When you think of natural history museums, you might picture exhibits filled with ancient lifeless things, like dinosaurs or meteorites. But behind that educational exterior, there are hidden laboratories where scientific breakthroughs...

Baked or fried, boiled or roasted, as chips or fries; at some point in your life you've probably eaten a potato. But potatoes have played a much more significant role in our history than just that of the dietary staple we have come to...

By combining historical demography and epidemiology, we can (sort of) determine how people throughout history have died.

During the late 700s and early 800s, environmental changes began to affect Maya cities. Some of these problems may have been caused by the Maya themselves - deforestation and soil overuse may have led to food shortages and population...

Event: September 1962. Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring is published and word of how industrial chemicals harm nature begins to spread. Story: Rachel Carson is an author, scientist and environmentalist. Her books were praised as both...

In which John looks at what it even means to live in a global age, as we've been talking about Europe's role in the gobal community for 47 episodes now. But, pedantry aside, the world is more connected than ever, and that has had effects...

In which John asks whether globalization is a net positive for humanity. While the new global economy has created a lot of wealth, and lifted a lot of people out of poverty, it also has some effects that aren't so hot. Wealth disparity,...

In which John asks whether globalization is a net positive for humanity. While the new global economy has created a lot of wealth, and lifted a lot of people out of poverty, it also has some effects that aren't so hot. Wealth disparity,...

In which John Green, Hank Green, and Emily Graslie teach you about the Anthropocene, an unofficial geological era that covers the last century or so, in which humanity has made massive progress. We've discovered the Higgs-Boson particle,...

This video traces the history of the Environmental Justice Movement, highlighting pivotal events like the Memphis Sanitation Strike, protests in West Harlem, and the founding of the EPA. Learn about landmark studies revealing the link...

This video examines the history of environmental racism, focusing on protests in Warren County, North Carolina, and Houston, Texas, where predominantly Black neighborhoods were targeted for hazardous waste disposal. It highlights the...

This video explores the concept of the Anthropocene epoch, also known as the age of humans. The video discusses the negative impacts of human activity on the planet, including climate change, mass extinction, and environmental injustice....

Mining is the process of extracting valuable materials from the Earth's surface, such as metals, coal, and gemstones. It has been practiced since ancient times and has played a crucial role in the development of civilizations. However,...

Nancy MacLean is an award-winning scholar of the twentieth-century U.S., whose most recent book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, has been described by Publishers Weekly as “a...

Learn about the discovery and usage of DDT as an insecticide, its toxic nature, and the environmental impact it had. Discover how DDT contamination persists in our oceans, its connection to industrial practices, and the current efforts...

For African American History Month, we team up with our African American Employee Resource Group to bring 4 guests from different areas of expertise like life support systems, robotics, flight control and leadership to explain what they...

Consider the classic white t-shirt. Annually, we sell and buy 2 billion t-shirts globally, making it one of the most common garments in the world. But how and where is the average t-shirt made, and what's its environmental impact? Angel...

About 66 million years ago, a terrible extinction event wiped out the dinosaurs. But it wasn't the only event of this kind -- extinctions of various severity have occurred throughout the Earth's history -- and are still happening all...

Volcanoes, climate change, and Chinese history may seem like three phrases spit out of a random word generator, but the three things are more inherently linked than one may assume.

Although coal is such an amazing energy source that we've kept using it despite the harm it causes, today we may be better poised to stop using it than at any previous time in history.

Throughout Earth's history, climate has varied greatly. For hundreds of millions of years, the planet had no polar ice caps. Without this ice, the sea level was 70 meters higher. At the other extreme, about 700 million years ago, Earth...

Throughout history and around the world, most people dislike hyenas. But why?

Many of the greatest biological dispersal events in history likely happened because animals inadvertently traveled across the oceans on floating debris.

For the last 12 years, LaToya Ruby Frazier has photographed friends, neighbors and family in Braddock, Pennsylvania. But though the steel town has lately been hailed as a posterchild of "rustbelt revitalization," Frazier's pictures tell...