Antarctica is more than a continent-sized sheet of ice (and the penguins that live atop it). There's land, liquid water, and even life underneath all that ice. And scientists have built up a suite of tools to find all of it.

Small grains in the Murchison meteorite have been estimated to be 7 billion years old—much older than the Earth, and even the solar system.

In 2009, a man named Edwin Rist planned a museum heist. His target wasn't jewels, or fossils, or the Declaration of Independence. It was bird skins. It took just over a year for authorities to track him down, largely because the...

You've probably heard that processed foods are bad for you. But is that true for all of them? And how do we know?

This video description is brought to you by language. But how long have humans been able to use our gift of gab? The answer is a lot more complicated than you might think. From studying fossil brains and ear bones to DNA migration...

Throughout history, humans have come up with some pretty weird ideas related to longevity. Like drinking neurotoxic mercury to live forever, slathering yourself in oil and eating honey to reach the ripe old age of 300, or getting an...

Can you melt wood? Most of the time, the answer is no. But as with many things in science, under the right circumstances, it might just be possible.

Do animals exercise? Think about it -- do animals need to lose weight, or train for their big migration? We'll look at a few definitions of exercise and see if animals meet the criteria for hitting the gym.

We all have to deal with getting rid of trash. But what do we do when that trash is radioactive? Here's a few of the weirdest solutions to the green glowy problem of storing radioactive waste for decades to come.

All crocodilians look more or less the same today, but to survive two different mass extinctions, they've had to change a lot. Here's how they pulled it off.

Rocky bodies like moons, asteroids, and comets are chock full of resources, from water, to helium-3, to rare earth elements. But how can we access them? Some scientists have proposed using microbes to aid in the mining of certain metals.

More and more people under 50 are being diagnosed with colorectal cancer. These young people don’t seem to have any of the usual risk factors for colorectal cancer, like an inherited genetic mutation. after some sleuthing, scientists...

Correction

07:11 We made a conversion error! The asteroid in this sentence should be 95,000 meters or 95 km. The conclusion (water would be deadly hot and sterilized) is cor

rect.

Let's face it: The Earth is going to get...

The Sahara is rather famously a desert, but it wasn't always that way. And during the time of lush green forests, there were plenty of people who lived there, but they've been hard to study. However, new genetic analysis has given us...

In the southeast corner of New Mexico, the United States is burying decades of nuclear waste. The storage site, and the earth above it, will remain lethal for millennia...perhaps as much as 300,000 years! How can we warn people that far...

The North American continent used to have deep roots extending far into the Earth's mantle. They melted. Here's how scientists think they disappeared.

Humans love to decorate, and that's been true for a long time. Early humans have been painting on the walls for tens of thousand of years, and their work helped us understand a lot about their world and our own. From Lascaux Cave in...

The Giant's Causeway is a rock formation that is so otherworldly that it seems like it was made by supernatural beings. But these incredible hexagonal columns of rock aren't the result of giant masons. They formed through a quirk of...

When you see a bunch of fossils in a museum, you might not think about how unlikely it is that they got there. But there's a lot of lucky dice rolls that landed that mastodon in the museum, and researchers are really motivated to find...

We all picked up new habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. But not all of them stuck. Here's the data on whether we're better or worse drivers, exercisers, social media community members, neighbors, and self carers than during and before...

Whether or not you think humans should be announcing our presence to the cosmos, we're doing it, anyway. Both intentionally, and not. And if aliens really do exist, there are several ways they could find us. Here are six of them.

Astronomers have spent the past century (roughly) trying to figure out where all the elements on the Periodic Table come from. For example, the oldest hydrogen emerged when the universe was just a baby (Big Bang nucleosynthesis). And the...

While the word "mummy" may conjure up an image of King Tut (or a 1999 Brendan Fraser action/adventure movie), ancient Egyptians were far from the only culture that mummified their dead. Around the world, and across millennia, people...

If you've got a uterus, you've probably heard of menopause. But there's a lot that doesn't get talked about when it comes to this period, or lack thereof. This video is going to break down the real deal with menopause and give you...