Agriculture, hula hoops, SARS, and THIS video: how long did they take to get around the earth?
Have you ever wondered why leaves are green and not red, blue, or even black? We did too!
Still wondering why leaves are green and not purple or even black? CHLOROPHYLL! It's how leaves work.
What is the maximum height for a mountain on Earth!? And why?
Why Does Earth Have Deserts? For the same reason it has Rainforests: Hadley Cells!!!
Bedbugs! Note: Both male and female Cimex lectularius feed on humans
MinuteEarth provides an energetic and entertaining view of trends in earth's environment -- in just a few minutes!
Henry explains what freezer burn is.
Why do we drive on the left/right!?
How do plate tectonics REALLY work?
Urban development can be tough on wildlife. But some plants and animals are adapting to our cities in surprising ways.
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.
Why do some species flourish and others falter? Sometimes it just comes down to luck.
How Alan Turing's Reaction-Diffusion Model Simulates Patterns in Nature
Farming erodes soil 50 times faster than it forms. We can change that, but will we?
Hybrid animals are infertile because of the way their sex cells form. But sometimes, life finds a way.
Our functional map of the brain has changed. Here's why.
Research suggests that more diverse ecosystems are better for the bottom line.
Sometimes, it makes sense for critters across the animal kingdom to chow down on their own young.
Why there will likely soon be more tigers in backyards in Texas than in the wilds of Asia.
Almost all mammals with prehensile tails live in the neotropics because the forest is different there.
Foraminifera – tiny, single-celled marine life forms – build gorgeous houses that record how much ice there is on the planet.
Reindeer meat could’ve entered North American cuisine and culture, but our turn of the century efforts to develop a reindeer industry were stymied by nature, the beef lobby, and the Great Depression.
An amazing new technology will let scientists grow new kidneys for patients using their own stem cells inside of pigs.
The pigments in our food all get destroyed on their way through our digestive system...so where do the colors of our poop and pee come from?
Doctors beat back a disease that was killing tens of thousands of babies a year with a machine based on a simple principle of physics.
It's easy to assume that every trait - including stubby arms on a terrifying predator - must be beneficial, but the forces of evolution don't really work like that.
Snakes occupy a special place in the human brain because they’re so weird.
How whale poop becomes perfume. Thanks to Crunchyroll for sponsoring this video!
Collective nouns are a great way to have fun with language and nature.
Due to a revolution in our understanding of the tree of life, birds are dinosaurs, while dimetrodons are not.
Check out how cats became our favorite little murder machines.
A tiny change in a molecule’s geometry completely changes its effects on the human body.
Getting wet isn’t REALLY what makes wool shrink; it merely exacerbates the friction between the wool fibers, which is stronger in one direction than another, so when agitated in the washer or dryer, they migrate in relation to each other in a process called “felting.”
Sled dogs are the best endurance athletes in the world thanks to a weird quirk in their metabolism.
Less than half of the rain that falls from a cloud makes it all the way to the ground – because a lot evaporates while falling or after landing in treetops.
Our diets are more global than we realize, because our common food crops and animals were domesticated far away in diverse locations.
It can be hard to distinguish bees from all the other insects out there that look like bees.
A monitoring system developed to listen for secret nuclear tests mostly hears other events happening all around Earth.
Because of space physics, one faraway asteroid is likely the progenitor of almost a third of all the meteorites on Earth.
Worms cause major changes to ecosystems, but those changes aren’t always new.
Thanks to spotted hyenas’ unusual social structure, males experience a tough life of solitude, harassment, and deprivation.
Infinitesimally small quantum dots can turn a window into a see-through solar panel!
The "Mountain or Valley?" illusion makes our brains turn valleys inside out. But inside-out valleys are a real thing, both on Earth and on Mars.
It’s becoming harder and harder to categorize moons as moons.
What exactly makes sugary syrups so sticky, when neither water nor sugar is very sticky on its own?
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.
Nutrition during the first few years of life has a huge impact on adult height, and since nutrition has been getting better over time, humanity - including your family - is getting taller.
To feed everyone in the future, we may need to disrupt 10,000 years of farming practices and turn agriculture into a closed system.
Female hyenas don't have penises, but it sure looks like they do - and we still aren't quite sure why.
The incredible chemical weapon-making abilities of fungi, bacteria, and plants have created a diverse array of compounds that are useful to humans.
Male birds have the largest genital diversity of any class of animals because their sex chromosomes make it easy to pass male-helping mutations down the line.
Even the parts of our brains that don't control physical movement show a lot of rhythm, and that might be integral to how our brains work.
Occasionally, internal or external factors change, allowing certain animals to become giant versions of themselves.
When we domesticate an animal species, their brains shrink and they freak out less.
