SciShow

For patients who need a kidney ASAP, scientists might have found a way to safely circumvent the body’s immune system. And it’s by changing their /blood type/. Here's how it works.

We often hear that birds "mate for life," but in reality, all kinds of things can break up a happy couple. Here are the reasons birds can get divorced. And yes, they really call it that.

Rabies is a big problem all around the world, both for humans and other animals. And while plenty of animals might be able to eat their vaccines, one that can't is vampire bats. Lucky for us, there's a new method that might help us vaccinate whole colonies of vampire bats without needing a bajillion needles. All you need is Vaseline.

Mendeleev's original, 1869 version of the Periodic Table featured 63 elements. Now, there are 118. But as scientists worked to extend the Table (and fill in a bunch of holes), not every discovery turned out to be real.

From the non-bubonic plague that killed a Welsh king, to the deadliest pestilence in 16th century Mexico, to a pandemic we're currently in the middle of (No, it's not coronavirus), here are 7 disease outbreaks spanning roughly 25,000 years of human history that you probably haven't heard of.

If you're old enough to remember the Concorde (whether or not you ever flew in one), you might also be wondering why engineers haven't gotten around to developing an even faster commercial aircraft. Something hypersonic, which could get you from LA to Tokyo in something like 2 hours. Well, there's a reason, or several, so let's break it down.

If you ever complained about having nothing to do as a kid, our mom may have told you that being bored is good for you. And it turns out, she was right.... mostly. There's more than one kind of boredom, and they're both pretty different. Hopefully this video doesn't bore you.

Fossilized poop might seem gross, but coprolites give us critical information about how animals lived millions of years ago.

Accents: Everybody has one. They usually tell us something about where a person is from, or what languages they speak. But there's one accent that is so new that nobody really knows why it happened. This is how a bunch of researchers in Antarctica accidentally innovated their own shared accent, and what it tells us about our brains.

If you've ever done a personality test or read a horoscope and thought, it seemed scary accurate, you may have fallen for something called a Barnum Profile. There's a psychological trick that makes us all vulnerable to personality tests, so let's get into the real science behind personality testing.

Thousands of years ago, some people carved a huge camel into a rock in the Arabian peninsula. Not only has that carving doubled the amount of time we think humans were living in the region… it might also help crack a prehistoric climate mystery.

Death Cap mushrooms are notoriously poisonous. But now they're colonizing new homes and evolving new toxins!

In a special sliver of the Namib Desert, where there's just the right amount of rain, you'll find a spectacular, almost artistic natural phenomenon: fairy circles. Scientists have been arguing with each other for decades about what causes them. But it turns out the Namib isn't the only place where you can find them, which complicated things even more.

We've all got that one cousin who doesn't look like the rest of the family, and our ancestors were no exception. Meet Paranthropus, the group of hominins so strange that researchers nicknamed one of them Nutcracker Man. Here's the whole story of our weirdest looking ancestors.

From starling flocks, to fish schools, to human mosh pits, plenty of animals start moving weird when there's enough to form a swarm. And both physicists and biologists are still trying to work out exactly how it all works.

Money makes the world go round. But did you ever think about what those coins in your cup holder might tell future researchers about you? Turns out, the change in our pockets bears a lot of clues about us as people, and it has for a while. Here are a few things that modern researchers have learned about ancient people just by looking at their money.

Kratom, tianeptine, phenibut, synthetic THC, and tadalafil may seem harmless since you can buy them at your local gas station. But sometimes the consequences are deadly.

The island of Madagascar is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But is isn't just because it's isolated. All that diversity also stems from its unique geological past, including getting ripped off of not one, but two separate continents!

The ONE Disease That Smoking Can Help Treat

Although they form in an instant when lightning strikes, fulgurites are critical clues to how the world changed over thousands of years. Hosted by: Reid Reimers (he/him)

You might think your risk of cancer goes up as you get older, but that's not completely true. Among the very oldest people, the risk of cancer actually goes down. Scientists may finally have discovered why. Hosted by: Hank Green (he/him)

Conventional wisdom holds that the huge variety of dogs is just the result of humans breeding them to be that way. But new research suggests that dogs have been weird from the start. Hosted by: Madelyn Leembruggen (she/her)

Humanity's relationship with the bubonic plague is over 5000 years old. That's right, it didn't just suddenly appear (and then disappear) during the infamous Black Death. In fact, you could still catch The Plague, today! Although the bacteria that cause it could give you a different kind of plague, instead... Hosted by: Madelyn Leembruggen (she/her)

These are the most cited papers in materials science, computer science, physics, biology, and chemistry. Learn why graphene, deep residual learning, generalized gradient approximation, SDS-PAGE, and the Lowry assay are so popular. Hosted by: Madelyn Leembruggen (she/her)

How many numbers do we need to describe reality? If you're a particle physicist, it currently hovers around 30, describing things like the mass of the electron or the strength of gravity. But some physicists think you can go even lower: to just three...or even more radically, ZERO. What are these numbers, and why are the rest so unimportant? Hosted by: Madelyn Leembruggen (she/her)

Scientists had figured out the biology and chemistry of how onions make you cry. But there was one thing they left out: Physics. Using an onion guillotine, they have finally solved the puzzle. Hosted by: Hank Green (he/him)

It's probably not a surprise that an important glacier is shrinking. But Thwaites Glacier is shrinking in complicated ways (did someone say underwater hurricanes??). Those are processes we need to understand if we want to keep Thwaites Glacier around and prevent doomsday-style sea level rise. Hosted by: Madelyn Leembruggen (she/her)

We know humans evolved in Africa. But that's a big place, so do we know where on this massive continent our ancestors first became, well, us? Let's unpack the evidence by talking about the oldest known lineage of humans and track their and our migration all across Africa and the world. Hosted by: Reid Reimers (he/him)

Today, there are multiple nuclear submarines on the bottom of the ocean floor with the potential to leak radioactive material. But how much damage will that cause? Learn about the K-27, K-159, K-278, K-129, Kursk, and Guitarro. Hosted by: Hank Green (he/him)