TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What really killed the dinosaurs? (It wasn’t just the asteroid) | Sean P. S. Gulick
Sixty-six million years ago, near what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula, a juvenile sauropod feasted on horsetail plants on a riverbank. Earth was a tropical planet. Behemoth and tiny dinosaurs alike soared its skies and roamed its lands...
SciShow
Becoming a Predator Was Hard
Animals eating other animals seems like a tale as old as time, but it's only almost that old. Predation had to evolve in the Ediacaran period -- so let's look at early almost-predators like Auroralumina, Kimberella, Ikaria, and whatever...
SciShow
Early Earth Microbes May Have Eaten Raw Meteorites
Is it possible that life on earth began with an out of this world rock buffet?
SciShow
Goodbye SOFIA, Thanks for All the Discoveries
SOFIA or The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy is coming to an end, but let's look back on some of the amazing discoveries of this flying telescope.
SciShow
Why Space is the Place For Halloween Lovers | Compilation
In honor of the spookiest time of year, let's take a look at the spookiest-named things in the cosmos.
SciShow
The Future of the Search for Life
Astronomers have found more than 5,000 planets in the last three decades, but that’s not nearly as exciting as potentially coming across the first extraterrestrial creatures. And we may finally be in a position to make that discovery.
SciShow
How Do You Date a Star?
Figuring out the age of a blinking speck in the sky is a difficult feat, especially if considering how many types of stars there are. This is where a Hertzsprung-Russell meets a gyrochronologist.
SciShow
Great Minds: Conny Aerts, the Starquake Professor
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.
SciShow
Female Cockroaches Hate Romance (And It’s Our Fault)
Most people don't love cockroaches. And thanks to that lack of love, the females of one species of cockroach might not love their males looking for love. But lucky for both of them, evolution might be finding a way around it.
SciShow
Why Hairworms Don’t Have Hair
Hairworms, sometimes called horsehair or Gordian worms, are mind-controlling parasites with a twist. A genetic study found these nematomorph worms are missing 30% of their genome, and we don't understand how they live without genes for...
SciShow
The Hostile World Where Animal Life Began
For decades, researchers thought they had a solid idea about the earliest booms in animal life. But new research might have turned off the gas on all these ideas, flipping our understanding of the Avalon explosion and the Cambrian...
SciShow
You Went Through Puberty as a Baby
We all remember the woes and trials of our adolescence. But what you may not have realized is that your middle-school bout with surging hormone's wasn't the first time you went through a sort of puberty. From surging hormones to hair...
SciShow
Growing Bacteria in Space Stations | Compilation
Bacteria is enormously resourceful and will find a way to grow just about anywhere it can, and that includes space stations. Here's a compilation of how that's happened in the past and how we've handled it!
PBS
Fighting the stigma of opioid addiction with stories of recovery
People working on the front lines of the opioid crisis at the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation offer their Brief but Spectacular takes on addiction and recovery.
PBS
How Did Our Most Famous Ancestor Really Die?
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.
PBS
Did Eating Insects Shrink These Dinos?
We often think of dinosaurs as either preying on other dinos or mammals, or as plant-eaters -- but in ecosystems today, those aren’t the only two options. So why would we expect dinosaurs to have only been carnivores or herbivores, with...
PBS
Do Black Holes Create New Universes?
Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants - like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces - just right for the emergence of...
PBS
Could Life Evolve Inside Stars?
One of the most bizarre proposals for life not as we know it doesn’t even use atoms. It proposes that fundamental kinks and defects in the fabric of the universe - cosmic strings beaded with magnetic monopoles - may evolve into complex...
PBS
Venus May Have Life!
If you rank the most habitable places in our solar system Venus lands pretty low, with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead and sulphuric acid rain. And yet it may have just jumped to the front of the pack. In fact, we may have...
PBS
Can You Observe a Typical Universe?
The moment you started observing reality, you hopelessly polluted any conclusions you might make about it. The anthropic principle guarantees that you are NOT seeing the universe in most typical state. But used correctly, this highly...
PBS
Can Viruses Travel Between Planets?
With the global pandemic of Covid 19 still encompassing the world, we are generally not big fans of viruses right now. But we sure are thinking about them a lot. That’s right, even astrophysicists are pondering these bizarre little...
PBS
Does Life Need a Multiverse to Exist?
Life exists in our universe. There we go - one hopefully uncontroversial statement. Therefore our universe is capable of producing and supporting life. How am I going? Two for two? Let’s try for three: therefore there are countless...
PBS
Is The Universe Finite?
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...
PBS
Is There Life on Mars?
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...