MinuteEarth
When Trees Go Nuts
Every once in a while, all the oaks or spruces or other plants in a region suddenly produce a tremendous bounty of seeds – up to 100 times more than usual. But why do they do it, and how do they all manage to sync up?...
MinuteEarth
What Nuclear Bombs Taught Us About Whales
A monitoring system developed to listen for secret nuclear tests mostly hears other events happening all around Earth. ___________________________________________ If you want to learn more about this topic, start your googling with these...
MinuteEarth
Why The Weather Is Worse At The Mall
Extreme weather sometimes happens in very specific areas thanks to extreme surface temperature differences.
MinuteEarth
How Fighting Wildfires Makes Them Worse
Today's wildfires burn, on average, twice the amount of land they did in 1970. The reason? We've been working too hard to put them out. Want to learn more about the topic in this week's video? Here's a keyword/phrase to get your googling...
MinuteEarth
Why It Sucks to Be a Male Hyena
Thanks to spotted hyenas’ unusual social structure, males experience a tough life of solitude, harassment, and deprivation. ___________________________________________ If you want to learn more about this topic, start your googling with...
MinuteEarth
Why Is A Group Of Crows Called A “Murder”?
Collective nouns are a great way to have fun with language and nature. Thank you! ___________________________________________ Collective Noun: A noun that denotes a group of individuals. Terms of Venery: Collective nouns specific to...
MinuteEarth
Why Are Leaves Green? Part 1
Have you ever wondered why leaves are green and not red, blue, or even black? We did too!
MinuteEarth
Why You Shouldn't Give Ginger To Monkeys (and other animal sayings)
Humans from different cultures anthropomorphize different animals to represent the same human traits. ___________________________________________ To learn more, start your googling with these keywords: Sunshower: A meteorological...
MinuteEarth
The Plankton Paradox
The competitive exclusion principle predicts that there would just be a few species of plankton, but instead there are thousands.
MinuteEarth
Why Don't More Animals Eat Wood?
Wood is abundant and full of energy, but outside of some insects, almost no animals eat it because the stuff it's made of is hard to break down
MinuteEarth
Why Can't Mules Have Babies?
Hybrid animals are infertile because of the way their sex cells form. But sometimes, life finds a way. FYI: We try to leave jargon out of our videos, but if you want to learn more about this topic, here are some handy keywords to get...
MinuteEarth
The Lost Penis Enigma
Because there are so many different types of penises among our evolutionary relatives, we didn’t know until a recent discovery whether they all had the same origin.
MinuteEarth
The Cheapest Way To Save A Life
The most cost-effective way to save a human life right now is to help give Vitamin A drops to certain groups of people, thanks to the health effects of the drops and the ease of their distribution.
MinuteEarth
Four Reasons Our Brains Suck At Pandemics
Certain cognitive biases cause humans to make unsafe decisions in a pandemic, making a terrible disease even worse.
MinuteEarth
Why Do Rivers Have Deltas?
Where rivers meet the ocean, coastlines tend to bend either inward or outward, creating estuaries and deltas. But how do they get those shapes? Want to learn more about the topic in this week's video? Here are some keywords/phrases to...
MinuteEarth
Why Is Poop Brown And Pee Yellow?
The pigments in our food all get destroyed on their way through our digestive system...so where do the colours of our poop and pee come from?
MinuteEarth
Why The Shortest Day Of The Year Isn't The Coldest
The way we experience seasons don't necessarily line up with how they're technically defined - here's why.
MinuteEarth
How This River Made Chimps Violent
When a group of apes got split apart, slight differences in their new environments led to big differences in future generations.
MinuteEarth
Dogs vs Cats: The Diversity Paradox
Different dogs look incredibly different - but that doesn't mean they are necessarily more diverse.
MinuteEarth
Why Does Wine Make Your Mouth Feel Dry?
Astringent plant chemicals called tannins bind proteins on mucous membrane and skin, generating a prickly, puckery mouthfeel from foods and letting us “tan” skins into leather. ___________________________________________ If you want to...
MinuteEarth
Why Some Molecules Have Evil Twins
A tiny change in a molecule’s geometry completely changes its effects on the human body. ___________________________________________ If you want to learn more about this topic, start your googling with: Enantiomers: Molecules that are...
MinuteEarth
How To Go Extinct
Our new evolution simulator reveals that extinction often happens when conditions change quickly.