Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. It has no atmosphere and is, as such, covered in craters. It's also incredibly hot but, surprisingly, has water ice hiding beneath its surface.

We're going to be building on the Moon this decade -- and next will be Mars, says space architect Melodie Yashar. In a visionary talk, she introduces her work designing off-world shelters with autonomous robots and 3D printers and...

Every amazing mission you know about today started off as just an idea, and some of 2019’s early phase NIAC concepts could mean big things for our future.

Observing the effects of microbes using satellites can give us all sorts of useful information about life on Earth ... and other planets too.

Scientists may have found the light from two merging black holes, and a gas giant, without the gas.

We all want to make the world better -- but how? Jamais Cascio looks at some specific tools and techniques that can make a difference. It's a fascinating talk that might just inspire you to act.

For the first time, we are forced to consider the real risk of destabilizing the entire planet, says climate impact scholar Johan Rockström. In a talk backed by vivid animations of the climate crisis, he shows how nine out of the 15 big...

When stars die, they tend to take everything around them with them. But new evidence appears to show a planet orbiting a white dwarf, and we’re not sure how it survived! Plus, experiments designed to detect dark matter might be capable...

The good news is it's now clearly cheaper to save the planet than to ruin it, says engineer and investor John Doerr. "The bad news is: we are fast running out of time." In this conversation with climate policy expert Hal Harvey, the two...

You need it, you love it, you probably live on it: it's land! But have you ever thought about where land even comes from?

MinuteEarth: Science and stories about our awesome planet!





Watch the videos featured

in the trailer:

Where did all our oceans, glacie

rs, and rivers come from?

Why ar

e rivers...

On July 14, 2015, New Horizons flew by Pluto. Scientists have used the data from the mission so far to uncover active geology, an enormous canyon, a unique case of chemical coloration, and more. What else might we discover as we venture...

Dawn is spiraling in for a closer look at Ceres, and researchers have discovered the best evidence yet for active volcanoes on Venus. Plus, check out Venus and Jupiter right next to each other in the sky!

In September 1859, miners following the Colorado gold rush woke up to another sunny day. Or so they thought. To their surprise, they soon discovered it was actually 1am and the sky wasn't lit by the sun, but rather by brilliant drapes of...

The source of earth's water is something of a mystery, and some scientists are starting to think that the sun might have provided the special ingredients to help.

It may not appear very lively six feet underground, but a single teaspoon of soil contains more organisms than there are human beings on the planet. From bacteria and algae to fungi and protozoa, soils are home to one quarter of Earth's...

What if we told you that there was a time when oxygen almost wiped out all life on Earth? 3 billion years ago, when the world was a place you'd never recognize, too much of a good thing almost ruined everything for everybody.

So we know what life needs here to work, and we've talked a little about what life COULD look like on other planets. But what about plant life? What could plant life look like on other planets? In this episode of Crash Course Kids,...

NIAC has awarded their first two grant winners for phase III: optical mining and 3D modeling craters, and researchers are further honing in on how to identify faraway habitable planets.

The sun is obviously a big factor in the earth's weather, but changes in the solar cycle don't always affect our climate in straightforward ways.

From gigantic planets too close to their stars, to those in unfathomably wide orbits, astronomers have discovered seemingly impossible solar systems that shouldn’t exist at all. But they do.

SciShow News gives you some wet and weird developments from around the solar system, including new insights about what liquid lurks under the surface of Titan, and a sweaty comet that's been spotted on its way toward the sun.

"We will start inhabiting outer space," says Angelo Vermeulen, crew commander of a NASA-funded Mars simulation. "It might take 50 years or it might take 500 years, but it's going to happen." In this charming talk, the TED Senior Fellow...

If insects suddenly morphed into large beings and decided to wage war on us, there's no doubt that humans would lose. There are an estimated 10 quintillion individual insects on earth, outnumbering humans by more than a billion to one....