MinuteEarth

Minute Earth

From the creators of the popular science show with millions of YouTube subscribers comes the MinuteEarth podcast. Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question you might not even know you had - but once you hear the answer, you’ll want to share it with everyone you know. Our team of scientists digs into the research and breaks it down into a short, entertaining explanation jam-packed with science facts and terrible puns. We’ll tell the incredible story of how monkeys crossed the Atlantic ocean on natural rafts, and we’ll explain why it gets hotter the deeper you dig underground.

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540 episodes
Updated Today

Episodes540

Newest first

May 31 · 1 min
Capsaicin and Menthol trick our brains
Why do spicy foods taste “hot” and minty foods taste “cold”?
May 30 · 1 min
Caribbean hermit crabs are always growing
hermit crabs and kidney transplants
May 24 · 1 min
Trash vs. Garbage
Trash vs. Garbage - is there a difference? Well, my grandmother taught me that trash means plastic, leaves, metal, tires, wood, etc, and garbage means food waste - I guess what we might now call compost.
May 23 · 1 min
Frozen food
A slow freeze gives fluid within cells the time to stack up into big ice crystals. Since water expands when it freezes, the sharp edges of these crystals poke holes through the walls of the cells, and when the food thaws, the fluid leaks out. Gross!
May 18 · 3 min
Why Don't Blue Whales Eat Fish?
The most massive land animals in the world all eat little stuff: grass and leaves. And almost all of the most massive aquatic animals also eat something itty bitty: tiny crustaceans called krill. Why do such big things eat such small things?
May 16 · 1 min
Suburbs vs Cities
People in suburbs of all types gobble up more energy, water, and other resources and emit more pollutants than those people in taller, denser urban neighborhoods.
May 11 · 3 min
Why Bees Mostly Ignore The Waggle Dance
You've probably heard that bees use a complex series of movements – often called the "waggle dance" – to tell other worker bees where to find new sources of nectar…it’s a super clever and sophisticated system. But it turns out that bees almost never immediately jump up to follow the directions they just got, which, weirdly, is also super-clever and sophisticated.
May 10 · 2 min
Fetus Poop
Do fetuses poop?
May 9 · 1 min
Biological Control
When we brought rabbits to New Zealand for food and fur, they escaped and bred like...well...rabbits, overrunning the country.
May 4 · 4 min
There’s Really Only One Way To Die
Even though there are a lot of causes of death out there, they all actually boil down to one thing.
May 3 · 1 min
yellow crazy ants
The yellow crazy ant - a likely native of Southeast Asia - has been nom nom noming many beloved and endangered Australian creatures since its arrival several decades ago.
May 2 · 1 min
Invasive species
Should humans just stop fiddling with the planet?
April 27 · 4 min
Could This Thing *Really* Fly?
The Quetzalcoatlus – one of the largest pterosaurs that ever lived – was able to fly even though it was the size of a giraffe! How on Earth did this giant manage to fly?
April 26 · 1 min
Delta Works
In 1362, a storm aptly named “The Great Drowning of Men” wiped out a string of European settlements, killing more than 25,000 people. In the centuries since, low-lying places like the Netherlands have developed an impressive array of water-defense systems, including wierden, dikes, ditches, dams, locks, and picturesque water pumps.
April 25 · 1 min
Hottest Place
So to find the true hottest place on earth, we need an army of meteorology students to install and monitor thermometers on every inch of the planet. Or we could measure the temperature of the earth from space... which NASA does, every day.
April 20 · 3 min
When Does It Make Sense To Kill Your Sibling?
When a baby sand tiger shark hatches from its egg, it finds itself trapped inside its mom’s uterus, forced to eat its siblings, or be eaten. It’s super weird, but pitting your kids against each other can sometimes be a winning parental strategy.
April 19 · 1 min
Cold Sap
Upon arriving in cold places, trees then evolved two techniques they still use to avoid frozen leaves: one is to fill living leaf cells with concentrated sugary sap, a biological version of anti-freeze.
April 18 · 1 min
Frozen Trees
If you took a tropical tree (whether ancient or modern) and transported it to Siberia or Patagonia in winter, its water would freeze into sharp-edged ice crystals, fatally puncturing the living cells in all of its leaves.
April 13 · 4 min
40 Years Without A New Antibiotic. Why?
Most medical science moves at super-speed; researchers are constantly developing new medications, techniques, surgeries, you name it. Except for antibiotics: we haven’t gotten a single new type of antibiotic ready to give to patients in over 40 years.
April 12 · 1 min
Before rainforests
Before rain forests, ancestors of trees like cypress, pine, and spruce dominated the land - but they were conservative when it came to using (and losing) water - so the air tended to be dry, meaning less rain.

MinuteEarth

Capsaicin and Menthol trick our brains

Caribbean hermit crabs are always growing

Trash vs. Garbage

Frozen food

Why Don't Blue Whales Eat Fish?

Suburbs vs Cities

Why Bees Mostly Ignore The Waggle Dance

Fetus Poop

Biological Control

There’s Really Only One Way To Die

yellow crazy ants

Invasive species

Could This Thing *Really* Fly?

Delta Works

Hottest Place

When Does It Make Sense To Kill Your Sibling?

Cold Sap

Frozen Trees

40 Years Without A New Antibiotic. Why?

Before rainforests

Could This Thing Really Fly?