SciShow
Atlas: The Little Rocket That Still Can
In 1962, John Glenn went into orbit on an Atlas rocket, and thus began a family of rockets that lasted for 60 years!
SciShow
Where Did Mercury’s Spots Come From?
The Sun isn’t the only celestial body in the solar system to boast spots of its own. Mercury, too, has its fair share, and they’re worth wondering about.
SciShow
How Do You Find the Moon’s Best Picnic Spot?
Living on the moon won't be easy, but it might be worth taking a note from our ancestors, and setting up in caves
SciShow
This Planet is Only Half Covered in Lava
There are a lot of weird exoplanets out there, like 55 Cancri e (aka Janssen), which is probably half covered in lava. But the half that's covered in lava might not be quite the half you're thinking of.
SciShow
The Ocean’s Turning Green (That’s Bad)
Computer models of climate change have long predicted that the ocean would turn green as a result of warming. But the change can't be seen by the human eye, so scientists weren't sure how they'd measure this effect... until it turned out...
SciShow
The Hostile World Where Animal Life Began
For decades, researchers thought they had a solid idea about the earliest booms in animal life. But new research might have turned off the gas on all these ideas, flipping our understanding of the Avalon explosion and the Cambrian...
SciShow
The Island Made Of Gemstones
Zabargad Island in the Red Sea is so crusted with peridot that it's fair to say the place is literally made of it.
SciShow
Life on an 8-Hour Planet
Even if we find an earth-sized exoplanet, how can we be so sure that we're looking at earth 2.0? It might come down to how fast it's spinning.
SciShow
How Blocking the Sun Makes Mars Hotter
If we’re going to send people to Mars someday, we’re going to need to be very conscious of the challenges presented in this endeavor. And at the top of that list is the ferocious nature of dust on the barren planet.
SciShow
Did Earth's Continents Come from Space?
Earth didn't always have the land beneath your feet, but what might have caused it to form is a bit of a mystery.
PBS
A nurse practitioner's Brief But Spectacular take on combating loneliness
Laurie Theeke is a nurse practitioner who studies loneliness as a unique bio-psychosocial stressor that impacts human health. After years of clinical experience, she developed a five-session program called "LISTEN," which seeks to guide...
PBS
Could We Terraform Mars?
We already have the technology to bring humans safely to Mars and set up small settlements - or at least could do within a generation. But those settlements will need to be cocooned - shielded against the deadly cold, intense radiation,...
PBS
How Ankylosaurs Got Their Clubs
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.
PBS
How Did Our Most Famous Ancestor Really Die?
Did our most famous fossil ancestor, Lucy, die by falling out of a tall tree? The answer is part of a decades-long debate over how, exactly, our ancestors transitioned from life in the trees to life on the ground.
PBS
Did Eating Insects Shrink These Dinos?
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...
PBS
Venus May Have Life!
If you rank the most habitable places in our solar system Venus lands pretty low, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and sulphuric acid rain. And yet it may have just jumped to the front of the pack. In fact, we may have...
PBS
What If Humanity Is Among The First Spacefaring Civilizations?
Half of the universe is filled with expansionist alien civilizations, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll reach us. OK, that sounded a little sensationalist. But it’s also the conclusion of a recent astrophysics paper. Let’s...
PBS
How a Mass Extinction Event Created the Amazon
The Amazon rainforest of South America is a paradise for flowering plants. But long ago, the landscape that we now think of as the Amazon looked very different. And would you believe that the entire revolution of the Amazon began with...
PBS
How Horses Went From Food To Friends
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...
PBS
How 7,000 Years of Epic Floods Changed the World (w/ SciShow!)
Strange geologic landmarks in the Pacific Northwest are the lingering remains of a mystery that took nearly half a century to solve. These features turned out to be a result one of the most powerful and bizarre episodes in geologic...
PBS
How We Know The Earth Is Ancient
In astronomy we talk about billions of years like it’s no big deal. But how can we be sure about timescales so far beyond the capacity for human intuition? Our discovery of what we now call deep time is very recent - as recent as our...
PBS
What’s Your Brain’s Role in Creating Space & Time?
Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict with concepts fundamental to our minds, such as the realness of space and time....
PBS
Is Earth's Magnetic Field Reversing?
Earth’s magnetic field protects us from deadly space radiation. What if it were drastically weakened, as a precursor to flipping upside down? I mean, it has before … many, many times.. Spaceship Earth has a literal deflector shield. A...
PBS
The Humans That Lived Before Us
As more and more fossil ancestors have been found, our genus has become more and more inclusive, incorporating more members that look less like us, Homo sapiens. By getting to know these other hominins--the ones who came before us--we...