Considering humans' increased impact on the environment, we may want to reconsider whether there is still a place in our legal system for the Act of God defense.
Migrating birds care more about the ease of their trip than the distance they travel, and that leads to some truly roundabout routes.
There's something surprising that helps determine how damaging a disease is: distance.
We mostly grow annual plants because they reliably produce energy-rich seeds, which we like to eat.
Shocking the brain has come and gone as a medical treatment, but it’s currently resurging, as it often provides the best form of relief for severe depression and advanced Parkinson’s disease.
No matter how wealthy a country is, there's a lot it can do to improve the health of its citizens.
Once it’s out of your body, your genetic information is valuable to a variety of people, but you can keep it safe(ish) with a few simple steps.
Food already in cupboards, supermarkets, & warehouses could feed humanity for 4 months, but potential food - berries, termites & krill - could extend that by another year.
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.
Female mammals make milk, a cocktail of filtered blood, to provide their babies with vital nutrients.
Humans from different cultures anthropomorphize different animals to represent the same human traits.
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?
The human lifespan might be limited, in part, because natural selection just stops working late in life.
Thanks to humans, old school apex predators are struggling to hold onto their perch at the top of the food chain. And now a new class of adaptable mesopredators are remaking the ecosystems they take over.
As we try to figure out the evolutionary trees for languages and species, we sometimes get led astray by similar but unrelated words and traits.
Earth’s outer shell is made of two materials whose different densities and thicknesses give rise to two distinct “levels” on the planet’s surface.
When nutrients from the ocean depths reach the sunlit surface (like in the Galapagos), life is more productive.
Animals eat their own poop in order to gain extra access to nutrients or to microbes that help digest those nutrients.
Malaria is a global disease that we've beaten back around the world, including in some tropical places, but we’ve had the hardest time in Africa.
Honeybees are dying from parasites, pesticides, and poor nutrition, but we can help them in a number of ways, including by encouraging them to make a homemade antibiotic.
Rates of appendicitis vary around the world, likely due to the forces of modernization.
Just like the names of products and companies, animals' names can affect how we feel about them...and changing the name of a species might actually help us save it.
Bird poop was the gateway fertilizer that turned humanity onto the imported-chemical-based farming system of modern agriculture.
Because of the chaotic way fingerprints develop and the multiplying effect of compound probability, it's basically impossible for any two fingers to have matching prints.
Scientists are trying to figure out if they can predict big earthquakes by simulating small quakes in labs and studying big quakes under the ocean.
Concrete is responsible for 8% of humanity’s carbon emissions because making its key ingredient - cement - chemically releases CO2, and because we burn fossil fuels to make it happen.
With our current understanding of evolutionary history and our strategy of cladistic naming, if we wanted to have both goldfish and sharks under a single group called "fish", then mammals must also be called fish.
Wave power hasn’t yet made a splash because it’s hard to use waves to spin turbines, and because the sea is a harsh place to build things.
Lyme disease is spreading like wildfire around the world: here's why.
Humans can hold our breath longer than we think by taking advantage of our body’s innate survival instincts - and then ignoring them.
Morocco has 3/4 of the world’s known reserves of rock phosphate, our main source of phosphorus, so Morocco may be key to our long-term ability to grow food.
Cancer has proven hard to beat, but a promising new type of treatment can use the disease's own powers against it.
Basic research can seem wasteful, but it's actually a great economic investment.
The technology we use to keep cool is heating the world in a vicious feedback cycle, so we need to improve it and use it less.
Aquatic cyanobacteria first oxygenated earth’s air, making human life possible; now, due to our actions, cyanobacteria are madly blooming once more, poisoning our coasts in the process.
Observing the effects of microbes using satellites can give us all sorts of useful information about life on Earth ... and other planets too.
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.
Ditches and drain pipes help crops survive but can negatively impact the broader landscape.
Because exercise isn't essential for short-term survival, we don't exercise enough, so we need to reincorporate purposeful physical activity into our lives.
The same enzyme that used to save us is now killing us because the body reactions it catalyzes now cause more harm than good.
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.
Trees can take an astounding amount of carbon out of the air, which is good, because we need to do that times a trillion.
We ranked dragons based on how biologically and evolutionarily plausible they are.
The way smartphones made many devices nonessential is a model for a new way to think about improving energy efficiency.
New technology has revolutionized how we study wild animals, but it has also bogged down scientists with data...luckily, there's an *intelligent* solution.
We’re in the middle of a rapid, unprecedented, and world-changing increase in the intensity and scale of human activity on this planet.
Experts can't agree on the definition of the term "concussion," which makes it difficult to diagnose, treat, and research this important brain injury.
Fruit trees are unpredictable and grow slowly, and consumer tastes are fickle, so successful new varieties of fruit are rare.
