In which Stan Muller subs for John Green and teaches you about energy and humanity. Today we discuss the ideas put forth by Alfred Crosby in his book, Children of the Sun. Historically, almost all of the energy that humans use has been...

So... do plants need dirt? The truth might shock you. In this episode of Crash Course kids, Sabrina talks about how plants get energy and how that energy is transported around them. Also, she talks about dirt.

So we know what life needs here to work, and we've talked a little about what life COULD look like on other planets. But what about plant life? What could plant life look like on other planets? In this episode of Crash Course Kids,...

Have you ever wondered if there is anyone (or anything) else out there in the universe? Well, you're not alone. But what would alien life look like? And what would their food chains and food webs look like? In this episode of Crash...

Have you ever seen a magic trick where one thing changes to another thing? Well, that's nothing compared to what plants can do through a process called photosynthesis. In this episode, Sabrina talks about how photosynthesis works! This...

There's a list of the 500 most powerful computers on Earth, and we're downloading the details on the top five.

Energy expert Sebastián Kind helped Argentina go from virtually no renewable energy to generating nearly 40 percent of its electricity from wind and solar in just six years, despite economic crises and skepticism. How did the country's...

Clean energy visionary Lei Zhang loves the Gobi Desert — the most Mars-like place on Earth. Why? Because of the promise it holds to provide the free, abundant solar and wind energy to fuel humanity’s next leap forward. Sharing the story...

In 2014, the world’s second largest coal consumer made a bold promise: to increase its solar capacity from three gigawatts to 100 gigawatts in just eight years. Many people called it overly ambitious, but energy expert Kanika Chawla saw...

Impact investor and Acumen CEO Jacqueline Novogratz unveils a bold vision to bring off-grid solar electricity to 700 million people still living in darkness, transforming lives while slashing emissions. She asks a thought-provoking...

Around 2 billion years ago, life had plateaued in complexity, ruined the atmosphere, and was on the verge of self-annihilation. But then something strange and potentially extremely lucky happened that enabled endless new evolutionary...

Big things are made of smaller things, and those smaller things are made of smaller things still. That’s reductionism in a nutshell, and digging our way to the smallest layer has been one of the primary goals of physics for ever. But...

They say fusion is 50 years away, no matter when you ask. Then why are billions suddenly being pumped into fusion startups? Yes to train LLMs, but there's a reason the technobrats are bullish on fusion in particular. The fact is, the...

Life’s been around on Earth for at least 3.7 billion years. But for most of that time, it was incredibly boring — just simple little cells squirming around in water. It only got interesting in the last few hundred million years. And that...

Over 200 years ago, scientists were looking at sunlight through a prism when they noticed that part of the rainbow was missing. There were dark lines where there should have been colors. Since then, scientists have unlocked the secrets...

Biology is the study of life—a four-letter word that connects you to 4 billion years worth of family tree. The word “life” can be tricky to define, but a shared set of characteristics helps biologists identify living things. In this...

It's no secret that we need green energy solutions. But one often-overlooked part of that future is the need to store our green energy longer-term, so finding novel ways to store that energy is key. Enter: gravity...

Yellowstone National Park is one of the most famous tourist destinations and nature reserves in the world. And it's also the perfect place for.... geothermal power plants? Let's talk about the weird reason why NASA is all for building...

Correction: This is Watt's law, not Ohm's law! Our math was right but our name was wrong.



We need green energy yesterday. And it so happens that nature regularly sends huge bolts of electricity at us out of the sky. So what...

Fluorescence isn't just a cool effect that turns your white T-shirt neon purple under a black light. Its discovery opened our eyes to a whole new field of science and engineering. And it's all thanks to a crystal called fluorite....

Low-E windows have reduced the amount of energy required to heat and cool our buildings, a critical step in fighting climate change. But new research suggests we've lost something beneficial in the process.



Hosted by: Hank...

It's impossible to have something colder than absolute zero...right? That's why it's called "absolute zero". Well, it turns out you can get certain substances to negative absolute temperatures (e.g. -1 Kelvin)...but in order to do so,...

Photosynthesis is a powerful process that is responsible for some of life’s most vital functions. In fact, consumers like us rely on photosynthetic producers to harness energy from the sun so that we can survive and thrive. In this...

Cells need energy to power the chemical reactions that keep their microscopic cities running, and most of that energy comes from a chemical called ATP. In this episode of Crash Course Biology, we’ll learn how our cells use energy, what...