After having solved the small matter of evolution by natural selection - becoming one of the most famous scientists in the world in the process - Charles Darwin turned his focus to a different personal obsession…

To get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.

There are hundreds of billions of planets in our galaxy. Scientists now think hundreds of millions of them have conditions where life could arise. What do scientists think are the best ways of reaching out to them? And why do some...

Are you an insect fetus who'd rather not get eaten by your siblings? How about a baby frog who'd rather not drown before getting to leave your egg? Well, you had better figure out a way to hatch when you need to. Hosted by: Hank Green

The Appalachian Mountains are some of the oldest geological features on earth. And they also hold fossils that tell us about some of the very earliest life forms that we'll ever manage to see in the fossil record. So how did these...

Science offers a way of discovering and understanding the world around us, driven by questions and tested with evidence. And it’s a twisty-turny team effort— you won’t find many lone geniuses out there, or straight lines from hypothesis...

Biology is the study of life—a four-letter word that connects you to 4 billion years worth of family tree. The word “life” can be tricky to define, but a shared set of characteristics helps biologists identify living things. In this...

If you were really into gift shops as a kid, you probably loved to look at all the shiny geodes. But those little geodes are nothing compared to the mother of all geodes, found is in Put In Bay, Ohio. So let's talk about how this geode...

In the early 1960s, NASA rolled up to a US Navy facility in Pennsylvania with one goal in mind: stick its newly-minted astronauts into one of the most extreme centrifuges that has ever been built, and whirl them around really fast to...

If all goes well, we'll be sending astronauts back to the Moon in just a couple of years. And scientists have a lot to figure out before then, including the answer to a seemingly simple question: What time is it up there? Hosted by:...

Not long after the supernova of 1604, the telescope was invented. But astronomers would have to wait nearly FOUR CENTURIES to witness the next supernova that was visible to the naked eye. It was 1987, and a blue supergiant in the Large...

Naloxone, better known as Narcan, is today's gold standard to treat opioid overdose. But sometimes it comes up short against more potent opioids like fentanyl. So future treatments might take advantage of opioid receptor...

An asteroid nearly twice the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs left a record-setting crater in South Africa. If you look closely, you can still see it today, 2 billion years later. Hosted by: Jaida Elcock (She/her)

Whether you’re trying to play Dungeons and Dragons or one of the many other TTRPGs out there, there’s a good chance your last campaign failed because there were simply too many adventurers in the party. And by "too many" I mean, like,...

Hurricanes are scary and the idea is usually to move away from them as much as possible. Then there are the intrepid scientist-pilots at NOAA who fly right into them. On purpose. And they do it to save lives. Hosted by: Hank Green...

There's a tree species that used to be all over the world. And now, they can only be found in a secret valley in the mountains in Australia. This is the story of the rise and fall of the Wollemi Pine, including how some new tech might...

Perfectly packing your suitcase for a trip may require more physics and math than you think. Here's when to crumple your clothes in the bag and shove it down, iron and fold everything, or roll it up using CleanTok hacks. Hosted by: Hank...

The idea of improving athletic performance with a certain kind of lighting sounds absurd, but some NFL and MLB teams are trying it. The question is: does it work? Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)

If you were a time traveler, would you survive the Black Death? Smallpox? Tuberculosis? What about the unknown diseases of the future? And is it safer to travel back or forward in time? We attempt to answer these questions. Hosted by:...

Artificial Intelligence always takes over humanity in the movies when it gains consciousness. But even without getting into sentience, it's capable of influencing our lives in a lot of ways already. Hosted by: Stefan Chin (he/him)

Groundhogs are famous in North America for "predicting" when spring will come (and also that Bill Murray movie). But while they might make for terrible meteorologists, they actually play a valuable role in several other scientific...

Scientists are starting to find a strange connection between neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, MS, and dementia. They all seem to follow on the heels of common but severe infections. And that means we might...

Blind people use the same part of their brains to recognize faces as sighted people, and can even identify a face from the sound of someone chewing. Hosted by: Reid Reimers (he/him)

Sometimes, one animal ends up in an evolutionary arms race with another for millions of years. Here are four fascinating examples, including our own showdown with snakes. Hosted by: Jaida Elcock (she/her)