Because the ossification process can differ so much from human to human, we have a wide range of potential bone numbers.
We could generate a lot of usable energy from human and animal poop through greater adoption of a process for using microbes to break down poop into methane gas.
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.
When a group of apes got split apart, slight differences in their new environments led to big differences in future generations.
Earth's ocean water is continuous. How can we divide it into sections that are more useful?
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.
We’ve changed - and standardized - the way diseases get named because the old way was often stigmatizing and confusing.
We've worked as a team - remotely - for seven years, and we're sharing some of our favorite tips for making it work.
Our modern lifestyle and diet are leading to the extinction of parts of our microbiome, but we can use what we've learned from dealing with nearly-extinct macrobiota, like bald eagles, to understand the consequences and find solutions.
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.
We've known for millennia that lead pipes could make us sick, so why are we still drinking from them?
Sounds that animals make can be really different, and it turns out that there's a reason why some species communicate with certain sounds.
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.
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.
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.
As we see a rise in misinformation on YouTube, educational channels like MinuteEarth need your support today more than ever.
We’ll each have at least $100,000 more in our piggy banks, on average, if we stop climate change than if we don’t.
Although it’s not likely to happen soon, someday gas stations may be replaced by (or turn into) another type of fueling station, because no fuel or mode of transportation is forever.
Throughout history and around the world, most people dislike hyenas. But why?
Our new evolution simulator reveals that extinction often happens when conditions change quickly.
The old combined sewer systems of many major cities are no match for modern storms and impermeable surfaces.
Some aquarium hobbyists will pay $10,000 or more for a single shrimp because of the rarity of their colors or patterns.
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.
Sounds in the ocean can travel more than 10,000 miles - that's halfway around the world! Here's how.
Here’s what happened when more than a dozen of our favorite channels got together to blindly make a video with one another.
Not all hardwood trees have hard wood and softwoods soft wood, because these terms denote their taxonomic ancestry, not the wood's actual hardness.
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.
We've all experienced thunder, but what ARE all those claps, booms, and rumbles?
Surprisingly, flattened fauna can teach us a lot about wildlife biology.
Burning a marshmallow can release more energy than detonating an equal mass of TNT...so why isn't a marshmallow as dangerous?
There’s lots of debate as to which original starter Pokémon is the best fighter among squirtle, bulbasaur, charmander, and pikachu, but only one is the most biologically plausible.
The amount of metal some special plants are able to take up from the soil would be toxic enough to an average plant to kill it several times over.
For some birds, trying to cheat your neighbors into raising your babies is just as much work - and is no more successful - than doing it yourself.
WE MADE A BOOK! It’s packed with the clever explanations, adorable illustrations, and quirky humor you love from MinuteEarth – all in hard-cover form! Explore science and fun facts about animals, plants, microbes and more from all over Earth (and beyond).
Hyenas are more catty than doggy, but ultimately they’re just hyena-y!
Know your hybrids
Opossums and possums are awesome. Here’s how to tell the difference.
We're making hurricanes stronger. Here's how.
Here’s how mountains control the weather.
Most new species are discovered by amateurs because nowadays non-professionals are actually better suited to the requirements of new species “discovery.”
Under the right conditions, wildfires can form clouds and generate firestorms, which last far longer than normal thunderstorms.
Certain cognitive biases cause humans to make unsafe decisions in a pandemic, making a terrible disease even worse.
Different dogs look incredibly different - but that doesn't mean they are necessarily more diverse.
In order to truly understand differences among animal lifespans, we need to stop thinking about a specific number and start thinking about a distribution.
Null results often get a bad rap, sometimes characterized as a study "finding nothing," but there's a lot we can learn from studies whose results fail to support their hypotheses.
The body can get a whole lot colder - but not a whole lot hotter - before we die. Why is that?
You might already know that proteins are a fundamental part of your diet, but they're much more than that.
Superheroes - imaginary and real - aren't all that super on their own...here's why.
All over the world, giant wave breaks appear because of underwater geology that supercharges their wave energy.
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.
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.
The global pandemic led to a drop in outdoor air pollution, but it also led to an increase in indoor air pollution - and our exposure to it.
We might have a strong hand because having a weak hand is actually useful.
It turns out that defining what is and isn't a “tree” is way harder than it seems.
By analyzing survivorship curves over the centuries, we can learn what’s changed about how - and when - humans die.
Fevers are one of our best weapons against infections, but they don't work like you might think.
Optimal foraging theory means that turning down food is sometimes more efficient than eating it - but even then, what’s “wasted” doesn’t necessarily go to waste.
It’s not just how much you take in; it’s how fast your body can purge it.
