Waste not, want not.... right? Poop, in all of its various forms throughout nature, shapes the world in ways you might not imagine. One creature's waste is another's fuel, and all over nature these leftovers help new life spring up....

Hank introduces us to the brilliant and heartless Fritz Haber, a great mind who is considered "the father chemical warfare," but who also made discoveries and innovations that helped lead to the Green Revolution which is credited with...

Fish consider the ocean their own personal toilet. Well, researchers found out that's not such a bad thing!

Despite their iridescent colors and smooth shapes, pearls are actually made of the exact same material as the craggy shell that surrounds them. Pearls, urchin spines, the shells of mussels, snails and clams, even coral— all these...

Hank talks about a few - maybe crazy, maybe reasonable - geoengineering schemes that some scientists have come up with in order to "fix" climate change, including designer clouds, ocean fertilization, and stratospheric shading with...

The world needs clean water, and more and more, we're pulling it from the oceans, desalinating it, and drinking it. But what to do with the salty brine left behind? In this intriguing short talk, TED Fellow Damian Palin proposes an idea:...

Everyone loves slime... until it starts coming out of someone's nose, then all of a sudden it's "gross." But this slimy stuff is also really important to the lives of many animals, including humans!

Although gelatinous animals might seem like simple creatures, they'll probably outlast the rest of us, because being gelatinous might turn out to be the ultimate survival strategy.

Several cultures portray the world as being carried on the back of a giant turtle. As it turns out, sea turtles really do house an entire world on their backs — one of microscopic organisms, that is!

Humans don't have interconnected teeth for slicing, or a secondary set of jaws to clamp down on prey already in our mouths, however, the rest of our animal kingdom is full of strange and awesome adaptations.

Your cell phone is mainly made of plastics and metals. It's easy to appreciate the process by which those elements add up to something so useful. But there's another story we don't hear about -- how did we get our raw ingredients in the...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the dissolution of a solute in a solution can be explained as a reversible reaction. Bonds in the solid solute are broken and the ions are dissolved in a solution. The Ksp (or solubility product...

Deep in the ocean, fluffy bits of organic matter fall like snow. But this marine snow isn’t just pretty; it’s an essential part of our ocean food webs and our global climate!

In this video Paul Andersen explains how water is unequally distributed around the globe through the hydrologic cycles. Seawater is everywhere but is not useful without costly desalination. Freshwater is divided between surface water...

Today roads, sidewalks, bridges, and skyscrapers are made of a material called concrete. There's three tons of it for every person on Earth. It's also played a surprisingly large role in rising global temperatures over the last century....

As we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more of it is dissolving in the oceans, leading to drastic changes in the water's chemistry. Triona McGrath researches this process, known as ocean acidification, and in this talk...

Welcome back to the Fluctus Channel for a feature on the intricate steps of processing different types of salts around the world. Fluctus is a website and YouTube channel dedicated to sea geeks. Whenever you are curious or an...

This video discusses the ongoing water crisis in the Maldives following the December tsunami. It highlights the short-term solution of using desalination units to turn seawater into drinking water, which is currently being relied upon by...

Whether fish get thirsty depends on the fish you look at. Fish that live in freshwater have different physiology to deal with their environment than fish in salty seawater. These physiological differences dictate whether fish need to...

A closer look at the three key processes that shape our coasts. What are they and what effects do they have? Earth Science - Geology - Learning Points. Our coastlines are constantly being re-shaped by three key processes. Erosion -...

Discover some geo-engineering techniques that scientists are developing to manipulate Earth's climate. What are they and how would they work? Earth Science - Human Impacts - Learning Points. Geo-engineering strives to use technology to...

Did you know that basking sharks use gill rakers, large combs in their mouths, to filter plankton from the seawater?
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Discover how a process known as desalination is used to extract salt from seawater on a large scale.
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Find out how we extract salt from seawater on an industrial scale.
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