The most popular language on earth isn't spoken, it's smelled. Those smells are made up of terpenes, a multipurpose class of chemical compounds.

If you live in the U.S. you may have heard that the Pacific Northwest is supposedly overdue for an earthquake of colossal, devastating proportions. If that’s true, how can we better understand the threat and be prepared for the day it...

Modern technology can make us forget how cruel the ocean once was to seafarers. Even with these new technologies, some parts of the sea are still just plain dangerous. Here are a few places on Earth where ships have met the briny depths.

We're heading for a world population of 10 billion people -- but what will we all eat? Lisa Dyson rediscovered an idea developed by NASA in the 1960s for deep-space travel, and it could be a key to reinventing how we grow food.

In the late 1800s, paleontologists in Nebraska found huge coils of hardened sand stuck deep in the earth. Local ranchers called them Devil's Corkscrews and scientists called them Daemonelix. It was clear these corkscrews were created by...

Long before there were strip malls, skyscrapers, and combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bells, nature had its own architects: all kinds of creatures create all kinds of structures for living, raising offspring, or maybe just the occasional...

Accepting the 2007 TED Prize, Bill Clinton asks for help in bringing health care to Rwanda -- and the rest of the world.

If salty water is constantly spilling into the world’s oceans, does that mean they are getting saltier by the day?

What is integration? Why is it computed as the opposite of differentiation? What is the fundamental theorem of calculus?

Could someone hack your pacemaker? Avi Rubin shows how hackers are compromising cars, smartphones and medical devices, and warns us about the dangers of an increasingly hack-able world.

Earth’s outer shell is made of two materials whose different densities and thicknesses give rise to two distinct “levels” on the planet’s surface. Watch our new show Paradigms (U.S. servers only!): https://www.vrv.co/paradigms...

Discover a process that truly demonstrates nature's grit: ecological succession! The Amoeba Sisters introduce both primary and secondary succession

Though people are most familiar with Plato's fictional Atlantis, many real underwater cities actually exist. Peter Campbell explains how sunken cities are studied by scientists to help us understand the lives of our ancestors, the...

Because smaller animals have to eat more relative to their bodyweight, Tolkein’s hobbits need to eat a lot - not for comfort, but for survival.

George Steinmetz's spectacular photos show Africa from the air, taken from the world's slowest, lightest aircraft. Join Steinmetz to discover the surprising historical, ecological and sociopolitical patterns that emerge when you go low...

Hank talks with MacArthur Fellow Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum of Rice University who co-founded Beyond Traditional Borders: An interdisciplinary undergrad curriculum focused on solutions to global health problems.

Explore food chains, food webs, energy pyramids, and the power of biodiversity in this ecology video by the Amoeba Sisters! This video also introduces general vocabulary for the unit of ecology.

Locusts are a huge agricultural pest...except in North America. What happened to the Rocky Mountain locusts that once swarmed this continent? Researchers think that the colonization of the North American West might have had something to...

What was that giant swoop on Venus? And SpaceX continues to move forward.

The Boomerang Nebula is colder than space! And it's not really shaped like a boomerang!

Paul Andersen explains the major classification terms in ecology and how a community can be measured by species composition and species diversity. The symbiosis of leaf cutter ants is included. The podcast ends with a discussion of...

Because of poor acoustics, students in classrooms miss 50 percent of what their teachers say and patients in hospitals have trouble sleeping because they continually feel stressed. Julian Treasure sounds a call to action for designers to...

Today's wildfires burn, on average, twice the amount of land they did in 1970. The reason? We've been working too hard to put them out. Want to learn more about the topic in this week's video? Here's a keyword/phrase to get your googling...

From spirals to spots to fractals, nature is full of interesting patterns. Many of these patterns even resemble geometric shapes. One of the most common? Hexagons. Why do we see this six-sided shape occur so many times in nature? This...