For the past decade, Leonard Susskind, one of America’s pre-eminent physicists, has taught a series of six courses in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program.

Speaking at the American Physical Society last month, Matthew Bierbaum, a Cornell grad student, presented a talk called “Collective Motion at Heavy Metal Concerts,” where he made the case that physics is everywhere, even in a mosh pit at a heavy metal show.

In December of 1959, Richard Feynman gave a talk called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” at an annual meeting of the American Physical Society at Caltech.

The story has become part of physics lore: A young Richard Feynman, future Nobel winner, was bored with life in the remote New Mexico desert while working on the atomic bomb during World War II, so he amused himself by learning to pick the combination locks in the supposedly secure filing cabinets containing America’s nuclear secrets.

I went through childhood listening to Tom Lehrer’s “New Math“. The 1965 song, performed in part like standard spoken-word comedy, made me laugh every time.

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station work every day on all kinds of experiments, from working with robots to preparing for spacewalks. But when they get a break, they often field questions from school children and adults about life in space.

We recently posted a rare audio recording of Albert Einstein reading his essay, “The Common Language of Science.” Today we have a similarly rare treat: filmed excerpts from a speech on individual liberty that Einstein gave shortly after the Nazis rose to power and he became a refugee from his native Germany.

Genius — these days, we bandy the term about ever so freely. Everyone’s a genius, including this 2-year-old wielding a pair of nail clippers. Then, Neil deGrasse Tyson comes along and reminds us what a genius really looks like.

Here’s an extraordinary recording of Albert Einstein from the fall of 1941, reading a full-length essay in English:

The essay is called “The Common Language of Science.” It was recorded in September of 1941 as a radio address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

From the annals of Why Smart People Do Dumb Things: The New York Times has a long piece on Paul Frampton, a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who meets a Czech model online, then, rather gullibly, travels to South America to get to know her in person.