The sounds of the rainforest include: the chirps of birds, the buzz of cicadas, the banter of gibbons. But in the background is the almost-always present sound of a chainsaw, from illegal loggers. Engineer Topher White shares a simple,...

Spindly trees, rusted gates, crumbling stone, a solitary mourner: these things come to mind when we think of cemeteries. But not long ago, many burial grounds were lively places, with gardens and crowds of people -- and for much of human...

I'm sure you've all heard about Isaac Newton and that apple that fell on his head and how that was a huge deal to our understanding of gravity. Well... let's talk about that. In this episode of Crash Course Physics, Shini sits down to...

Almost 30 years ago, Pico Iyer took a trip to Japan, fell in love with the country and moved there. A keen observer of the human spirit, Iyer professes that he now feels he knows far less about Japan -- or, indeed, about anything -- than...

Economics PhD Sebastião Salgado only took up photography in his 30s, but the discipline became an obsession. His years-long projects beautifully capture the human side of a global story that all too often involves death, destruction or...

The human hand, with its multi-talented thumb, might be man's greatest tool. But did you know we can trace that thumb, and the hand and arm it's connected to, all the way back to a 375 million-year-old fish named Tiktaalik? This week I...

4000 years ago, the ancient Sumerians made a surprising discovery: if they scraped the bark off a particular kind of tree and ate it, their pain disappeared. Little did they know that what they'd found was destined to influence the...

Paul Andersen details the evolutionary processes of speciation and extinction. Stickleback evolution in Lake Loberg is used as example of rapid speciation. Adaptive radiation is illustrated using the Hawaiian honeycreeper. A brief...

There are all sorts of flying birds, but some of the world's biggest are ones that stick to the ground, like the awesome ostrich!

Around the world, living things have managed to build truly extraordinary ecosystems in some of the last places you would think to look. Understanding these ecosystems can help us protect or repair them, and it can also help us...

In the South Pacific, there is a rare tree so rich in metal that its sap runs blue.

Fruit trees are unpredictable and grow slowly, and consumer tastes are fickle, so successful new varieties of fruit are rare

Language is endlessly variable. Each of us can come up with an infinite number of sentences in our native language, and we're able to do so from an early age— almost as soon as we start to communicate in sentences. How is this possible?...

Springtime means the arrival of green grass, bright flowers, and buzzing bees. But for many of us, it's also about sneezing, watery red eyes, and a runny nose, thanks to allergies. In this week's video, you'll learn why we get allergies,...

Jessi and Squeaks found a branch growing what looked like white hair! So they brought the branch back to the Fort to run some tests and found out that it isn't hair at all... it's ice!



Second Grade Next...

When you think of herbs, you might picture rosemary, basil, or dill weed, but you can add something a bit bigger than that to your mental herb collection: good ol' bananas.

Not all hardwood trees have hard wood and softwoods soft wood, because these terms denote their taxonomic ancestry, not the wood's actual hardness.

Roasting marshmallows over a fire is a lot of fun, but did you know that, in nature, fire keeps our forests clean and healthy and even helps some plants grow?

Though not everyone is excited about it, plastics are pretty much everywhere. But what problems are they causing and is there anything we can do to solve those problems?

If you find some trees with little apple-like fruits by the ocean, beware! It might be a Manchineel, the world's most dangerous tree.

We have some good reasons for wanting to make fake wood, but wood is complex and intricate. Can we create a good wood substitute?

Bamboo is the world’s fastest growing plant thanks to the cell elongation process it shares with all grasses and its unique cell wall layering adaptation, allowing it to shoot up to 100 ft (30m) in just 8 weeks.

If we want to build a place for us to live, or to hang out, or do eat dinner with our friends, we're going to need a special kind of engineering called architecture. In this episode of Crash Course Kids, Sabrina gets us to help her build...

Our early ancestors relied on lightning to cause forest fires, from which they could collect coals and burning sticks to help them cook food and clear land. Yet, it wasn't just humans who benefited from these natural phenomena. Even as...