While the rest of the world’s megafauna are still foundering in the anthropocene era, these two big animals have used little animal strategies to bounce back. Way back.
Sharks wouldn’t be known for their fierce teeth today if it weren’t for their ancient scales.
Because smaller animals have to eat more relative to their bodyweight, Tolkein’s hobbits need to eat a lot - not for comfort, but for survival.
People all around the world tend to represent time via space, but there’s no consensus on which way time goes.
Lots of global problems seem intractable, but there’s a formula for success that we can follow.
The current hurricane category scale doesn’t accurately convey the danger of a storm, because it doesn’t account for a hurricane's most destructive factors.
Hyenas communicate via an information-dense physical medium (hyena butter) - and now MinuteEarth does too (book).
Trying to ripen some fruits on your kitchen counter is totally fruitless - here's why.
A technology to ignore birds on radar ended up being useful to study and conserve them.
The competitive exclusion principle predicts that there would just be a few species of plankton, but instead there are thousands.
The way we experience seasons don't necessarily line up with how they're technically defined - here's why.
The urushiol molecules in poison ivy have the ability to trigger a harmful immune response in most people because the immune system mistakenly labels them as a threat.
Our oceans don’t technically contain salt, but the ions salt is made of play a critical role in planet-wide processes that make the Earth habitable.
Extreme weather sometimes happens in very specific areas thanks to extreme surface temperature differences.
A broken bone might seem worse than a sprain, but you'll get over it much more quickly.
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.
Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies, like NFTs, work a lot like reindeer mating.
This summer, we partnered with Nate Senner of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Tebughna School in Beluga, Alaska to make this series of videos all about how, why, and where birds migrate. We had so much fun making these videos that we decided to make them available for free to anyone and everyone who is curious about the secrets birds hold. Enjoy!
Soil doesn't seem like it's "alive", yet it functions like a living thing in lots of key ways.
In an effort to protect us from getting killed by something we’ve ingested, our brain’s vomit control center processes a lot of information from several different places … and sometimes is a little overly cautious.
Even though less than 1% of Earth's water is freshwater, it's the home for 50% of fish species. This is the Freshwater Paradox.
Way more kids have fuzzy vision these days because we spend less time in outdoor light, which makes our eyeballs longer.
One of Earth's biggest cells is one you're probably really familiar with.
Water can dissolve more substances than anything else on earth...so why doesn't it dissolve everything away?
The most likely cause of the next pandemic will be the “spillover” of a disease from one of a select group of animals with particular immune system traits and interactions with humans.
Who needs redundancy? Well, everyone, it turns out.
In 2020, many cities started monitoring wastewater for viruses, and there are a lot of non-virus reasons to keep doing it.
Trust is eroding, in part, due to the over-abundance of opinion-based content; we must all develop better tools and habits for consuming information to regain a shared understanding of what is true.
Most of Earth’s land is currently in the northern hemisphere because we happen to exist in a time where uneven heating in the mantle has pushed many continental plates northward.
Because females often outlive males, behavior is often blamed - but there is a decent chance our sex chromosomes might be to blame instead.
COVID isn’t the only virus to cause long-lasting symptoms. Other viruses - including the flu - can have similar enduring effects on our tissues and immune systems.
Blood-suckers may seem like they have it easy, but feeding on blood comes with a lot of challenges.
Our respiratory systems do a great job of protecting us, but they are no match for the smallest pollution particles created by the modern world.
Lots of geological forces need to come together for continents to form, but they all require one ingredient: water.
You may have heard of "abortion pills" - here's what these medications are and what they do (and don't do).
Volcanoes might seem like an unstoppable force of nature - but there is at least one OTHER force on Earth that seems to be able to keep them down.
There are two types of rain, and one of them is almost impossible to forecast.
We often use decibels, a measure of sound pressure, to describe how loud something is - but loudness is caused by how we perceive sounds, and the two often don't line up.
Most animals on earth are bioluminescent, but almost all of them live in the ocean - and scientists aren’t sure why.
Some plants can drink water from the air - and that has some weird effects on the forests where they live.
The concept of warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals is outdated because there are actually tons of different animal thermoregulation strategies.
For thousands of years, water was thought to be an element. That is, until some of the greatest chemists in the world managed to crack it open.
Energy use can be confusing – I mean, how do you compare gasoline in your car to electricity piped to your house? That's why we made these things spud-tacularly simple.
The human population of the world will soon peak – and then decrease – thanks to a combination of two quickly changing economic and educational trends.
Trees are a super-efficient way to sequester carbon, but since planting the wrong trees in the wrong place can do more harm than good, we need to go about tree planting more carefully.
Nuclear war is a terrifying existential threat, but we shouldn't only fear the blasts because the ensuing smoke is the real killer.
