Be Smart

There’s a lot of confusion out there about what is and isn’t a dinosaur. And you’d be forgiven for being kinda confused. Well, like an intrepid fossil hunter, we set out to dig up an answer, and what we found teaches us a lesson about how hard it is to build a picture of the past when you only have a few puzzle pieces and a lot about why we classify things the way we do.

The largest pterosaurs like Quetzalcoatlus were closer in size to airplanes than birds. No flying animal alive today comes close to their huge size. So did giant pterosaurs actually fly? I went to see the fossil bones of the largest pterosaur that ever lived so I could learn how these winged giants actually took to the skies.

Viruses keep jumping out of nature and into humans and getting us very sick in the process. So why do zoonotic spillovers like SARS-CoV-2 happen, and why are they becoming more frequent? We asked an expert.

Learn about this Nature Challenge.

Invisible, mysterious, and deadly — SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 have spread around the world and caused much of humanity to hide away. Germs like these only succeed and spread because of our social evolution, and our social nature is why social and physical distancing is so deeply painful for us. But evolution has also given us the gifts we need to survive this difficult time. Here's how.

Celebrating 30 years of the Hubble Space Telescope.

I’ve explained a lot of weird bodily functions on this show but there’s one that we haven’t covered that’s always confused me: Tickling. What are you for, tickling? What’s the point of you? Why do you exist? Why do you make us laugh even though we hate you? Let’s dig into our evolutionary past to try and find an answer.

One of the most effective things you can do to protect yourself from catching a germ and becoming a statistic, whether it’s a global pandemic like COVID-19 or just every single other day of your life, is something that people have been trying to get you to do since you were like 2. Wash your hands. With good ol’ soap. And do it the right way. That’s it. Here’s the science of handwashing!

Stay informed. Stay cautious, but not scared. Listen to scientists and public health officials and follow their guidance. By protecting yourself, you’re protecting the most vulnerable among us. Together we can flatten the curve on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2.

Daylight saving time is a perfect example of how a few people with the best of intentions can end up annoying millions of the rest of us for the better part of a century. And it’s time we take an honest look at how we got to this place where half the world comes unstuck in time twice a year, and ask if the supposed advantages for springing forward and falling back still hold up!

If the sun instantly switched off like a light bulb–which can’t happen, by the way–then we wouldn’t know for almost 8 and a half minutes. Light travels at the fastest speed there is, but it still takes almost 500 seconds to get to Earth. But the most amazing thing about the sunlight we see is it’s actually SUPER old. How is that possible? Because of the physics and mathematics of random walks.

Within an hour of a baby giraffe being born, it’s standing, walking, and nursing on its own. Human babies on the other hand? We’re born unable to move or eat on our own, we can’t communicate or fully sense our world, and we leak EVERYWHERE. If humans are so smart, why are our babies so… un-smart? You may think it’s all about head size, but the real science is more complex.