Black holes are really only dangerous if you get too close. Ha, who am I kidding. It turns out they may be responsible for ending star formation across the entire universe.
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When we first realized that black holes could have...

Early primates not only lived in North America -- our primate family tree actually originated here! So what happened to those early relatives of ours?

They may not look like much, but beneath that shell lies an evolutionary mystery - one that stumped the biggest names in natural history for over a hundred years.

Throughout the Pleistocene Epoch, the range of the woolly rhino grew and shrank in sync with global climate. So what caused the climate -- and the range of the woolly rhino -- to cycle back and forth between such extremes?

The hardened residue scraped off your teeth at the dentist is called your dental calculus, and your dental calculus is the only part of your body that actually fossilizes while you’re alive! And scientists have figured out how to study &...

How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just...disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies to even start to figure out the cause -- or causes -- of one of the greatest vanishing acts in Earth’s...

In the search for the genes that make us human, some of the most important answers were hiding not in the genes themselves, but in what was once considered genomic junk.

As a scientific concept, evolution was revolutionary when it was first introduced. With the help of all three of our hosts and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s new Deep Time Hall, we’ll try to explain how evolution...

About 59 million years ago, the largest animal lurking in the ancient forests of Colombia by far was Titanoboa - the largest snake ever known. It’s only been in the past few years that we’ve put together the many pieces of this puzzling...

Long necks gave sauropods a huge advantage when it came to food, but not in the way you think. And this benefit would allow them to become the biggest terrestrial animals of all time!

The climate of the Sahara was completely different thousands of years ago. And we’re not talking about just a few years of extra rain. We’re talking about a climate that was so wet for so long that animals and humans alike made...

It arose from rhino ancestors that were a lot smaller, but Paraceratherium would take a different evolutionary path. Believe it or not, it actually became so big that it probably got close to what scientists think might be the actual...

Despite the name, we don’t know where the so-called “hell pigs” belong in the mammalian family tree. They walked on hooves, like pigs do, but had longer legs, almost like deer. They had hunched backs, a bit like rhinos or bison. But as...

In order to understand where hearts came from, we have to go back to the earliest common ancestor of everything that has a heart. It took hundreds of millions of years, and countless different iterations of the same basic structure to...

Weasels have an extreme body plan that may push the boundaries of what’s metabolically possible. So when and how did this happen? Why'd the weasels get so skinny?

It may be that for every star in the universe there are billions of microscopic black holes streaming through the solar system, the planet, even our bodies every second. Sounds horrible - but hey, at least we’d have explained dark matter.

You’ve seen it in the comment section before: “Climate change is natural. It’s happened before and it will keep happening”. In reality, comments like these are the newest kind of climate change denial. In this video we’re going to learn...

Some of us can't get enough of that new car smell. But certain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that help create this aroma are linked to cancer. While this doesn't mean new car smell definitely increases your chance of getting cancer,...

Fentanyl has become a primary cause of the opioid overdose epidemic in the past decade. But what is it about this drug that's so dangerous? There's more to the story than meets the eye.



If you’re ever in the position...

Where would biology be without microscopes? But for a long time, in order to see the smallest bits of life, that life had to be dead. Then along came Atomic Force Microscopy, which let us observe things like DNA and proteins moving...

You're lucky you don't literally age faster and drop dead when you see a dead person... because fruit flies do. Here's what researchers are learning about the connection between perception, aging, and mood disorders like depression.

About 1.8–0.8 billion ago, the Earth went through a period known as the Boring Billion, where not a lot changed in terms of geology, evolution, or even the number of hours in a day. Some scientists call it “the dullest period in Earth’s...

Sometimes, you ask ChatGPT to do a math problem that an arithmetically-inclined grade schooler can do with ease. And sometimes, ChatGPT can confidently state the wrong answer. It's all due to its nature as a large language model, and the...

There are two types of rain, and one of them is almost impossible to forecast.