Methuselah’s environment lacks nutrients, water, and oxygen. In other words, it’s the perfect place to grow very very old.
By combining historical demography and epidemiology, we can (sort of) determine how people throughout history have died.
The shape of a farm can tell you a surprising amount about the land it's on and the people that use it.
When the brain receives pain from an internal organ, it often projects the pain in the wrong place because of the way sensory nerve paths converge.
A simple mis-folding in a certain brain protein causes a disease for which we have no cure.
When it comes to the mating game, fish have some of the strangest ways of thwarting the competition.
Despite centuries of death records to the contrary, “dying of old age” is not medically possible; instead, it’s just a convenient catch-all.
We actually have no idea what a “disease” is.
Plants don't make caffeine just for us, so what DO they make it for?
It’s common to call creepy crawlies bugs, but because entomologists refer to a specific class of insects as bugs, it’s wrong to call other things bugs - right?
Almost everything we know about the reproductive practices of European eels comes from a genius study conducted more than 100 years ago.
The Acheulean handaxe was the most common tool of early humans, but we still don’t know what the heck they used it for.
In 1990, fossil collectors in South Dakota stumbled across a dinosaur that turned out to be a really big deal. Not just because it was a T. rex – basically the most popular dino out there – or because it ended up in Chicago’s famous Field Museum… but because of the number of bones it had.
Coral reef fish get away with being colorful thanks to a weird quirk of underwater optics.
By overcounting how much carbon their forests suck up, and undercounting how much carbon their industries release, countries undercount their total carbon emissions.
The official number of extinct species is wrong… why?
Meteorite hunters don’t search for meteorites in the places most frequently peppered by them – they go to Antarctica instead, because that’s where they are easiest to find.
On the Internet, koalas get an unnecessary amount of hate, so let's debunk some of the most pervasive koala myths!
In the future, humans will likely die of a very different suite of causes than we do now, thanks to advances in healthcare, an aging population, and changes in the environment.
Many of the greatest biological dispersal events in history likely happened because animals inadvertently traveled across the oceans on floating debris.
Elephants might be strong, but they are weak compared to ants because ants have certain advantages that allow them to outlift their larger competitors.
PFAS - also known as the “forever chemicals” we use in all sorts of household products - are able to cause all sorts of health problems without ever really reacting with anything.
Most trees reach for the sun – but not the weeping willow. Why?
Without eclipses, our world would be a lot different because eclipses give us the ability to do science we otherwise wouldn’t be able to.
Every species on Earth has a fingerprint - whether or not they have fingers at all.
Because eclipses are powerful and frightening events, ancient cultures went to great lengths to understand eclipses, leading to remarkably accurate predictions and helping invent the science of astronomy.
We've long known that animal pollination is an important way plants reproduce on land, but we're only JUST finding out animals also pollinate plants underwater.
Life in Antarctica's ocean has followed a completely different evolutionary path from other ocean life because of how cold and isolated the ocean is.
Hurricane path prediction seems straightforward, until it is not – that’s because hurricanes can encounter atmospheric effects that turn their paths into erratic nonsense.
Sewers are a great way to make pooping safe, but they’re not always the right solution because they require specific resources that many places just don’t have.
Electric eels can emit some of the largest shocks in the animal kingdom - but why don't they shock themselves?
Why is the middle of a hurricane sometimes so clear and calm?
Because of the way digestion works, human poop not only contains dangerous microbes, it also contains a wide variety of other things, many of which we could potentially put to use.
For centuries, humans have reported animals freaking out during solar eclipses, like birds falling from the sky and bees hiding in their hives, but the animals most affected by eclipses might be us.
The average human, in theory, eats 3 spiders a year. If you're not eating them and I'm not eating them, who is?
Many crustaceans from all sorts of starting points evolve to end up looking similar, likely due to outside pressures. That’s sort of like what happens with YouTube videos.
When a ship sinks, lots of factors, like the ship’s materials, the water quality, and the depth of the seafloor all play a role in determining how long the ship will last down there - as a result, the Titanic will be gone in fifty years, while Byzantine wrecks in the Black sea remain.
Solar eclipses can happen anywhere on earth, but if you want to see a total eclipse, you need to go to the far north, because the Earth’s shape and orbit determine the high latitudes and eclipse hotspot.
Humans eat a lot of different animals, but almost none of them are carnivores - why?
Lots of languages and species are going extinct, but because others keep getting found or described, the official counts of languages and species are still increasing.
There are huge varieties of birth control methods because there are lots of different ways to disrupt the process of sperm-egg fertilization.
When we say a meme goes “viral,” we aren't actually saying it's making people sick. But the math behind a meme’s spread suggests it's actually a pretty spot-on analogy.
One of the best ways of studying bacteria is to grow them on a petri dish, but only a tiny percentage of bacterial species will grow on them. The other 98% of them simply refuse to.
There’s an island in the Caribbean where David used to perform magic tricks for monkeys. And it was super cool because it suggested that they have the ability to count! (but only up to four)
Plants can tell when competitors are nearby because they can *see* them.
You might think the most dangerous thing that can happen at a beach is a shark attack, or that the scariest thing might be a tsunami - but instead, rip currents kill more beachgoers than all other causes combined.
Beehives always have a queen, who is the mother of the entire hive. But have you ever wondered, what happened to the king, if there was ever any? Can a male bee become a king?
The ancestors of gars, horseshoe crabs and coelacanths looked almost the same as their modern relatives. Darwin called species like these “living fossils'' because they seem like they are evolutionarily frozen in time. But Darwin was wrong.
Despite the seemingly basic things we don't know about dinosaurs, we do know some surprising things – like their body temperatures.
It seems wild that some animals basically trade in their bodies for new ones during their lifetime, but it's actually really common – and it makes a lot of sense.
Many animal species stuff themselves with toxic chemicals for protection, which forces them to use a handful of distinct strategies to avoid becoming victims of their own weapons.
A world without predators. It sounds like a safer, happier world, but come on, this is SCIENCE…
Most living things on Earth need oxygen to survive, but scientists discovered a species of bacteria that uses oxygen totally differently from every other organism on Earth.
A person’s genes alone don’t tell us enough about how to most effectively treat their cancer.
The Grand Canyon is super-wide and super-deep, which might make you think that the Colorado River, which carved it, is particularly old or powerful. Or at least that's what I thought.
AI is evolving so fast that soon it might be able to take over scientific research...but what would that look like?
Your body is a lot louder than you might think.
There are several ways to think about ancestry, and all of them suggest you have fewer unique ancestors than you might think.
We teamed up with Miranda Cosgrove to make Science Minute with MinuteEarth, an illustrated segment for her TV show: Mission Unstoppable. If you like this, there's a ton more over at CBSUnstoppable or, if you're in the US, watch the new season on CBS on Saturday mornings!
The various ways new fish get into isolated lakes are a microcosm of the complicated ways that life has spread around the globe.
Plant pollen is everywhere in springtime, but because it is so small, you probably don't know that what is making you sneeze is a living, breathing, mobile version of the plant that forms half of the it's entire bizarre life cycle.
We've all had an experience where soap has made a wet thing slippery, but...why?
Earth might be the only planet with tectonic plates, but it is not the only one with quakes because quakes can be caused by a ton of different things in the solar system.
There is a point in human history where everyone alive at the time fits into one of two categories: Either they are the ancestor of nobody alive today, or they are an ancestor of everyone alive today because of how genealogy and genetic lineages work – and it is much more recent than you think.
This is a story about attention, memory, and headless goat hockey, which is a totally real sport played on horseback with a goat carcass standing in for a ball. It's known by many names throughout central asia, but I first encountered it as "buzkashi". It's wild, and I swear it is relevant.
Animals are prone to falling for “evolutionary traps”: modern human-made stuff that accidentally tricks them into maladaptive behavior.
We want to tell important stories about our natural world, but some ideas that seem great initially end up being way too big to cover in a short video.
Venomous snakes kill nearly 100,000 people a year. Which is weird, because we have a pretty effective treatment for venomous snake bites; it’s actually been around for more than a hundred years. So why are so many people still dying?
Despite the fact that we've been trying to exterminate coyotes for hundreds of years, the species is thriving because of a special trait that causes their population to grow whenever one gets killed.
The canine family is a hugely diverse group of foxes, wolves, and –yes– doggos that have spread all over the world. MinuteEarth explains who they are and how they’re related.
Monkey Island is, perhaps unsurprisingly, home to thousands of monkeys. And when a major hurricane blew directly across the island, the researchers who study those monkeys thought that they were going to return to a scene of mass tragedy. But only two monkeys died during the storm. It wasn’t until long after the skies cleared that the bodies started piling up.
In school, you probably learned about the water cycle with a diagram. The problem is…it’s wrong – or at the very least, pretty misleading.
In the 1960s, NASA’s engineers were building the Apollo spacecraft. But they ran into a major problem that almost prevented them from getting to the moon. To solve it, they brought in some unexpected help: expert weavers.
If you’ve ever owned a backyard trampoline –or jumped on someone else’s– you might have noticed that the grass underneath it is longer and lusher than the grass in the rest of the yard. It’s not just that that grass isn’t getting mowed… in fact, when it does get mowed, you can see the weird effect even better! Instead there's something else –something shadier– going on here.
Krubera Cave, one of our planet’s deepest known caves, extends 2200 meters into the earth – that’s a depth of nearly six Empire State Buildings. Or at least, that's as far down as humans have been able to explore; there might be other undiscovered chambers that go down even farther. But the cave can't be that much deeper, because there's a limit – actually, three limits – to how deep caves on Earth can get.
Ok so “misaligned AI” is dangerous. But if it does decide to kill us, what SPECIFICALLY could it do?
Nobody knows why some mushrooms are psychedelic. I mean, we know that they contain a compound called psilocybin, which messes with the brain chemistry of lots of animals, including humans. But we don’t know why being psychedelic would be useful to mushrooms in the first place. Here are three of our best theories.
Fish, amphibians, and reptiles –actually, almost all vertebrates– get bigger throughout their lives; they generally keep on growing until they die. Then, there are humans, who, by the age of 20 or so, just stop getting bigger… or at least taller. Why do we stop growing partway through life?
The feline family is a hugely diverse group of lions, panthers, and –yes– kitties that have spread all over the world. MinuteEarth explains who they are and how they’re related.
YouTube and NBC invited us to make a video for the final Democratic Candidate’s Debate before the US Presidential primaries. Here’s our video (about climate change & energy), Lester Holt’s question, & the candidates’ responses.
NBC & YouTube actually asked us to make TWO videos for the Democratic Presidential Debate on January 17th, 2016. Here’s the video that DIDN’T get shown at the debate.
Have ever wondered how digital illustrations are made? This video explains the basics.
We answer your burning questions in our first-ever Q&A video. Thanks for asking, and for watching!! Thanks also to our patrons and YouTube members. You make MinuteEarth possible.
In this collection of classic MinuteEarth videos, we keep score on the winners and losers of the animal kingdom.
Perfumes contain many very strange ingredients, but one of the strangest is definitely ambergris. These days, it's mostly replaced by a synthetic compound - so don't worry about dowsing yourself in whale bile ;)
Cement is responsible for 8% of humanity’s carbon dioxide emissions, which is a problem if we want to build more cities. To reduce the carbon dioxide emitted by the production of cement, people are trying to replace limestone with other types of materials.
Black bears in North America are actually doing pretty well! However, the same thing is not the case for their Asian cousins. So why do some species thrive while others falter? The cause, as you might expect, is humans.
Who will win? Jasper from @Minutelabsio or Asa Stahl from @planetarysociety ?
They say you eat with your eyes first. And they (whoever 'they' are) seem to be right. Would you eat a poop-shaped treat or do you save things like that for Halloween?
It looks SO gross (and IS kinda gross) but some animals need to digest their food twice to get all the nutrients out of their meal.
Dogs are great companions, AND having them around reduces the chance of developing allergies
The animals we eat generally don't eat other animals - why is that?
Petri dishes are filled with nutrient agar and used as food for bacteria - but only a few species will actually grow on them. And if we can't grow them, then we can't study them either.
A fossil's bones can tell you more about the organism than just the shape - it can also tell you how warm the organism kept its body!
Bee genetics are really weird! First, eggs only need 1 set of chromosomes to become a baby bee. Second, male bees can only have daughters.
Find us anywhere you listen to podcasts!
A crime spree hit England! The criminal? A feathery cutie.
Humans are strange animals for many, many reasons. One of them is that we are the only ones to wipe our butt. But why do we need this?
Hermit crabs grow throughout their life, but their shell doesn't! This is why they are always on the lookout for a new shell that fits perfectly.
The worst thing about being a vampire would be the diet. Blood is really not that nutritious and you'd run into several problems while maintaining your bloody diet!
Earth worms are an invasive species and changed the American landscape!
This might sound like a silly question, but TONS of organisms change their body types during their lifetimes. And while it has its advantages, it does come with a cost.
This is an excerpt of our video "Why are they all in Antarctica" which is a finalist in the #LabMeCrazy! Science Film Festival!
Lunar eclipses are really cool and form in a pretty similar way to solar eclipses. Because of this, lunar eclipses help us figure out the pattern of solar eclipses!
The very same type of cancer can be caused by a lot of different mutations. Instead of trying to understand every mutation, some doctors are copy-pasting the cancer cells to try many different treatments at once! Then, the one that works can be given to the patient.
We LOVE to take casual jokes just a little bit too far.
Rip currents are one of the most dangerous things you can encounter on the beach, partially because they are really hard to spot!
There are two recommended ways to escape a rip current: 1: try to swim to the side 2: stay calm while the current takes you towards the ocean and swim towards the side, then the beach when the current is calmer.
Humans are pretty strange for keeping the same body plan throughout our entire life! Why do so many organisms change their body plan anyway?
How would you avoid poisoning yourself if you were a venomous creature? I would also choose to lick my own armits.
