Maybe you've seen pictures of glowing blue lava flows and dismissed them as Photoshop trickery. Healthy skepticism is good, but there really is a volcano in Indonesia where a unique fluke of chemistry creates an eerie blue glow.

In which Stan Muller subs for John Green and teaches you about energy and humanity. Today we discuss the ideas put forth by Alfred Crosby in his book, Children of the Sun. Historically, almost all of the energy that humans use has been...

The world is full of colors. Almost all of them can be described by a wavelength of visible light, but there are some colors out there that are just in your head!

In which John Green teaches you about Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein. Sure, you know Frankenstein the cultural phenomenon, but how much do you know about the novel that started it all? You'll learn about the Romantic movement in...

The Greeks had a simple and elegant formula for the universe: just earth, fire, wind, and water. Turns out there's more to it than that -- a lot more. Visible matter (and that goes beyond the four Greek elements) comprises only 4% of the...

Congratulations! By being here, alive, you are one of history's winners -- the culmination of a success story four billion years in the making. The other 99 percent of species who have ever lived on earth are dead -- killed by fire,...

Guns in Space

We don't need a time machine to learn from the past (but let us know if you find one)! Air bubbles trapped in ice for millennia and ancient pollen grains can tell us a lot about climate shifts hundreds of thousands of years ago!

Pandora was the first mortal woman, breathed into being by Hephaestus, god of fire. The gods gave her gifts of language, craftsmanship and emotion. From Zeus she received two gifts: the trait of curiosity and a heavy box screwed tightly...

How Fire Ants Took Over America



Fire ants are several species of ants in the genus Solenopsis, which includes over 200 species. Solenopsis are stinging ants, and most of their common names reflect this, for example, ginger...

How could the most abundant bird in North America go extinct so quickly? Short answer: us.

What's more exciting than a spaceship? A spaceship on Fiya! NASA plans on playing with fire. Caitlin Hofmeister explains in this episode of SciShow Space!

Former Republican member of the u.S. Congress Bob Inglis shares an optimistic message about how conservatives can lead on climate change and other pressing problems -- and how free enterprise (and working together across ideologies) hold...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Ryan Lobo has traveled the world, taking photographs that tell stories of unusual human lives. In this haunting...

They call you the human cannonball. Your act involves flying through rings of fire, bouncing through a trampoline course, and catching the trapezist in the grand finale. Today's pre-flight test fails dramatically, and upon inspection,...

Did you know that, despite their serene, picturesque appearance, some frozen lakes can catch fire? Why are climate scientists studying the explosive gas bubbles trapped in lake ice?

From packing peanuts to disposable coffee cups, each year the uS alone produces some two billion pounds of Styrofoam -- none of which can be recycled. Frustrated by this waste of resources and landfill space, Ashton Cofer and his science...

Hydrologist Casey Ryan explains how he studies water on the Flathead Indian Reservation and Jessi from Animal Wonders brings in Huckleberry the beaver, who is much bigger than he use to be.

Hank delivers news of the future, with his rundown of the top space missions scheduled for 2014. Learn about upcoming launches to a nearby asteroid, a comet as it approaches the sun, and the first test flight of NASA's new Orion crew...

It's normal to feel anxious or overwhelmed by climate change, says psychologist Renée Lertzman. Can we turn those feelings into something productive? In an affirming talk, Lertzman discusses the emotional effects of climate change and...

In the mid-ninth century, Chinese chemists, hard at work on an immortality potion, instead invented gunpowder. They soon found that this highly inflammable powder was far from an elixir of life -- they put it to use in bombs against...

It's a rematch Battle of The SciShow Hosts on today's quiz show! Will Olivia be victorious again or will Hank "try those logarithms" and win the day?

At TED U, Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, spells out 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do -- and why a little danger is good for both kids and grownups.

In this collection of classic MinuteEarth videos, we learn that for pretty much every action we humans take, there’s an unintended consequence we didn’t see coming.