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 Earth's First, Unkillable Animals Saved the World
They have survived every catastrophe and every mass extinction event that nature has thrown at them. And by being the little, filter-feeding, water-cleaning creatures that they are, sponges may have saved the world.
PBS
How Dogs (Eventually) Became Our Best Friends
We’re still figuring out the details, but most scientists agree that it took thousands of years of interactions to develop our deep bond with dogs. When did they first become domesticated? Where did this happen? And what did the process...
PBS
How Ancient Whales May Have Changed the Deep Ocean
It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ones found around geothermal vents. And it turns out that when a whale dies, that’s just the beginning of...
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
Are We All Actually Archaea?
The unexpected discovery of an entirely new domain of life was pretty huge and surprising - even if archaea do just look like bacteria. But, in recent years, it’s been their connection to us that's turned out to be particularly full of...
PBS
The Fuzzy Origins of the Giant Panda
How does a bear -- which is a member of the order Carnivora -- evolve into an herbivore? Despite how it looks, nothing about the history of the giant panda is black and white.
PBS
Our Bizarre, Possibly Venomous, Relative
This video contains images and video of snakes and spiders. It's possible Euchambersia possessed venom about 20 million years before the first lizards and over 150 million years before the first snakes evolved. We’ve teamed up Sarah Suta...
PBS
How the Walrus Got Its Tusks
The rise and fall of ancient walruses, and how modern ones got their tusks, is a story that spans almost 20 million years. And while there are parts of the story that we’re still trying to figure out, it looks like tusks didn’t have...
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
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
How to See Inside Anything
You might think of x-rays as the go-to particle to see through solid objects. But there's a subatomic particle out there that can see through everything from volcanos to lead shielding in nuclear reactors. It's called a muon, and...
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
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
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
Can Sponges “Think” Using Light?
Sponges might not look like particularly complex animals, but they've had billions of years to evolve their own special systems. And one of those systems might involve sending messages through their body in the form of light.
SciShow
These Animals Lost Their Stomachs. Why?
What do a platypus, a pufferfish, and a seahorse have in common? Why, they all managed to evolve themselves out of having a working stomach! The reasons why might vary, as well as how they manage to live their lives without them, but...