PBS
What's the Oldest Beverage?
When exactly did we start drinking other things, and why? To find out, we have to look at the world’s oldest beverages – which might not be what you expect.
PBS
What Happened To The Other Mesozoic Mammals?
In 2003, a fossil belonging to a mammaliaform was discovered in an ancient lakebed in what's now China. It was an almost complete skeleton the size of a platypus, a find that complicated the history of mammaliaforms. It painted a picture...
PBS
Our Most Mysterious Extinct Cousins
There was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our ancestors. Our paths ran beside each other - and potentially even crossed at times - but...
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What Was The Earliest Surgery?
When did practicing medicine - in its varied, complex forms (from sharing medicinal plants to the earliest surgeries) - become something that we actually started doing? While it’s a hard question to answer, it’s possible that our...
PBS
No Single Cradle of Humankind
It would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.
PBS
The Second Time Sponges Took Over The World
Researchers have discovered a piece of a weird, but critical, time in the deep past…a time when the first-ever mass extinction may have turned Planet Earth into Sponge World.
PBS
How Animals Got Butts
While the evolution of the butthole was a major breakthrough in animal development, its story might actually end with redefining what it means to have a butthole at all.
PBS
When Neandertals Became Apex Predators
Climbing to the summit of the Eurasian food chain was one of the Neandertals’ most impressive evolutionary feats, but in the end, it may have actually been what doomed them.
PBS
The Mystery of the Cretaceous Pompeii
Since the 1990s, paleontologists have been pulling 125-million-year-old complete dinosaur skeletons from the rocks of the Lujiatun in Northeastern China, most seemingly posed in perfect rest. This has prompted comparisons to a famous...
PBS
How Mountains Make Evolution Weird
Mountains have a unique effect on diversity, messing with our understanding of animals through time, and pretty much just making evolution weird. And they would eventually reveal something even stranger about a group of mammals even...
PBS
Why Wasn't There A Second Age of Reptiles?
An asteroid impact triggered the K-Pg mass extinction, wiping out the non-avian dinosaurs, ending the Age of Reptiles, and ushering in the Age of Mammals. But why was it the mammals who triumphed?
PBS
The Graveyard at the Center of the Earth
Scientists have been trying to solve the mystery of why plate tectonics works the way it does for over a hundred years. And they might have just uncovered a key to cracking it.
PBS
Could This Sperm Whale Eat The Meg?
Unlike in fiction, giant whales do not emerge fully-formed from the ocean deep. So, where did Livyatan melvillei come from? How did such a large predator live? And what caused the titan to die out? The answer may lie in an appetite so...
PBS
Are All Oceans Basically Reincarnated?
This is the hundred-year tale of how an unlikely bunch of bottom-dwelling marine critters helped reveal that ocean basins are basically reincarnated every few hundred million years.
PBS
Darwin's Unexpected Final Obsession
After having solved the small matter of evolution by natural selection - becoming one of the most famous scientists in the world in the process - Charles Darwin turned his focus to a different personal obsession…
PBS
The Dinosaurs That Evolution Forgot
Where are all the east coast dinosaurs? Why don’t we find famous species like Triceratops in Central Park? Turns out, evolution and geology came together to make the east coast into an ancient lost world of weird dinosaurs.
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What Could We See with a Planet-Sized Telescope?
The James Webb Telescope just took a photo of a newly discovered exoplanet. Exciting stuff but the raw image just looks like a small, faint dot—not a fully detailed world. The question is, just how big would a telescope need to be to...
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Why OOH Sounds Different Than AHH
Human language is an incredible thing: a combination of mouth sounds that we combine into words, sentences, poems, and constitutions. They carry meaning, emotion, and power. But underneath it all, language is really just physics. In this...
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The Great Oxygenation
Life’s been around on Earth for at least 3.7 billion years. But for most of that time, it was incredibly boring — just simple little cells squirming around in water. It only got interesting in the last few hundred million years. And that...
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How Scorpions Became Earth’s Ultimate Survivors
Scorpions are a frightening and deadly group of animals. But their venom is one of nature's most unique chemical cocktails. Here’s how scientists are using it for inspiration to design new medicines and pain killers.
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Why Some of the Rainbow is Missing
Over 200 years ago, scientists were looking at sunlight through a prism when they noticed that part of the rainbow was missing. There were dark lines where there should have been colors. Since then, scientists have unlocked the secrets...
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The Biggest Myth About Innovation
The idea of the lone genius creating everything isn’t just misleading. It’s harmful and wrong. Innovation thrives when people work together, and rather than nice linear paths, new ideas come from chance events and unexpected connections....
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What is the Most Average Thing?
We may not know it, but averages affect our lives every day. Designers and manufacturers use averages to make our houses, cars, shoes and airline seats safer and more comfortable(ish). But calculating averages is way more complicated...
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How Did X Become the Unknown (and so much else)?
X is everywhere and it’s probably thanks to math. But why is x the symbol for the unknown?