So, rocks are hard. But the scale we use to rank them, the Mohs scale, is only really good at quantifying that for one kind of hardness, and topaz is a perfect stone to talk about to explain that. And you can check it out in our SciShow...

This month's Rocks Box is pyrite, also called fool's gold. But this fool's gold might not be so foolish, since we can use it to get all kinds of other minerals we really need, and it may be a key to getting real gold after all.

An entire field of science is dedicated to identifying the perfect indoor temperature. And it's a lot more complicated than simply setting the thermostat to 21 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit).

If you could survive a trip to the very first moments of reality as we know it, what color would you see?

When you get two doses of a vaccine, you might assume that it doesn't matter which arm gets the shots. But some evidence suggests that it does.

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...

Supersonic jets like the Concorde face concerns over safety, high carbon output, and cost. They also make loud sonic booms so loud that only transoceanic flights are legal. Now one NASA program is trying to make a quiet supersonic plane...

In 2023, a whole bunch of orcas started attacking boats off the coast of Spain. Was this the first battle in an all-out interspecies war? Well, probably not. But it's a pretty neat look into how trends come and go in orca pods - like...

The Sun is green, actually. We'll go into why the blackbody effect means the Sun emits more green visible light than any other color, and why evolution and color perception mean it's ok to see it as yellow, anyway.

Searching for a cure for rickets led to the discovery of vitamin D. Fortifying foods with vitamin D led to another disease, and a whole new way to view genetic disease in general.

You've probably heard of acid rain: rain that's more acidic than normal because of pollution in the atmosphere. But, if rain can become more acidic, shouldn't it also be able to become more basic?

You might want a really sturdy umbrella to dig into this video, because we’re discussing 5 animals that have a tendency to rain down from the sky and the reasons we think this might be happening!

If the 10 kilometer wide asteroid that hit the Earth 66 million years ago hit just a few minutes later, would the outcome of the living creatures here have been different?

Neurons often get all the credit for running the brain, but the work done by Ben Barres at Stanford University proved that glial cells are far more crucial to brain functioning than we had previously realized.

Everywhere in the animal kingdom you can find teeth in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so you probably think you have a pretty good idea where they came from. But in reality, this debate is still a hot one, and it may have something to do...

If, for some wild reason, we decided that breeding humongous spiders was a good idea, could we actually pull it off?

You might think that you’re pretty familiar with your body, but it turns out that our bodies still have some surprises for us!

This episode is brought to you by the Music for Scientists album! Stream the album on major music services hereref='https://streamlink.to/music-for-scien....' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>here Check out the “For Your Love" music...

While you might not think about quantum mechanics being part of your everyday life, it turns out that it might play a role in some of the most familiar things, from the sunlight in the trees to the nose on your face!

We began keeping goldfish as pets more than 1,000 years ago, but their beauty wasn’t the only thing they had going for them. Goldfish had a lot of really weird biological traits that made them incredibly resilient. And in an unfortunate...

In which John introduces you to quite a lot of Chinese history by discussing the complicated relationship between the Confucian scholars who wrote Chinese history and the emperors (and empress) who made it. Included is a brief...

Sex can be a taboo conversation, but over the years we found out that our viewers had a lot of questions about it. So we’ve put some of the answers to those questions into one video!