When caterpillars undergo metamorphosis and become butterflies, their brains melt into goop. Neuroscience says they shouldn't remember anything about their past lives. So why do studies show that they do?



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From hypothetical magnetic levitation trains and space elevators that aren't even attached to the ground, to very real space cannons tested in the 1960s, humans have come up with a lot of ways to hurl stuff into outer...

If you've wandered down a supplement aisle recently, you may have come across a bottle for sale that has "anti-aging" ingredients to help your body make a molecule called NAD+, better known as nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide. Your...

Every day, airplanes fly over the Panama-Colombia border and drop millions of flies from the sky. It's part of an intense effort to control a deadly pest called screwworms, and believe it or not, it works.



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In 2020, students from the University of Texas proposed sending a fleet of rovers to the Moon that, for a price, would carve words and symbols into the surface for *you*, random human. And that got us thinking, how big would such a...

This lake in Canada sports a stunning summer look - spots! And the weird geology and hydrology that makes these spots is definitely worth talking about. Plus, Spotted Lake may not be the only one of its kind, and might tell us more...

You've probably heard that urine is sterile. And we're only just learning that's not true. Understanding the urinary microbiome could help us find new ways to treat kidney stones, UTIs, and even bladder cancer.



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Chocolate being one of the world's most delicious foods, you'd think we would know everything about it. /Somebody/ domesticated wild cacao. It's just… nobody really knows who, or when… or where. But if we want chocolate for the long...

A biologist’s natural habitat is anywhere questions about life are being asked—whether the subject is a nematode or a narwhal, a single cell, or a whole ecosystem. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’re flipping the microscope...

Science offers a way of discovering and understanding the world around us, driven by questions and tested with evidence. And it’s a twisty-turny team effort— you won’t find many lone geniuses out there, or straight lines from hypothesis...

Biology is the study of life—a four-letter word that connects you to 4 billion years worth of family tree. The word “life” can be tricky to define, but a shared set of characteristics helps biologists identify living things. In this...

If you were really into gift shops as a kid, you probably loved to look at all the shiny geodes. But those little geodes are nothing compared to the mother of all geodes, found is in Put In Bay, Ohio. So let's talk about how this...

In the early 1960s, NASA rolled up to a US Navy facility in Pennsylvania with one goal in mind: stick its newly-minted astronauts into one of the most extreme centrifuges that has ever been built, and whirl them around really fast to...

You can dye your hair, you can get a tan, but the color of your eyes is pretty much set in stone - or is it? From weird diseases to temper flare-ups and even iris implants, here are just a few ways that your eye color might not be so...

Your thyroid is a tiny gland in your throat, and what it lacks in size, it makes up for in power. This thing controls your metabolism, so you literally can't have power without it. And unfortunately, there's a lot that can go wrong...

The Stern-Gerlach Experiment in lauded in textbooks around the world for its contributions to the world of quantum physics. But for a few years, scientists unknowingly praised it for proving the wrong thing! Because instead of proving...

Diamonds are cool, but they form really far below the Earth's crust, and the main way they get to the surface(ish) is through rock formations called kimberlites. And these kimberlites are really rare and really weird. So let's talk...

The New Jersey earthquake of 2024 might have felt bigger than ones of the same magnitude on a Richter scale or intensity in California. That's because earthquakes in the eastern US go farther and hit harder than their western...

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You can turn all your old cooking scraps into gardening gold, thanks to hard-working microbes. Here's all the science of compost and everything you need to know to get started composting. <b<br/>r/>

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If all goes well, we'll be sending astronauts back to the Moon in just a couple of years. And scientists have a lot to figure out before then, including the answer to a seemingly simple question: What time is it up...

Everyone knows where Punt is, right? The Ancient Egyptians sure did — they traded with them for millennia. But apparently they were *so* familiar with its location, they never bothered to write it down for posterity. So archaeologists...

Adding sand to beaches sounds like it's an oxymoronic thing to do, but it's totally a thing. And there's some major benefits, like protecting our coastlines from storms and conserving ecosystems. But there are also some major...

Where is the closest black hole to Earth? Well, they're pretty hard to find, so the record-holder keeps getting updated. Currently, it's an unassuming black hole called Gaia BH1. But research has hinted at several black holes that...