Amoeba Sisters
Evolution
Explore the concept of biological evolution with the Amoeba Sisters! This video mentions a few misconceptions about biological evolution before providing a general definition. Then this video provides a description of four different...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Scientists are obsessed with this lake | Nicola Storelli and Daniele Zanzi
In the millions of years since oxygen began saturating Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, most organisms have evolved to rely on this gas. However, there are some places where oxygen-averse microorganisms like those from Earth’s earliest...
SciShow
Does Evolution Happen Gradually or Suddenly?
Do new traits in evolution happen slowly, or all at once? Two new studies in the journal Science may finally help us solve this mystery.
SciShow
How These Animals Lost Their Heads (And Bodies, and Butts)
You'd think that there are some features that, once an animal group evolved to have them, could never really go away, right? Well, Stefan is joined today by hosts from PBS Eons, Journey To The Microcosmos, and Bizarre Beasts to break...
SciShow
Why City Birds Love Cigarettes
Urban birds like house finches and house sparrows are great at finding materials to repel pests and parasites from their nests. Unfortunately, one of those materials is used cigarette butts.
MinuteEarth
Why do Some Species Thrive in Cities?
Urban development can be tough on wildlife. But some plants and animals are adapting to our cities in surprising ways.
SciShow
What Color Was the Big Bang?
If you could survive a trip to the very first moments of reality as we know it, what color would you see?
SciShow
Are Sharks Really Older Than the North Star?
If you've spent enough time on the internet, you may have stumbled upon the fact that sharks are older than Polaris, aka the North Star. But are they really? It turns out the truth is a little more complicated.
SciShow
Why Can’t We Have Unicorns?
Unicorns may be mythical creatures, but they're very plausible-seeming ones. So why hasn't evolution gifted us with magical horses with horns? Let's take a look at the genetics and developmental biology of headgear in ruminants and other...
MinuteEarth
The WEIRD Way Monkeys Got to America
Many of the greatest biological dispersal events in history likely happened because animals inadvertently traveled across the oceans on floating debris.
SciShow
Cats Shouldn't Love Tuna (But They Do)
Tuna are big, fast-swimming ocean fish. They're hardly the natural prey of cats, whose ancestors evolved in the desert. Yet a study of taste receptors in cats shows that they're predisposed to LOVE tuna.
SciShow
How Do You Date a Star?
Figuring out the age of a blinking speck in the sky is a difficult feat, especially if considering how many types of stars there are. This is where a Hertzsprung-Russell meets a gyrochronologist.
SciShow
Great Minds: Conny Aerts, the Starquake Professor
While doing some light reading of data from a telescope, Conny Aerts made a breakthrough that allowed her to lead the charge in the field of asteroseismology and win her the 2022 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics.
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
Did An Ancient Pathogen Reshape Our Cells?
There is one - and only one - group of mammals that doesn’t have alpha-gal: the catarrhine primates, which are the monkeys of Africa and Asia, the apes, and us.
PBS
How Our Deadliest Parasite Turned To The Dark Side
Around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in Africa, a microscopic parasite made a huge leap. With a little help from a mosquito, it left its animal host - probably a gorilla - and found its way to a new host: us.
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
Do Black Holes Create New Universes?
Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants - like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces - just right for the emergence of...
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
Why Does Caffeine Exist?
Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ability to produce this molecule independently evolve in multiple, distantly-related lineages of flowering plants, again and again?
PBS
Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?
For some reason, animals keep evolving into things that look like crabs, independently, over and over again. What is it about the crab’s form that makes it so evolutionarily successful that non-crabs are apparently jealous of it?
PBS
When Penguins Went From The Sky To The Sea
Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for millions of years, and some of them were even dressed a little more casually.
PBS
When Giant Millipedes Reigned
This giant millipede was the largest known invertebrate to ever live on land. So how did it get so big??
PBS
That Time the American West Blew Up
How is it possible to have cataclysmic eruptions without any real cataclysm?