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.

Plants are amazing. Really! Photosynthesis is an incredible thing. But it also means that some plants can't live everywhere. They need to get the right amount of sunlight for the right amount of time. In this episode of Crash Course...

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 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...

Soviet agronomist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was obsessed with plants. Especially finding out where domesticated crops first came from. And out of his research came a proposal that certain crops, like rye and oats, were evolutionary...

How did ants take over the world? Well, it looks like they didn’t achieve world domination all by themselves. They may have just been riding the wave of a totally different evolutionary explosion.

To get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.

There was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our ancestors. Our paths ran beside each other - and potentially even crossed at times - but...

The rise of the Himalayas affected more than just the immediate area. Turns out, we may have them to thank for everything from the rise of giant flightless birds in Madagascar; to the disappearance of plants from Antarctica; to the...

Plants eat sunlight and air to make life. But the key enzyme behind it all, called RuBisCO, isn’t actually all that great at its job. Let’s talk about how photosynthesis really works, why oxygen isn’t coming from where you think, and...

China's Red Beach is a stunningly beautiful tourist destination. But the plants that make Red Beach red are hiding a secret -- one that could save other wetlands, if we can save this one first. <br<br/>/>

Hosted by: Stefan Chin (he/him)

Adding sand to beaches sounds like it's an oxymoronic thing to do, but it's totally a thing. And there's some major benefits, like protecting our coastlines from storms and conserving ecosystems. But there are also some major...

Trees are dead inside. It's true: the xylem tissue that supports their trunks technically isn't alive. Archaeologists hate that because this problem, the old wood problem, can cause carbon dating to be off by hundreds of...

Everywhere you look on Earth, you’ll find wonderful and diverse living things, from tiny tardigrades to soaring sequoias. And incredibly, everything alive today, and everything that’s ever lived, is related. In this episode of Crash...

Scott Loarie has a challenge for you: go outside and take a picture of a living thing. He introduces the global community of people building a living atlas of the natural world by sharing their nature photos with scientists — and shows...

Could the key to a sustainable food system already be growing in the world's farms? Plant scientist Giles E.D. Oldroyd explores how a special quirk of soybean plants allows them to naturally partner with networks of fungi and bacteria to...

Plants can tell when competitors are nearby because they can see them.

We've long known that animal pollination is an important way plants reproduce on land, but we're only just finding out animals also pollinate plants underwater.

Humans have known about the toxicity of death cap mushrooms for millennia. Yet they continue to pose a significant threat to unsuspecting foragers and mushroom hunters throughout the world. Today, death caps are responsible for more than...

Over his decades of farming and ranching, Gabe Brown has noticed a troubling trend: the conventional farming techniques he used were degrading the soil and harming nature. He shares how his family farm turned things around by adopting...

What we eat is less about what we choose and more about what’s offered to us, says food and climate expert Sarah Lake. Unpacking how governments and companies have driven up meat consumption in the US through extensive marketing, she...

How Our Honey is Made

So, what's the difference between 'weather' and 'severe weather'? Is it just how hard the wind is blowing? Is it just thunder and lighting? Well, it can be some or all of those things. In this episode of Crash Course Kids, Sabrina talks...