MinuteEarth
How Birds Fooled Military Radar
A technology to ignore birds on radar ended up being useful to study and conserve them.
MinuteEarth
How We Evolved To Browse The Web
The decisions we make while we browse the internet are suprisingly similar to the ones animals make as they forage for food...here's why.
MinuteEarth
The Problem With Life Expectancy
In order to truly understand differences among animal lifespans, we need to stop thinking about a specific number and start thinking about a distribution.
MinuteEarth
Why We Faint (When Other Animals Don't)
Humans are the only animals known to faint due to triggers like shock, fear, or pain; this is due to a combination of our massive brains and upright stance.
MinuteEarth
Can Pregnancy Tests Help Beat COVID-19?
The lab-on-a-stick that lets us know if we’re pregnant is a genius bit of technology that can be used to quickly determine everything from whether there are nuts in our chocolate to whether we have COVID.
MinuteEarth
This Atom Can Predict The Future
Many of the bewildering correlations in our world - like that between Beryllium-7 and the Asian monsoon - are a result of huge and unseen forces that tie them together.
MinuteEarth
Why You’re More Likely To Die In Winter
There’s a huge seasonal difference in death rates that is propelled by a variety of factors including pathogen behavior and anatomical response to temperature changes.
MinuteEarth
Can AI Help Us Identify Animals?
New technology has revolutionized how we study wild animals, but it has also bogged down scientists with data...luckily, there's an *intelligent* solution.
MinuteEarth
Why Are There So Many Tigers In Texas?
Why there will likely soon be more tigers in backyards in Texas than in the wilds of Asia.
MinuteEarth
How We Make MinuteEarth Videos (Behind the Scenes)
An outline of how we make our videos.
MinuteEarth
Why Do India And China Have So Many People?
India and China have so many people today because they’re good for farming and big, but they’ve always been that way, so they’ve actually had a huge proportion of Earth’s people for thousands of years.
MinuteEarth
Why It’s HARD To Bring A New Apple To Market
Fruit trees are unpredictable and grow slowly, and consumer tastes are fickle, so successful new varieties of fruit are rare
MinuteEarth
The Secret Global Sewer System
Ditches and drain pipes help crops survive but can negatively impact the broader landscape.
MinuteEarth
Why Are Adults Bad At New Languages?
Learning a new language as an adult is harder than doing so as a child because adults usually aren’t as invested and often use the wrong strategies.
MinuteEarth
Are Plastics Too Strong?
The same chemistry that makes plastic tough, light and flexible also makes it nearly impossible to get rid of, because it’s hard to break those resilient chemical bonds.
MinuteEarth
Why Hardwoods Are The Softest Woods
Not all hardwood trees have hard wood and softwoods soft wood, because these terms denote their taxonomic ancestry, not the wood's actual hardness.
MinuteEarth
Why You Can't Build A Clone Army... (Yet)
Because of the way genetic reprogramming works, it’s hard to make one clone based on an adult cell, and it’s almost impossible to make a second-generation one.
Crash Course Kids
Living Things Change
Have you ever heard of the Peppered Moth? It's a great example of how living things can change because their environment has changed. And it's not just them! There used to be giant insects roaming the world, but they got smaller through...
MinuteEarth
Is There A Better Way To Power Airplanes?
It’s hard to replace jet fuel because the alternatives aren’t energetic enough, are too dangerous, or aren’t yet being made at scale.
MinuteEarth
The Super Secrets of Sewage
In 2020, many cities started monitoring wastewater for viruses, and there are a lot of non-virus reasons to keep doing it.
MinuteEarth
Extreme Weather | MinuteEarth Explains
In this collection of classic MinuteEarth videos, we take a look at some of the most extreme weather on Earth and its consequences.
MinuteEarth
The Fastest-Growing Plant In The World
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.
MinuteEarth
The Best Worst Energy Source
Although coal is such an amazing energy source that we've kept using it despite the harm it causes, today we may be better poised to stop using it than at any previous time in history.
MinuteEarth
Why Biodiversity Is Good For The Economy
Research suggests that more diverse ecosystems are better for the bottom line.