PBS
What Happened To Primates In North America?
Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?
PBS
The Invisible Barrier Keeping Two Worlds Apart
In between two of the islands of Indonesia, there’s an ancient line that is both real and…not real.
PBS
Something Has Been Making This Mark For 500 Million Years
Paleodictyon, a hexagonal-patterned fossil, is a bit of a mystery. We don’t even know if it’s a trace fossil, or the organism itself. So… what could it be?
PBS
How Volcanoes Froze the Earth (Twice)
Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happen? And most importantly for us, why did the planet eventually thaw again? The evidence for Snowball Earth is written on every continent...
PBS
How Plants Caused the First Mass Extinction
In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the world. The arrival of plants on land would make the world colder, drain much of the oxygen out of the...
PBS
How a Supervolcano Ignited an Evolutionary Debate
The Toba supervolcano was the biggest explosive eruption of the last 2.5 million years. And humans were around to see it, or at least feel its effects! But what were those effects?
PBS
When the Earth Suddenly Stopped Warming
For decades, scientists have been studying the cause of the Younger Dryas, and trying to figure out if something like it could happen again. And it turns out that what caused this event is the subject of a heated debate.
Be Smart
Are We Running Out Of Food??
If you tried to sum up the last 150 years or so in one image, a chart of exponential growth would be a good place to start. It shows that some things change faster over time. You could apply it to life expectancy. Or compound interest....
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can other animals understand death? | Barbara J. King
In 2018, an orca called Tahlequah gave birth. But her daughter died within an hour. Tahlequah, however, didn't leave her body. Over the next 17 days and 1,600 kilometers, she kept it afloat atop her own. By altering her feeding and...
TED Talks
TED: Could an orca give a TED Talk? | Karen Bakker
What if we could hear nature's ultrasonic communication -- and talk back? From a bat's shrill speech to a peacock's infrasound mating call, conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker takes us through a sound bath of animal noises...
SciShow
Corn Shouldn't Be Food, But It Is
You probably have a bag of frozen corn in your freezer, or have chowed down on a buttery ear of corn at a cookout. But not only did it take thousands of years for humans to domesticate teosinte to corral it into what we now know as corn,...
SciShow
Why Teeth Make The Best Fossils
Teeth are so well preserved in the fossil record that they make the best, most informative fossils we can find, from phylogenetic studies to learning about the evolution of the human brain.
SciShow
The Wildest Noises in Wildlife… and Dunes
Nature can be pretty noisy, but there's some stuff that's just quiet all the time - right? Well, thanks to advances in audio equipment, researchers are finding out that everything from plants to bacteria have a lot more to say that we...
SciShow
Why Are Saturn’s Rings Younger Than Saturn?
Saturn's rings are younger than Saturn, and the most spectacular sight in the Solar System is also disappearing. How do we know? By running our finger through some cosmic dust.
SciShow
Even Locusts Hate Plagues of Locusts
Plagues of locusts have been documented since ancient times, and they affect the food supply of one in ten people today. How can we stop them? Well, computer models of locusts swarms tell us every locust is scared to death of its neighbors.
SciShow
You're Basically A Mushroom
The tree of life you learned in school is wrong, even if you just graduated. We like to sort eukaryotes into big kingdoms or supergroups, but scientists can't agree what those groups should be. Here's why that's a good thing.
SciShow
We Can't Find Most Of The World's Fungi
Most of the world’s fungi aren’t just rarely seen or found solely underground. They’re flat out invisible - and that’s becoming a big problem. Start your own microscopic journey with a Journey to the Microcosmos microscope:...
SciShow
The 2000-Year-Old Farmers Saving the Amazon Today
Thousands of years ago, indigenous farmers in the Amazon created exceptionally fertile soil. Today, scientists think it could restore the succession of rainforest plants and help reverse the effects of climate change.
SciShow
A Needle So Tiny It Injects Into A Single Cell
It may be possible to create a needle so small it can inject a vaccine into a single cell. But it's not the product of a medical device company. It's part of something we often think of as making us sick.
SciShow
Why Aliens Might Love Their Frozen Home
In the hunt for life beyond Earth, scientists shouldn't skip over frozen planets. In some cases, ice might actually help life evolve!
SciShow
What Are We REALLY Using Space Lasers For?
Ever since we started launching stuff into space, we've communicated with spacecraft (and astronauts) using radio waves. But over the past few decades, scientists have experimented with a new technique that could make things a lot more...
SciShow
Do Polar Bears Have Fiber Optic Fur?
Humans may use fiber optic technology to make everything from novelty desk toys to high speed internet cables, but Nature has its own ideas. For decades, scientists have debated to what extent polar bears may use the optical properties...
SciShow
Why These Animals Eat Sh*t
Of all the food options in the world, you'd think that feces would be low on anyone's preference list. But for these animals, eating poop can be anything from a delicacy to a health food - and yes, humans are on the list too.
SciShow
How to See Really Tiny Things Without Killing Them
Where would biology be without microscopes? But for a long time, in order to see the smallest bits of life, that life had to be dead. Then along came Atomic Force Microscopy, which let us observe things like DNA and proteins moving...