SciShow
Pyrotherapy: An Awful Nobel Prize for Infecting People with Malaria
Malaria vs. Neurosyphilis: the story of an unethical experiment, and its mysterious conclusions
SciShow
Your Best Friend Probably Smells Like You
The microbes that crawl all over us give us our unique scents. And research shows that not only do we prefer our own, but we tend to choose friends with a similar smell.
SciShow
Have an Autoimmune Disease? Blame the Black Death
The bubonic plague killed so many people in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa that that natural selection event is still rippling through our genomes today. But the same genes that helped your ancestors survive the Black Death...
Amoeba Sisters
Genetic Engineering
Explore an intro to genetic engineering with The Amoeba Sisters. This video provides a general definition, introduces some biotechnology tools that can be used in genetic engineering, and discusses some related vocabulary (such as...
SciShow
Growing Bacteria in Space Stations | Compilation
Bacteria is enormously resourceful and will find a way to grow just about anywhere it can, and that includes space stations. Here's a compilation of how that's happened in the past and how we've handled it!
SciShow
How We Get Sick in Space and How to Recover | Compilation
No one likes being sick, but can you imagine catching a bug while hurling through space? Turns out, this is an issue that many space agencies have worked to study and mitigate.
SciShow
Early Earth Microbes May Have Eaten Raw Meteorites
Is it possible that life on earth began with an out of this world rock buffet?
PBS
Why Does Caffeine Exist?
Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ability to produce this molecule independently evolve in multiple, distantly-related lineages of flowering plants, again and again?
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 We Figured Out Fermentation
Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our primate ancestors could digest them safely, and get more calories at the same time. This new superpower would open up a whole new...
PBS
Giant Viruses Blur The Line Between Alive and Not
In 2003, microbiologists made a huge discovery. One that would force us to reconsider a lot of what we thought we knew about the evolution of microbial life: giant viruses.
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...
Be Smart
Antibiotic Resistance and the Rise of Superbugs
Antibiotic Resistance and the Rise of Superbugs
TED Talks
TED: CRISPR's next advance is bigger than you think | Jennifer Doudna
You've probably heard of CRISPR, the revolutionary technology that allows us to edit the DNA in living organisms. Biochemist and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Jennifer Doudna earned the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking work in this...
SciShow
Why Astronauts Need Farm-to-Table
Growing food in space will be necessary to support the future of space exploration. And it won't be monoculture, either. Here's why astronauts will be growing whole ecosystems in space.
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
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
It's Raining Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria
Bacteria are everywhere, including clouds, and the rain that falls from them. Not only can they survive the harsh environment and hitchhike across continents, they can share their genes, too. Including the ones that make them resistant...
SciShow
How Can Microbes Protect Crops From Drought?
Solving food shortages caused by droughts is a big challenge that may benefit from a tiny ally. Turns out that the microbes living in the soil around plants can give them a boost when water's scarce, which means more food for us, which...
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 Earth's "Boring Billion" Years Were Anything But
About 1.8–0.8 billion ago, the Earth went through a period known as the Boring Billion, where not a lot changed in terms of geology, evolution, or even the number of hours in a day. Some scientists call it “the dullest period in Earth’s...
SciShow
We Solved the Mystery of the Dying Birds
Across the southeastern United States, bald eagles have been dying unexplainedly for the past 25 years. In March of 2021, researchers announced that they had found the killer, and they hope we can use this knowledge to better protect...
SciShow
We Can Cure Ebola! (Mostly—Which Is Better Than Rarely) | SciShow News
We’ve made a lot of progress recently in curing two deadly diseases that have been difficult to treat!
SciShow
This Parasitic Plant Stole Over 100 Genes From Other Plants | SciShow News
Plants may not seem like they live the most exciting lives, but two new papers published this week point to different types of plants that are actually very cunning and manipulative. One, the parasitic dodder, steals both nutrients and...