MinuteEarth

A honeybee hive might seem like a peaceful utopia, but in reality, it’s buzzing with internal conflict between warring factions. And the biggest conflict is between the queen and the worker bees.

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.

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.

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?

Even though there are a lot of causes of death out there, they all actually boil down to one thing.

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.

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?

Rabies is the one of the deadliest diseases we know of; if you don’t get treatment soon after getting exposed, you’re almost certain to die. But rabies’ intent isn’t actually to kill – it's to control.

Volcanoes are one of the most powerful forces on Earth; their lava can destroy cities and their ash clouds can blot out the sun. And there is basically nothing we can do to make sure a volcano will never erupt again – except wait for it to die. So while we wait, what is it, exactly, that kills a volcano?

In 1973, an airliner struck a bird called a Rüppell's griffon vulture – which, on its own, isn't that weird; planes hit birds pretty regularly during takeoffs and landings. But this collision happened at a cruising height of over 11,000 meters – WAY above the height at which most birds fly – which makes us wonder: what is the highest a bird can actually fly?

The ape family is a hugely diverse group of gibbons, gorillas, orangutans, chimps, and - yes - humans. MinuteEarth explains who they are and how they’re related.

If nuclear blasts, asteroids, or alien lasers killed off almost all humans on Earth, how many people would be needed to rebuild a genetically sustainable human population?

In the 1850s, German scientists were trying to figure out how to weigh a forest – but they weren’t particularly interested in the trees. Because as it turns out, forests are much more than trees, and trees aren't the heaviest – or even the second heaviest – part of a forest.

Some people just seem to be mosquito magnets; in one scientific study, 20 percent of the people ended up with 95 percent of the mosquito bites! So if you’ve ever thought mosquitoes had it out for you specifically, you might be right. And now, we know why.

The black plague is one of the deadliest diseases humans have ever faced; it killed as many as 50 million people – including about a third of the population of Europe – in the 14th century alone, in an outbreak known as the Black Death. In modern days, though, you hardly ever hear about people getting the plague, which might make you think we've wiped it out. But the black plague is still around and still infecting people – and we aren't even trying to eradicate it.

Way back at the dawn of aviation, during a public flight exhibition of all things, a gull jammed a plane's controls, crashing the plane and killing the pilot. Today, there are thousands of commercial airliners – and billions of birds – in the sky at any given time, so it seems like they should run into each other all the time. So why don't birds cause more plane crashes?

Over the past few decades, the number of green sea turtles has risen so much that the species has gone from being listed as “endangered” to a species of “least concern.” Sea turtles have become a poster child for conservation – and it seems like we could use what we’ve learned from saving them to save a bunch of other species too…but it turns out it’s not that simple.

We don’t actually know if aliens exist. But if they do, their cells probably have a special type of membrane. And that knowledge alone tells us where we can look for them and maybe even what they’ll be like.

In most places on Earth, the sun is guaranteed to set every evening, but not all sunsets are the same. From gases and clouds to pollution and our changing climate, discover what makes sunsets so colorful, and why protecting our skies matters.