In which John Green, Hank Green, and Emily Graslie teach you about, well, everything. Big History is the history of everything. We're going to start with the Big Bang, take you right through all of history (recorded and otherwise), and...

So, "modern" is kind of a loaded term, but today we're going to talk about modern life in Europe, as it looked around the time the 19th century turned into the 20th. We'll look at what life was like in the rapidly growing urban centers...

The origin of life is one of the most important mysteries in all of science. When did life begin? How did life first evolve from chemistry? Where did life get started? In some primordial soup or somewhere else? Let's journey back to the...

Before he hit eighteen, Fred Swaniker had lived in Ghana, Gambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. What he learned from a childhood across Africa was that while good leaders can't make much of a difference in societies with strong institutions, in...

The year was 1776. In Bavaria, new ideals of rationalism, religious freedom and universal human rights competed with the Catholic church's heavy influence over public affairs. Adam Weishaupt, a law professor frustrated with the Church's...

In which John Green teaches you about the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling that occurred from the 13th to the 19th centuries. This cooling was likely caused by a number of factors, including unusual solar...

So, the stars made the elements, we're all made of star stuff, etc. But what does all this mean? This week Emily Graslie teaches you how the formation of chemical elements in the bellies of the earliest stars made life as we know it...

Uprisings of enslaved people in the United States were not uncommon, and they had a big influence on how the institution of slavery evolved. One uprising that gets less attention, historically, is the German Coast Uprising that took...

Today, we're going to discuss the critical role graphical user interfaces, or GUIs played in the adoption of computers. Before the mid 1980's the most common way people could interact with their devices was through command line...

economic growth is the defining challenge of our time; without it, political and social instability rises, human progress stagnates and societies grow dimmer. But, says economist Dambisa Moyo, dogmatic capitalism isn't creating the...

Squeaks and Mister Brown pretend to go back in time to learn more about Trilobites, using special clues from fossils!



Second Grade Next Generation Science
Standards
Crossc
utting Concepts
Patterns: Observed...

In which John Green returns to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to explore the themes of true love, lust, and whether Romeo and Juliet were truly, deeply in love, or they were just a pair of impetuous teens. How exactly did Romeo...

When you have a study with a small sample size, how do you know that the results represent the broader population? Well, thanks to a brewer who needed to assess beer quality in the early 1900s, we now have a simple statistical test that...

In which John Green teaches you about the European Renaissance. European learning changed the world in the 15th and 16th century, but was it a cultural revolution, or an evolution? We'd argue that any cultural shift that occurs over a...

A huge and diverse subfamily of dogs, the bone-crushers patrolled North America for more than thirty million years, before they disappeared in the not-too-distant past. So what happened to the biggest dogs that ever lived?

The story of the word X-Ray is one of great thinkers. French philosopher Rene Descartes isolated the letters X, Y and Z to stand for unknowns, and centuries later, Wilhelm Rontgen discovered the X-ray, using the X for the unknown nature...

In which John Green examines Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare. John delves into the world of Bill Shakespeare's famous star-crossed lovers and examines what the play is about, its structure, and the context in which it was written....

Over the course of 50 episodes, we're going to learn about Black American History. Clint Smith will to teach you about the experience of Black people in America, from the arrival of the first enslaved Black people who arrived at...

As climate change accelerates, finding clean alternatives to fossil fuels is more urgent than ever. Social entrepreneur Vaitea Cowan believes green hydrogen is the answer. Watch as she shares her team's work mass producing electrolyzers...

Today we know pathogens -- viruses, bacteria, and certain other microbes -- are responsible for many diseases. But linking specific diseases to the microbes that cause them has been surprisingly tricky, and some research practices lead...

Humans are great at creating, and solving, problems. Hank talks with Gina McCarthy about the biggest public health problem we face today: climate change. Gina McCarthy is the Director of C-CHANGE (Center for Climate, Health and the...

The financial sector often talks of decarbonizing investment portfolios as a way to fight climate change. But portfolios can be "cleaned" without having any real impact on the problem, says investment expert Nili Gilbert. Bringing...

By choosing the right path and the right reference frames, any superluminal motion can lead to information or objects returning to their origin before they depart.

In 1688, in Pennsylvania, a group of four men created the Germantown Petition, which made the case that slavery was immoral, and that it was inconsistent with Christian beliefs in general, and Quaker beliefs specifically. While the...