Stories of werewolves have existed for thousands of years and continue to live on today. They're especially prominent in European literature and folklore, and often found in cultures where the wolf is the largest natural predator. Over...

For over 200 years, potatoes thrived in Ireland; roughly half the country’s residents lived almost entirely on potatoes. But when harvesting began in 1845, farmers found their potatoes blackened and shriveled. While this failed harvest...

How is the US going to reach net zero by 2050? That's the question Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, director of the Office of Science for the US Department of Energy, is urgently trying to answer. She shares the thinking behind what her team is...

Today, Jessi and Squeaks learn about some common (and maybe even spooky) ingredients used to make candy, including what might be the most famous Halloween candy of them: Candy Corn!



Second Grade Next Generation...

Squeaks and Jessi discover an animal with a head that reminds them of a boomerang. Its name is Diplocaulus, and they'll learn all about how that funny head helped it live a very long time...

Sure, potions of invisibility and immortality may be a little hard to come by in the real world, but there's some legit science behind less fantastic ones. Historical sleep and love potions are grounded in science, even if some of the...

At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been possible, thanks to a major revolution...

While clubs are practically synonymous with ankylosaurs, we’ve only started to get to the bottom of how they worked and how this unusual anatomy developed in the first place.

There is one - and only one - group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates, which are the monkeys of Africa and Asia, the apes, and us.

Do our modern horses descend from just one domesticated population, or did it happen many times, in many places? Answering these questions has been tricky, as we’ve needed to bring together evidence from art, archaeology, and ancient...

We often think of dinosaurs as either preying on other dinos or mammals, or as plant-eaters -- but in ecosystems today, those aren’t the only two options. So why would we expect dinosaurs to have only been carnivores or herbivores, with...

If a photon leaves the train station shortly after the Big Bang ...

The results are in - on this weeks episode of Spacetime we reveal the answer to our Asteroid Challenge, as well as our T-shirt winners! Check out who saved the world!

Kinetic and potential energy are defined as combinations of more basic quantities: position, velocity and mass. These combinations are chosen so that their sum is conserved. It’s actually remarkable that there’s any such combination of...

Woolly mammoths, our favorite ice age proboscidean, disappeared from Europe and North America at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Today, we’ve teamed up with TierZoo to solve one of the mysteries about these...

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?

For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs are apparently jealous of it?

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.

We all belong to the only group of hominins on the planet today. But we weren’t always alone. 100,000 years ago, Eurasia was home to other hominin species, some of which we know our ancestors met, and spent some quality time with.

Synapsids were the world’s first-ever terrestrial megafauna but the vast majority of these giants were doomed to extinction. However some lived on, keeping a low profile among the dinosaurs. And now our world is the way it is because of...

If you know one thing about pterosaurs, it’s that they’re flyers. And while pterosaurs may be well-known for their domination of the skies in the Mesozoic Era, they didn’t live their entire lives in the air. So how did we figure this...

Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for millions of years, and some of them were even dressed a little more casually.

The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of life in the oceans, changing the seas forever and triggering a new evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.

Sea scorpions thrived for 200 million years, coming in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Over time, they developed a number of adaptations--from crushing claws to flattened tails for swimming. And some of them adapted by getting so big...