MinuteEarth

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.