The clanging of shackles brings to our minds the dungeons of the czars, not the flag-bedecked liberty of an American courtroom.

Yes, sir, and we will do our best to fix that, but I don't think we can help Jane.

I-I mean I find it hard to believe they'd actually tell someone they've been assigned a glorified helper monkey.

But we've got no jealous boyfriend, and I can't see Callie dating a sleaze like him.

It's unlikely her abductor is preparing elaborate ethnic meals for her himself, so let's assume the wat is of the takeout variety.

You may have done some terrible things, but I can't help but think that none of that will matter if we get this antiviral to work.

But I don't think you want to tell your boss that you watched his stash go up in flames, now, do you?

And to think that the tumor was in the same bone, in the same place in my body as the accident 38 years earlier -- it seemed like too much of a coincidence.

Now invoking Einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us, but actually it is.

And as that woman took comfort in her robot companion, I didn't find it amazing; I found it one of the most wrenching, complicated moments in my 15 years of work.

And one remote location -- I first went there as a backpacker; I've been back several times for filming, most recently for Untamed Americas -- it's the Altiplano in the high Andes of South America, and it's the most otherworldly place I know.

It sounds crazy, it sounds dumb, but there are actually hospitals who would rather have no equipment than something that looks cheap and crummy.

If you went and looked for images of the Internet, this was all that you found, this famous image by Opte of the Internet as the kind of Milky Way, this infinite expanse where we don't seem to be anywhere on it.

But he was the second child, and the level of supervision had plummeted. (Laughter) So he wandered in, and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling, and I don't think he understands what's going on, but he is sure soaking in it.

In the eye of a theoretical physicist, the Higgs boson is a clever explanation of how some elementary particles gain mass, but it seems a fairly unsatisfactory and incomplete solution.

And I know it is not a fashionable term these days, and certainly not fashionable in the discourse of architectural schools, but it seems to me that all this, in one way or the other, is a search for beauty.

It's named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because of its benign, ethereal appearance in the sky.

What makes it seem real is that in actual languages, letters and groups of letters appear with consistent frequencies, and the language in the Voynich manuscript has patterns you wouldn't find from a random letter generator.

Christopher's case was a serious one and it needed to be dealt with as such, but I didn't think branding him a felon for the rest of his life was the right answer.

Now, if we want to move forward into a different future than the one we have right now, because I don't think we've hit -- 2016 is not peak civilization.

But even here, well hidden underground, we found a number of different microorganisms, which suggested to me that similarly dry places, like Mars, may be inhabited.

(Laughter) Seeing Lauran's sons at the march and holding signs took it to a new level for me, and not in a good way, because I know these boys, I love these boys, and I didn't feel they were old enough to understand what the march stood for.

But if our politicians can't agree on things like health care or even school lunches, I just don't see a path where they'll find consensus on something as big and as expensive as universal basic life income.

I witnessed scenes that were tragic and unreal, and only at the end did I realize that I had witnessed the slow preparation of ethnic cleansing.

But if we take seriously how these systems that we depend on for so much operate, I don't see how we can postpone this conversation anymore.

It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant -- that's why, often in these glamour shots, the person is not looking at the audience, it's why sunglasses are glamorous -- but also not so far above us that we can't identify with the person.

I know at least a bit -- Larry Page, for example, Jeff Bezos -- I don't actually believe they wake up thinking, "I've got to sell a fucking Nissan."

(Laughter) Maybe too far. But you know -- I don't think that a person of color making fun of white people is the same thing as a white person making fun of people of color.

Over a century later, synthetic biologists have found an even better way to use these once unlikely allies— by programming them to safely deliver drugs directly to tumors.

"Defining moment in American history, I don't think there's one; you can't say Hiroshima, that's a big one -- I can't think of any one moment I would say is a defining moment.

I'm not sure that's wise, given the importance of the problem, but there's now the geoengineering discussion about: Should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect?