Death and the possibility of an afterlife have fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists throughout history. Fear, hope, dread… these are all things we...
When people think about continents, they usually imagine something permanent and unchanging. Borders shift, countries rise and fall, but the land itself feels solid. Yet...
Jupiter is old. Like 4.5 billion years old. It started as a swirling disk of gas and dust that formed into a pretty big planetary core. With time, Jupiter’s core...
Hippos are among the most dangerous animals on Earth. They kill around 500 people every year across Africa, more than twice the number attributed to lions. Despite their...
Today we’re dropping a big bomb into the deepest part of the ocean. So grab a surfboard and get ready to hang ten on the waves of a massive nuclear tsunami. How would...
Let’s make every meal, ice cream only. That’s right. For the next few months, you will eat only ice cream. Sounds delicious. Which ice cream would be best...
You just fell into a pool with this thing. What is this? How would falling in here affect your health? And could you actually survive this? This is a spent nuclear fuel...
Few animals in freshwater ecosystems have a reputation as intense as piranhas. Popular culture often shows them as aggressive predators capable of stripping flesh in...
It is easy to dismiss mosquitoes as nothing more than annoying insects, but their impact on life on Earth is far more serious than most people realize. These tiny...
If you ever find yourself falling into a volcano, there are a couple of things you should know. First off, when you reach the bottom, the magma’s not going to...
What if all the Earth’s land became ocean, and all the oceans became land? And what if our mountains turned into deep trenches, while the trenches grew to the...
What are the ingredients for an industrial revolution? It’s simple! Take some new energy sources, add a dash of cutting-edge communications technology, and...
A sudden reduction in size, shrinking by one centimeter per second, would expose a human to progressively smaller scales of the natural world, from ordinary objects to...
Every year, hurricanes batter the North Atlantic and affect millions of people. The damage can be catastrophic, and these storms are getting worse. But what if we had a...
Some 5 billion years from now, the Sun will expand and become a red giant. And the Earth might be just in the way… If humans were still around then, would we leave...
How would the world change if, all of a sudden, every biological man disappeared? Would the world become more peaceful? Why would you have to ration food? And why...
Prehistoric Australia was not the sunny, laid back continent we know today. Between 126,000 and 12,000 years ago, during the late Pleistocene era, humans shared the land...
What advice would you give your younger self if you could travel back in time?
Deep in the frozen wilderness of eastern Siberia lies a village unlike anywhere else on Earth. Snow blankets the landscape for most of the year, the ground remains...
If you’re watching this right now, you’ve probably used antibiotics at some point in your life. But did you really need to? The Centers for Disease...
