on what is actually being deployed.
How mRNA Medicines Work
mRNA medicines do not deliver a drug, they deliver the instructions and let your own cells build it. That inversion, and the decades of work behind it, is one of the biggest stories in modern biotechnology. This cursus explains it end to end: the engineered mRNA strand and the Kariko-Weissman modified-nucleoside breakthrough that made it usable, the lipid nanoparticle that smuggles it into cells, and what the platform can treat, from COVID vaccines to personalized cancer vaccines and beyond, with the honest limits that remain.
AI for Doctors: Clinical Tools and Safe Use
A safety-first guide to using AI in clinical practice, where the stakes are human lives. Learn the categories of clinical AI tools and the difference between regulated diagnostic AI and general assistants, the workflows where AI helps most, ambient documentation, decision support, imaging, and patient communication, and the patient-safety framework, human-in-the-loop oversight, privacy, bias, and accountability, that keeps AI-assisted medicine safe.
AI for Scientists: Tools to Accelerate Research
A practical guide to using AI across the research cycle without compromising scientific rigor. Learn the categories of AI tools and the difference between general assistants and specialized scientific models like AlphaFold, the core workflows of literature review, data analysis, coding, and writing, and the integrity practices, disclosure, reproducibility, and avoiding fabrication, that keep AI-accelerated science trustworthy. Objective, evergreen, and built around verification.
The Science of Longevity: How to Actually Live Longer
Longevity is one of the most hyped topics in health and one of the most misunderstood. This cursus cuts through the noise with the actual science: why we age (the twelve hallmarks of aging), which interventions truly extend healthy years versus which just sell, what the research really shows for longevity drugs like metformin and rapamycin, and how biological age is measured and whether it can be reversed. Evidence-first, mechanism-led, and honest about what we do not yet know.
How energy works
From thermodynamics through grid engineering — the physics, the units, and the engineering trade-offs of every major energy source. Six lessons cover energy and power units, combustion and thermal cycles, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, solar and wind and batteries, and the grid that ties them together. Mechanism-first, evergreen, no predictions.
Genome editing and metabolic medicine
How DNA encodes proteins, how CRISPR/Cas9 cuts and repairs DNA, how base and prime editors achieve precision without breaks, what GLP-1 agonists do across multiple tissues, how clinical trial evidence is built, and how to read the resulting medical evidence. Six lessons, mechanism-first, evidence-aware.
Quantum computing fundamentals
Understand quantum computing from the physics up: what qubits, superposition, and entanglement really are, how the four leading hardware platforms build them, how error correction turns noisy qubits into reliable logical ones, and which algorithms deliver genuine speedups. Finish able to read any quantum-computing claim critically, from qubit-count headlines to post-quantum cryptography.
Semiconductors: from band theory to modern chips
A six-lesson path from the physics of silicon to the global chip industry. Start with bands, doping, and the PN junction; build up through diodes and transistors to CMOS gates; then walk the wafer through a fab, decode '5 nm' marketing, and trace how Dennard scaling died and chiplets carry Moore's law forward. By the end you can read a chip datasheet, follow a TSMC roadmap, and explain why every modern SoC is half-dark.
All Science lessons
Transistors: BJTs and MOSFETs
The two transistor families that built modern electronics. BJTs as current-controlled amplifiers, MOSFETs as voltage-controlled switches with a capacitor for a gate, the three operating regions of each, and the four reasons MOSFETs ended up running every digital chip.
Diodes: the simplest semiconductor device
From a single PN junction to the four-diode bridge in every wall adapter. The IV curve, rectification, Zener voltage references, fast Schottky diodes for switching supplies, LEDs and photodiodes turning current to light and back, and the five failure modes that bite real designs.
Semiconductor basics: bands, doping, and the PN junction
What makes silicon work where diamond won't, why doping turns an insulator into a tunable conductor, and how slapping p-type silicon next to n-type creates the depletion region that becomes a diode. The physics every chip is built on.