Instructional Video4:46
SciShow

Great Minds: Conny Aerts, the Starquake Professor

12th - Higher Ed
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.
Instructional Video5:14
SciShow

The Spacecraft That Wasn't Designed To Land, But Did

12th - Higher Ed
Many space missions take billions of dollars and decades of work to get develop, but 25 years ago this spacecraft delivered stunning results on a shoestring budget and a minimal development timeline.
Instructional Video4:57
SciShow

Life on an 8-Hour Planet

12th - Higher Ed
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.
Instructional Video6:18
SciShow

Are Space Sounds Lies?

12th - Higher Ed
If a tree falls in space, and it's frequency is modulated by multiple octaves and digitized, does it make a sound?
Instructional Video5:25
SciShow

This Year in Space News (That Isn't JWST)

12th - Higher Ed
If you’ve been distracted looking at the amazing photos The James Webb Space Telescope has taken, not to worry. Here are three other stellar stories from the last year of space science!
Instructional Video6:41
SciShow

Space Superlatives of 2022

12th - Higher Ed
As we wrap up 2022, we'd like to celebrate a few of the cosmic “winners” discovered this year, at least while they still hold their titles.
Instructional Video6:04
SciShow

Eavesdropping On Other Worlds

12th - Higher Ed
We usually only get to use our sense of sight in exploring the universe, but that hasn’t prevented scientists from trying to listen in.
Instructional Video6:21
SciShow

We Don’t Know Why Astronauts Get Motion Sick

12th - Higher Ed
A majority of modern astronauts experience any one of a suite of symptoms scientists collectively call Space Motion Sickness, or SMS. But despite knowing about it for nearly as long as humans have gone into space, we still don't know...
Instructional Video3:21
SciShow

Astronauts Need a Better Sunscreen

12th - Higher Ed
Space is a dangerous place. One of the many dangers comes in the form of radiation. On Earth, sunscreen helps shield our bodies. But astronauts on the ISS, or eventually on the Moon/Mars/etc., will have to be rocking some suped-up sunblock.
Instructional Video10:51
SciShow

This is How We’ll “See” the Universe’s First Second

12th - Higher Ed
In June 2023, scientists around the world announced the first official detection of the gravitational wave background — a cacophonous symphony of gravitational waves coming from every direction in space. Buried within that cosmic noise,...
Instructional Video9:05
SciShow

The Snail We Misidentified More Than 100 Times

12th - Higher Ed
Everyone makes mistakes, but misidentifying a species more than 100 times? It happened. In this List Show, we tell the tale of the periwinkle snail and other creatures scientists confused for someone else. <br/>
Instructional Video5:32
SciShow

The Rocket that Hopped

12th - Higher Ed
Surveyor 6 may not have been the first craft to make a soft landing on the Moon, but it is the first craft to take off from the surface of another world. And it did so in a very adorable way. Long before any Apollo astronaut, Surveyor 6...
Instructional Video7:36
SciShow

The Woman Who Saved the World

12th - Higher Ed
On her way to winning the 2023 Nobel Prize for her pioneering work on mRNA vaccines, Katalin Karikó lived a life made for the big screen. <br/>
Instructional Video7:21
PBS

How Did Our Most Famous Ancestor Really Die?

12th - Higher Ed
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.
Instructional Video12:44
PBS

Does Antimatter Explain Why There's Something Rather Than Nothing?

12th - Higher Ed
The most precious substance in our universe is not gold, nor oil. It’s not even printer ink. It’s antimatter. But it’s worth every penny of it’s very high cost, because it may hold the answer to the question of why anything exists in our...
Instructional Video13:32
PBS

Is The Wave Function The Building Block of Reality?

12th - Higher Ed
Objective Collapse Theories offer a explanation of quantum mechanics that is at once brand new and based in classical mechanics. In the world of quantum mechanics, it’s no big deal for particles to be in multiple different states at the...
Instructional Video12:25
PBS

Is The Universe Finite?

12th - Higher Ed
Every time you walk out the door, light from the Big Bang strikes your face, enters your eyes. This is the cosmic microwave background radiation - the left-over heat-glow from the very early universe. We can’t see this microwave light...
Instructional Video12:46
PBS

Is Earth's Magnetic Field Reversing?

12th - Higher Ed
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...
Instructional Video13:26
PBS

Is There Life on Mars?

12th - Higher Ed
Otherwise landed in 2004 with its twin - MER-A, better known as Spirit. These six-wheeled golf-cart-sized robots were Swiss army knives of geological lab instruments. Opportunities most spectacular discovery where these cute little...
Instructional Video9:13
PBS

Why We Only Have Ten Toes (It's a Long Story)

12th - Higher Ed
Today, all mammals from humans to bats have five fingers or fewer. Yes, even whales, whose finger bones are hidden in their fins. Birds have four or fewer and amphibians get the best of both worlds, often having four digits on their...
Instructional Video6:47
PBS

Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?

12th - Higher Ed
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?
Instructional Video9:11
PBS

When Hobbits Were Real

12th - Higher Ed
Its discoverers named it Homo floresiensis, but it’s often called “the hobbit” for its short stature and oddly proportioned feet. And it’s been at the center of a major controversy in the field ever since. Was it its own species? Or was...
Instructional Video8:54
PBS

What Happened To Primates In North America?

12th - Higher Ed
Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?
Instructional Video10:10
PBS

The Reign of the Hell Ants

12th - Higher Ed
This ancient species had the same six legs and segmented body that we’d recognize from an ant today. But it also had a huge, scythe-like jaw and a horn coming out of its head. This bizarre predator belonged to a group known as “hell...