Pollen is often described as 'plant sperm', but it has some important differences! Like sperm, pollen contains one DNA set from its parent, but unlike sperm, pollen itself is actually its own separate living plant made of multiple cells that, under the right conditions, can live for months, depending on the species.
One of the reasons soap is so slippery is the lack of friction. There's just nothing to hold on to and the bar flies up up and away!
There are several ways for fish to end up in completely isolated mountain lakes. Some of them are really weird!
We dont know WHY this Salamander is pregnant for 4 years, but we do know HOW this happens. What a mom!
The Aldabra rail is the only bird that we know of that evolved TWICE!
Emmy Noether was a brilliant mathematician who made massive contributions to physics! Her perseverance is an absolute inspiration
The egg came before the chicken, but did the seed come before the plant?
The magnets at Fermilab were covered in small metal shavings - but Felicia the ferret saved the day
Some flowers smell HORRIBLE to humans but amazing to other animals, like dung beetles! Different flowers attract different pollinators - and some of those pollinators are attracted by the smell of sweaty gym socks!
The gravity of both the sun and the moon pull on the Earth’s equatorial bulge, causing the Earth’s rotational axis to change. This causes a different star to take the place of our beloved Polaris one day!
The ribbon diagram has swiftly become the standard way of showing protein structures; it's hard to imagine any other type of representation!
It's become easier than ever to generate massive datasets - but dealing with all that information is challenging! AI, or Machine Learning, can help scientists analyse all that data and free up time to think about the results and do actual science.
We still don't know why recently boiled water freezes faster! A Tanzanian teen named Eraste Bartholomeo Mpemba was doing ice-cream experiments (yum!) when he found that recently boiled milk froze faster than room temperature milk - and he wondered why! Sometimes science is about knowing when you don't understand something yet!
You are covered with microorganisms. Everyone is! But everyone's microbe-cloud is different enough that scientists can pick out who has been in a room based only on the microorganisms they left behind!
Hundreds of rhesus macaques live on a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico. Here are some of their stories.
AI is very good at logic-based tasks, but doesn't make the same creative leaps that humans can make. AI can assist scientists, but not replace them.
What's the recipe for goosebumps and shivers? Let's talk about scary sounds! They are dissonant, shrill, and don't fit the setting you are in. Sometimes even cute sounds are scary when it's in the wrong setting.
Have you heard of the planet Vulcan? No, not the version from Star Trek! Vulcan was a proposed planet that would orbit between Mercury and the Sun - speculations date back to the 17th century! Sadly, Vulcan stayed fictional.
When we think about keeping our houses warm, we might want to optimize our heating - but there are many more ways to make sure your house stays warm and toasty! If we think about efficiency in a different way, we can use a lot less energy to reach the same goals.
Some mammoths have been found in Siberian permafrost - nicely preserved freezer-fresh meat. And recently some scientists used Mammoth DNA to clone cells, which is technically edible. But try to explain that allergic reaction to the ER...
The greater bulldog bat's call is as loud as a Jet Engine - but we cannot hear it. Its call is too high for our ears to pick up. We can't help but wonder what the world would sound like if we had a different range of hearing! Maybe we would be overwhelmed by the loud bats.
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We LOVE dogs and had a great time looking into all the modern dog breeds and their ancient ancestors.
Beatrice Shilling was both a sports car racer and an engineer!
It seems like a paradox, but you are not related to most of your ancestors. You inherited an equal number of genes from each of your parents, who received an equal number from their ancestors. There is a good chance you don't actually have any genes from most of your ancestors. Some genes seem impossible to brush off though. Are there some traits that everyone in your family seems to have?
Maybe your pets also dream of playing with you!
AI programs are becoming better and better at small tasks. Should scientists worry?
Gravity is everywhere on Earth, so we don't really know all the ways it affects our bodies. One of the strange consequences of lower gravity is that we can't burp - those gases come out on the other end instead
Some shipwrecks seem immaculately preserved for centuries, while others disappear without a trace. The difference depends on the ship and the location it sank.
Even the tiniest baby already has unique fingerprints - but WHY?
Someone already ran this experiment - by accident!
Or rather, these scientists study the claims that Bigfoot and other cryptids have been seen, and how descriptions have changed over time. This tells us something about our brain and our society! How do we fill in the blanks when we see something that doesn't make sense and WHY do we fill that blank with 'bigfoot? I wonder whether future accounts will include "ghost insects"!
Bacteria all seem really similar, but they are a super diverse group of organisms - more so than animals.
We all know how that ends!
It takes water and time to carve a canyon, there’s a secret third ingredient that allows a river to carve one that’s truly grand.
Rip currents are some of the most dangerous things you can find on the beach - but why are they so deadly?
