Paul Andersen explains how the behavior of various organisms is shaped by natural selection. The action of phototropism and the timing of photoperiodism have both been shaped by the relative availability of light. Courtship in the...

This week in SciShow News, there's a new kilogram in town, and we might be closer to understanding why people love coffee so much!

A group of scientists this week has found a chemical trick that might one day help block the harmful effects of loud noises on our ears, and another has built an underwater robot to take a look underneath Thwaites glacier.

Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation's success by its productivity -- instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use...

Snow Dragon. Pure Imagination. Frozen Minotaur. These are the names Eddy Cartaya and his climbing partner Brent McGregor gave three glacier caves that they were the first to explore. As the Sandy Glacier slowly slides down Mount Hood in...

What's the best country to live in? Is it the one with the best food? The longest life expectancy? The best weather? For the past 70 years, most governments have relied heavily on a single number: the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. But...

Is teleportation possible? Could a baseball transform into something like a radio wave, travel through buildings, bounce around corners, and change back into a baseball? Oddly enough, thanks to quantum mechanics, the answer might...

Developing a vaccine usually takes five to 10 years, costs about a billion dollars and has a failure rate of 93 percent. Under the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic, scientists are being asked to speed that timeline up to 12 to 18...

You might think you need a brain to be able to sleep, but organisms with super simple neural networks can still "sleep" sort of like we do. So, if these organisms can sleep too, then what is sleep anyway?

When you think about Einstein and physics, E=mc^2 is probably the first thing that comes to mind. But one of his greatest contributions to the field actually came in the form of an odd philosophical footnote in a 1935 paper he co-wrote...

What will happen to the planet if climate change melts what's left of Arctic permafrost? Shedding light on this overlooked threat, Arctic geologist Sue Natali reveals the true danger of heating up the iciest place on the planet: the...

Proving something right isn’t just about quantity. It’s also about quality and over the years, scientists have made measurements proving that we understand ridiculously well how the universe works.

What accounts for our polarized public life, and how can we begin to heal it? Political philosopher Michael Sandel offers a surprising answer: those who have flourished need to look in the mirror. He explores how "meritocratic hubris"...

2016 was a lot of things, but for astronomers, it meant the discovery of some of the farthest, faintest, and youngest objects in the universe we've seen yet.

Columnist David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature from the cognitive sciences -- insights with massive implications for economics and politics as well as our own self-knowledge. In a talk full of humor, he shows how you can't...

The 2007-2008 financial crisis, you might think, was an unpredictable one-time crash. But Didier Sornette and his Financial Crisis Observatory have plotted a set of early warning signs for unstable, growing systems, tracking the moment...

To study a system as complex as the entire universe, astrophysicists need to be experts at extracting simple solutions from large data sets. What else could they do with this expertise? In an interdisciplinary talk, TED Fellow and...

The WHO has declared the new coronavirus a global public health emergency—but that doesn't mean you should panic.

Scientists have worked out how likely it is that distant planets can see earth, and we are learning new ways to study the magnetic fields of galaxies.

Today we're going to talk about SPAAAAAACE, but not like stars and satellites and stuff. Instead, we're going to talk about geographic space. In geography, we can look at the world and the places and spaces we inhabit with four distinct...

Associate Producer Stefan Chin faces off against his boss, Hank Green. Will Stefan manage to keep his job? What does a dinosaur sound like? And where is that space whale?

Considering how massive our universe is, we know the distances to cosmic objects surprisingly well. What tools and clues do scientists use to measure distances that are so enormous they sound like made-up numbers?

SciShow Space shares four wonderful things that you probably use every day, all made possible by NASA technology.

Mark Shaw demos Ultra-Ever Dry, a liquid-repellent coating that acts as an astonishingly powerful shield against water and water-based materials. At the nano level, the spray covers a surface with an umbrella of air so that water bounces...