In 1987, thousands of people gathered in Saudi Arabia for the annual Hajj pilgrimage. But what started out as a celebration led to a worldwide health crisis: more than 2,000 cases of meningitis broke out, spreading across Saudi Arabia...

In 2008, something incredible happened: a man was cured of HIV. In over 70 million HIV cases, this was a first, and, so far, a last, and we don't yet understand exactly how he was cured. But if we can cure people of various diseases,...

Can holding your pee be bad for you? Learn about your bladder in this Quick Question with Michael Aranda!

Your cell phone is mainly made of plastics and metals. It's easy to appreciate the process by which those elements add up to something so useful. But there's another story we don't hear about -- how did we get our raw ingredients in the...

The process of human baby making seems pretty straightforward: egg+sperm+time=baby. But hold on to your ovaries, folks! It’s pretty rare, but sometimes, days or weeks after a person gets pregnant, they can get pregnant again in a process...

When she became the attorney general of New Jersey in 2007, Anne Milgram quickly discovered a few startling facts: not only did her team not really know who they were putting in jail, but they had no way of understanding if their...

In the United States today, juries decide less than 4% of criminal cases and less than 1% of civil cases filed in court. At the same time, jury systems in other countries are growing. So what happened in the US? And could the...

There are natural poisons that lurk in bacteria, plants, and fungi pretty much everywhere, and they're there for good reasons (according to the organisms that produce them) - but what is it about their chemical make up that makes them so...

A short explanation of why Bayes' theorem is true, together with discussion on a common misconception in probability

A primer on exponential and logistic growth, with epidemics as a central example

Bones might seem rock-solid, but they’re actually quite porous inside. Most of the large bones of your skeleton have a hollow core filled with soft bone marrow. Marrow's most essential elements are blood stem cells and for patients with...

SciShow News explains the science behind ALS, the disease that has inspired millions to take the Ice Bucket Challenge. Learn what ALS is, what we do and don’t know about it, and watch SSN hosts take the challenge themselves!

Have you experienced embarrassing voice cracking? Most people have, and there’s a lot of reasons why you might be affected. From illness, stress, and good old puberty.

Most of the cases we call “electrocutions” are actually electric shocks: an electric current running through a body. Whether an electric shock becomes an electrocution depends on the nature of the current involved.

SciShow News reports some promising new findings about the worldwide fight against HIV, including insights about how we can make the most of one of our newest weapons against HIV: circumcision.

Epigenetic inheritance is really weird, but is it real?

Neglect in the first few years of a child’s life can have many adverse consequences, and one of the largest studies on these effects occurred after the Romanian Revolution in 1989.

On the 4th of July, Americans like to celebrate the things that make the United States unique, and a lot of those things have to do with our geography. That remarkable geography is also responsible for some pretty unique weather, and...

When we began mass-producing matches in the 1800s, workers in the factories started dying mysteriously. The history of our sparking little flame-sticks is darker than you think.

There are some diseases, like Zika or malaria, that get a lot of media coverage. However, every year, millions of people are infected with diseases that are just as deadly that we never hear anything about.

About 10 years ago, the news was packed with reports about something called colony collapse disorder — a mysterious phenomenon that involved the disappearance of enormous numbers of bees. Then, the news stopped talking about it. So what...

Day to day, hospitals provide all kinds of services to help us get better and stay healthy, but during an outbreak, hospitals are the front line of the emergency. In this episode of Crash Course Outbreak Science, we'll look at how...

Throughout this series, and in our real lives, we've seen the chaos and devastation that outbreaks can cause. But there's good news! Eventually, outbreaks come to an end. In this episode, we'll look at some of the important tools of...

Nearly 3,000 years ago, a Babylonian tablet described a curious illness called "miqtu" that caused symptoms ranging from facial twitching to full body convulsions. Today we know miqtu as seizures, and modern medicine has developed...