There was a lot of bad stuff going on in Europe in the 17th century. We've seen wars, plagues, and unrest of all types. But, there is some good news. Huge advances were underway in the scientific community in Europe at this time. In this...

Hank brings you the SciShow news of the week. Recent record high temperatures and other extreme weather events around the world are climate change in action; a new fossil of an ancient human ancestor; some disturbing discoveries about...

From Ancient Greece to the 20th century, Aristotle, Freud, and numerous other scholars were all looking for the same thing: eel testicles. Freshwater eels could be found in rivers across Europe, but no one had ever seen them mate and no...

In eastern Europe, in the 17th century a couple of "great powers" were coming into their own. The vast empire of Russia was modernizing under Peter the Great, and the relatively tiny state of Prussia was evolving as well. Russia (and...

By studying population-level epidemiological trends, researchers have noticed that an old vaccine for tuberculosis may provide some protection against COVID-19.

We've spent a lot of time focusing on France and the U.S. as that's where a significant amount of both infrastructure and business models were initially set up for film. But there were other countries adding their own stories to the...

We're at a unique moment in history, says UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown: we can use today's interconnectedness to develop our shared global ethic -- and work together to confront the challenges of poverty, security, climate change and...

Taking lessons from a historical pattern called "Thucydides's Trap," political scientist Graham Allison shows why a rising China and a dominant United States could be headed towards a violent collision no one wants -- and how we can...

We are embarrassingly unaware of how divided our societies are, and Brexit grew out of a deep, unexamined divide between those that fear globalization and those that embrace it, says social scientist Alexander Betts. How do we now...

In 1165, copies of a strange letter began to circulate throughout Europe. It spoke of a fantastical realm, containing the Tower of Babel and the Fountain of Youth— all ruled over by the letter’s mysterious author: Prester John. Who was...

Here's something to think about the next time you clean your windshield.

The European Renaissance may have started in Florence, but it pretty quickly moved out of Italy and spread the art, architecture, literature, and humanism across Europe to places like France, Spain, England, and the Low Countries....

Until roughly 1100, there were relatively few places of knowledge-making. Monasteries and abbeys had special rooms called scriptoria where monks copied manuscripts by hand. But the biggest places where knowledge was made were the Gothic...

Got milk? Fact is, most people don't -- and shouldn't -- because for them, ice cream and milkshakes are basically toxic. So why can some people drink milk and survive? Turns out they're mutants! SciShow explains.

Greece has been the poster child for European economic crisis, but former Prime Minister George Papandreou wonders if it's just a preview of what's to come. “Our democracies," he says, "are trapped by systems that are too big to fail, or...

What makes a book a book? Is it just anything that stores and communicates information? Or does it have to do with paper, binding, font, ink, its weight in your hands, the smell of the pages? To answer these questions, Julie Dreyfuss...

As the Roman Empire flourished, Scandinavians had small settlements and no central government. Yet by the 11th century, they had spread far from Scandinavia, gaining control of trade routes throughout Europe, conquering kingdoms as...

Artists are notorious for pouring their heart and soul into their work, but historically, they also put some of their literal body parts into it as well!

Tour the deep dark world of the East German state security agency known as Stasi. Uniquely powerful at spying on its citizens, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the Stasi masterminded a system of surveillance and psychological...

In this bracing talk, coral reef ecologist Jeremy Jackson lays out the shocking state of the ocean today: overfished, overheated, polluted, with indicators that things will get much worse. Astonishing photos and stats make the case.

The 17th Century in Europe was pretty rough in a lot of ways. The Thirty Years War involved a lot of countries, and a lot of battles, and it was terrible for everyone involved, as wars have aa historical tendency to be. At the same time,...

New information has helped us understand where domestic horses came from. And by counting some tree rings, researchers were able to find evidence of Norse presence in the Americas in 1021 CE.

Though we probably won’t find a literal Atlantis beneath the sea, that doesn’t mean that a human settlement hasn’t ever been lost to the water. Meet Doggerland.

There is a mind-boggling amount of data floating around our society. Physicists at CERN have been pondering how to store and share their ever more massive data for decades - stimulating globalization of the internet along the way, whilst...