In part 1 of our special series on human ancestry, we tour through our family tree to meet our ancestors and distant cousins, and to find out what made us human along the way. The story of human ancestry is not a simple progression from...

If being alive on Earth were a contest, humans would win it hands down. We're like the Michael Phelps of being alive, but with 250,000 times more gold medals. Today Hank is here to tell us the specifics of why and how human population...

In which John Green teaches you about the changes wrought by contact between the Old World and the New. John does this by exploring the totally awesome history book "The Columbian Exchange" by Alfred Cosby, Jr. After Columbus...

You’re having a dream, and for some reason that giant rabbit that’s about to eat you starts to sing like a bird. You wake up to find that birds are singing outside your window! Check out this SciShow Quick Question to find out why those...

Bees are quite beneficial little critters: pollinating flowers, making honey, and also...helping corpses decompose.

Paul Andersen explains how ecosystems change over time. He starts by explaining how global climate change will impacts ecosystems around the planet. He then discusses how continental drift created climatic changes that impacted mammal...

The mirror test is supposed to be a way to figure out when an animal is self-aware, but there might be only one particular animal this test works well on: humans.

You might thank your nose for letting you experience the lovely aromas of a good soup, but you probably wouldn't think to thank it for helping you experience other people's emotions!

Dating back more than 800 years, chocolate is deeply woven into the Indigenous history of Oaxaca, Mexico. TED Fellow Germán Santillán talks about his work reviving the Mixtec technique used to prepare this ancient delicacy by training a...

Hank gets to the more violent part of community ecology by describing predation and the many ways prey organisms have developed to avoid it.

With a solid understanding of biology on the small scale under our belts, it's time for the long view - for the next twelve weeks, we'll be learning how the living things that we've studied interact with and influence each other and...

De-extinction, or using the power of modern biotechnology to bring back extinct species like mammoths and dinosaurs, would be cool. But is it really as easy as the movies make it look? Or do the cruel hands of time make it impossible?...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how scientific theories are created and modified over time. He starts by discussing the theory of natural selection as a model for the creation and modification of theories. He gives examples of...

From a special black-footed ferret to coral that can withstand warming waters, genetic rescue efforts that use genomics and synthetic biology are helping nature thrive. But despite the huge successes of this kind of intervention,...

Hank introduces us to the "simplest" of the animals, complexity-wise: beginning with sponges (whose very inclusion in the list as "animals" has been called into question because they are so simple) and finishing with the most complex...

Interactions between species are what define ecological communities, and community ecology studies these interactions anywhere they take place. Although interspecies interactions are mostly competitive, competition is pretty dangerous,...

Learn about asteroids, meteors, and comets and how they can affect earth!

Today, we’re moving on from artificial intelligence that needs training labels, called Supervised Learning, to Unsupervised Learning which is learning by finding patterns in the world. We’ll focus on the performing unsupervised...

Tropical rainforests are known for being super biologically diverse _ they're full of different species, from colorful birds and insects to plants and fungi. We haven't even come close to cataloguing everything that's there.

Find out why these arachnids are among the least B of humanity's BFFs. Yeah, they're blood-sucking parasites, but that's not all of it!

Poop Transplants!

Sometimes, plants do unexpected things. Like control their own body temperature.

This edition of SciShow News really is full of "news." Scientists have discovered a new moon orbiting Neptune, a new tick-borne virus threatening the United States, and a new species of shrew who is a real hero. Let's get to it!

How successful are we compared to other species? It turns out that biomass, or what things weigh, can be more important than how many of something there are. Find out how our numbers stack up against everything from bugs to bacteria, and...