Some satellites orbit in the same direction the planet rotates, which means they get a boost for their launch, but most have orbits where that isn’t ideal, and that creates some challenges for engineers.

For the first time, astronomers have detected the light coming from an exoplanet. SciShow Space News explains how they did it, and why it was so difficult in the first place.

Exoplanets have taught us a lot more about planets than our solar system could ever teach us, from what happens when they’re born, to what happens when their stars die.

Algae is one of the oldest and most abundant forms of life on planet Earth, so it only makes sense that it offers a ton of solutions to unsustainable modern problems. Here are five ways in which algae continues to reshape the world.

Humans have relied on fertilizers to grow their plants for thousands of years. But the production of synthetic fertilizers also requires an immense amount of energy that comes primarily from fossil fuels and therefore contributes to...

There's one crater that may be older than any that we know of. Except there's a snag, it might not actually be a crater at all.

Imagine aliens land on Earth a million years from now. What will these curious searchers find of us? They will find what geologists, scientists, and other experts are increasingly calling the Anthropocene, or new age of mankind. David...

You might not know it, but there are thousands of human-made satellites orbiting the Earth! They help us do everything from study the climate to make phone calls, and there are even some satellites that people can live on!

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the polarity of water makes life on the planet possible. Oxygen is highly electronegative and pulls the electrons closely creating a partial negative charge. The polarity of water (and the...

Though not everyone is excited about it, plastics are pretty much everywhere. But what problems are they causing and is there anything we can do to solve those problems?

Asteroid mining sounds like something out of a bad space movie, but harvesting materials from space rocks might be our ticket to building space colonies or living on Mars.

Paul surveys the Kingdom Plantae. He begins with a brief description of the phylogeny of land plants. He then describes the defining characteristics of plants, including cell walls, embryophytes, alternation of generation and...

In 1963, Jacques Cousteau lived for 30 days in an underwater laboratory positioned on the floor of the Red Sea, and set a world record in the process. This summer, his grandson Fabien Cousteau broke that record. Cousteau the younger...

Mr. Andersen contrasts nuclear reactions to chemical reactions. He explains the four main forces of nature; including gravity, electromagnetism, strong, and weak nuclear forces. He also explains how fusion differs from fission.

Did humans evolve from monkeys or from fish? In this enlightening talk, ichthyologist and TED Fellow Prosanta Chakrabarty dispels some hardwired myths about evolution, encouraging us to remember that we're a small part of a complex,...

This week in SciShow Space News we bring you the latest on what to expect from NASA's New Horizons deep space mission and what asteroids to watch for in the coming years!

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the dimensions of space and time are combined in relativistic mechanics. Gravity and velocity can affect both space and time according to Albert Einstein's Special Law of Relativity.

Artificial Intelligence has helped astronomers discover 2 new planets in systems that we'd already looked at, and new theories about how Mars lost some of its water have surfaced.

With exoplanets, often we want to know if they are Earth-like and whether they might host life, but we can also learn a lot from planets that are nothing like Earth.

You might have heard that Earth is due for a complete flip of its magnetic field. And while our planet does have a history of this behavior, predictions of when it might happen are too complex to estimate a date for.

While Jupiter is nowhere near massive enough to initiate fusion in its core, there are even more massive objects out there that fall just short of that achievement as well called brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs, have a mass that places them...

Pluto's not a planet. We're sorry, but we think it's time you move on. If you've gone through all your breakup music and Meg Ryan movies, and you still can't get over it, then SciShow Space will get out the ice cream, cuddle up with you...

SciShow Space takes you on a tour of Venus, a world with such an extreme environment that you might call it "Earth's evil twin."

Does your toilet water drain differently than in the other hemisphere? Is it because of the Coriolis effect? Hank has some things to clarify about these questions, and more in this edition of I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means.