MinuteEarth

By Minute EarthScience Earth Sciences

MinuteEarth episodes

January 29, 2025Why Is Poop Brown And Pee Yellow?
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Red blood cells (RBCs), also called erythrocytes, are the most common type of blood cell and the vertebrate's principal means of delivering oxygen
Hemoglobin also spelled haemoglobin and abbreviated Hb or Hgb, is the iron-containing oxygen-transport metalloprotein in the red blood cells of all vertebrates as well as the tissues of some invertebrates.
Bilirubin is a yellow compound that occurs in the normal catabolic pathway that breaks down heme in vertebrates.
Urobilinogen is a colourless by-product of bilirubin reduction. It is formed in the intestines by bacterial action on bilirubin. About half of the urobilinogen formed is reabsorbed and taken up via the portal vein to the liver, enters circulation and is excreted by the kidney.
Urobilin or urochrome is the chemical primarily responsible for the yellow color of urine.
Stercobilin is the chemical responsible for the brown color of human feces.

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4 min
January 28, 2025Should We Grow Human Organs In Pigs?
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Organ transplantation - surgically transferring an organ from one person into another.
Xenotransplantation - transplanting organs between members of different species.
Transplant rejection - when the organ recipient’s immune system destroys transplanted tissue.
Pluripotent stem cells - embryonic cells that can give rise to all the different types of cells that make up the body.
CRISPR - a genome editing tool that allows scientists to modify genes in living cells.

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4 min
January 27, 2025Why Don't Americans Eat Reindeer?
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Reindeer - the smaller, (semi-)domesticated version/subspecies of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus)
Caribou - the wild, north American subspecies of Rangifer tarandus (Rangifer tarandus granti and others).
Wild reindeer - the wild, European/Asian subspecies of Rangifer tarandus.
Herding - bringing animals together into a group, maintaining the group, and moving the group from place to place
Rain-on-snow event - exactly what it sounds like! Rain that falls on snow, freezes into a thick layer of impenetrable ice over pastures, and causes mass starvation of reindeer (or caribou).

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3 min
January 26, 2025 Cannibal Hamsters
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2 min
January 25, 2025 Air Conditioners
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2 min
January 24, 2025How These Sea Shells Know the Weather in Greenland
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Foraminifera: a class of single-celled marine organisms – protists, not animals – that live either near the surface ("planktonic foraminifera") or on the seafloor ("benthic foraminifera"). Called forams for short.
Climate proxy: something that tells us what the climate was like in the past, such as data from the thickness of tree rings, the composition of gases trapped in ancient ice, historical human records of annual bloom times (eg the long-recorded bloom dates of cherry trees in Kyoto, Japan), or the ratios of certain stable isotopes found in shells, corals, or other biogenic substances
Oxygen-18: a stable isotope of oxygen that contains 8 protons and 10 neutrons, rather than the 8 protons and 8 neutrons of "regular" oxygen (oxygen-16). The ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in seawater (and sea shells) can be used as a proxy for the global average temperature
Ice sheet: a permanent layer of ice covering land, as found in polar regions (and as distinguished from sea ice, like the stuff that floats at the north pole in the Arctic ocean). Combined, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contain more than 99% of the total freshwater ice on Earth.

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4 min
January 23, 2025How Humans Made Malaria So Deadly
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Malaria - a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.
Parasite - an organism that benefits by living in/on a host organism and deriving nutrients at the host's expense.
Host - an organism in/on which another organism lives.
Protozoa - a group of single-celled microscopic animals (not bacteria or viruses) that includes the Plasmodium species.
Plasmodium - a genus of parasitic protozoa, many of which cause malaria in their hosts. Four species regularly infect humans: P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae, & P. ovale.
P. falciparum - the Plasmodium species that kills the most people, by causing malignant malaria, the most dangerous form of malaria.
Anopheles gambiae - a ‘complex' of at least seven species of mosquitoes that are the main vectors of P. falciparum in sub-Saharan Africa.
Species complex - a group of closely related species that look so similar that the boundaries between them are often unclear.
Hunting and gathering - depending primarily on wild foods for subsistence
Paleontology - the study of fossils and what fossils tell us about the past, about evolution, and about how humans fit into the world.

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4 min
January 22, 2025Why Only Some Monkeys Have Awesome Tails
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Prehensile Tail: An animal tail that can grasp or hold objects. A wide range of animals have prehensile tails, including mammals (like opossums and kinkajous), reptiles (like chameleons), amphibians (like salamanders), and fish (seahorses).
Old World Monkeys (Cercopithecidae): A family of primates native to Africa and Asia that includes baboons, guenons and macaques – all of which have non-prehensile tails.
New World Monkeys (Platyrrhini): A family of primates native to Central and South America that includes spider monkeys, howlers, and capuchins – all of which have prehensile tails.
Prehensile tails evolved twice in new world monkeys: In atelines (spider monkey and howlers) the prehensile tail tip is like a finger and incredibly dextrous. In cebines (capuchin monkeys) the tip is furry and not quite as dextrous.

*Species featured in this video:
Spider Monkey (and Diddy Kong!)
Ficus insipida (tripical fig tree)
Barbary Macaque (from Northern Africa)
Rhesus Macaque(from India)
Opossum
Chameleon
Salamander (Aneides lugubris)
Seahorses (actually Horsea!)

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3 min
January 21, 2025Why Are There So Many Tigers In Texas?
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Crypsis: An animal’s ability to avoid detection by other animals. Tigers use camouflage crypsis as part of their predation strategy.
Apex Predator: An animal on top of the food chain with no natural predator in its ecosystem.
Camera Trap: A motion-sensor activated camera to capture images of animals in the wild with as little human interference as possible.
Cultural Climate: Shared perceptions and attitudes in a particular area.

MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC
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If you like what we do, you can help us!
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3 min
January 20, 2025Why Do Animals Eat Their Babies?
To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
Filial cannibalism: is a form of infanticide that occurs when an adult individual of a species consumes all or part of the young of its own species or immediate offspring.

MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC
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If you like what we do, you can help us!
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4 min

About MinuteEarth

From the publisher's feed

From the creators of the popular science show with millions of YouTube subscribers comes the MinuteEarth podcast. Every episode of the show dives deep into a science question you might not even know…