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"As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy. "

The science of smelling and scent.

"Six leading planetary scientists debate whether Pluto is a planet in a broadcast of the Hayden Planetarium's 2009 Isaac Asimov lecture. "

"Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts the 2010 Isaac Asimov debate at the Hayden Planetarium. He and five panelists debate whether NASA should bother going back to the moon, or just focus on Mars instead. "

Last week, the highly regarded medical journal, The Lancet, retracted a much debated 1998 study that had linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism. The study was retracted after concerns about ethical breaches by one of the study authors. In addition, 10 of the 13 co-authors have disavowed the study's conclusions. "We fully retract this paper from the published record," The Lancet editors said in a statement. But the damage has been done. The paper has fueled fears about the risks of childhood vaccinations and autism, particularly the M.M.R. vaccine, despite numerous studies showing no link.

Award-winning filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and astrophysicist Piet Hut discuss what chaos is and what it means when it comes to the universe.

Famed screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and theoretical physicist Brian Greene dissect time as we know it. What is the smallest unit of time, and what does it look like? For starters, you should stop looking at the clock, and start looking at the universe.

Biologist Stewart Firestein and world-renowned perfumer Christophe Laudamiel team up to tackle the science of smell.

"Keith Olbermann, the leading liberal voice on American television in the age of Obama, was suspended Friday after his employer, MSNBC, discovered he made campaign contributions to three Democrats last month. The indefinite suspension was a stark display of the clash between objectivity and opinion in television journalism. While Mr. Olbermann is anchor of what is essentially the "Democratic Nightly News," the decision affirmed that he was being held to the same standards as other employees of MSNBC and its parent, NBC News, both of which answer to NBC Universal. Most journalistic outlets discourage or directly prohibit campaign contributions by employees. "

Olbermann is the antithesis of Bill O'Reilly on Fox.

"It isn't often that a third of a movie audience sticks around to discuss its message, but that is the effect of "Race to Nowhere," a look at the downside of childhoods spent on résumé-building. " "How do you help your children balance when the whole education system is pushing, pushing, pushing, and you want your kids to be successful?" Alethea Lewis, a mother of two, asked a roomful of concerned parents who had just seen the film, a documentary, last week in Bronxville, N.Y., at a screening co-sponsored by the private Chapel School. With no advertising and little news media attention, "Race to Nowhere" has become a must-see movie in communities where the kindergarten-to-Harvard steeplechase is most competitive.

"UPDATE: Fox News senior vice president for news Michael Clemente has responded to the study which found that his network's viewers are more misinformed about American political issues than any other channel. In a statement to the New York Times' Brian Stelter, Clemente disparaged the University of Maryland, where the study was done. "The latest Princeton Review ranked the University of Maryland among the top schools for having 'Students Who Study The Least' and being the 'Best Party School' - given these fine academic distinctions, we'll regard the study with the same level of veracity it was 'researched' with," Clemente said."

The Fox News VP responds to the study of FoxNews viewers misinformation status by making a textbook ad hominem on the university making the study, University of Maryland.

"You'd think that with all their Googling to find the Spark Notes of the novels they didn't read, today's students would understand how the search engine works. Wrong: They are completely clueless! In a detailed study of 30 college students by anthropologists at Illinois Wesleyan, only seven were able to do a "reasonably well-executed search." According to Inside Higher Ed: They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.) Duke and Asher said they were surprised by "the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school." Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies, Asher told Inside Higher Ed in an interview."