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.

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.