PBS_ItsOKToBeSmart

Bees and flowers have an amazingly close relationship. Flowers need bees in order to reproduce, and bees need flowers to feed their colonies. Take away one, and the other would disappear too. It begs the question: When it comes to evolution, which came first, the bees or the flowers?

It’s one of the most annoying sensations our bodies can feel, but does anything feel better than when you scratch an itch? Ok, maybe *some* things. But itching and scratching are up there. How does this weird sensation work? And what is itching for?

How successful are we compared to other species? It turns out that biomass, or what things weigh, can be more important than how many of something there are. Find out how our numbers stack up against everything from bugs to bacteria, and get ready for some mind-blowing numbers!

Plants are the most important source of nutrients for pretty much all of Earth's animals, and many of the planet's bacteria and fungi too. Humans like them so much that we line them up in salad bars so we can feast upon their crunchy cronch by the plate full.

when the pyramids were built, the ancient Egyptians hadn’t invented the wheel, developed bronze tools, or discovered pi. How were they able to stack two million stone blocks, each weighing more than two tons, into precise geometric alignments that would survive more than 4,000 years and capture the imaginations of explorers throughout history? They did it the same way we always have: by trial and

The world's deadliest animal may be closer than you think.

Love is a complicated combination of brain chemicals and behavior that scientists are only just beginning to figure out. And it's remarkable that in every society that we have looked at on Earth, romantic love exists. So if love is so universal, and there are 7 billion other people out there looking for it, why can it seem like it's so hard to find?

Why do we sleep? We spend a third of our lives in slumber, but science has yet to determine exactly why we have do it. Here’s a look at how sleep works, why we’re not getting enough sleep, what happens if you DON’T sleep, and an idea about where sleep came from in the first place.

How can simple sound waves cause so much emotion? I went from my comfy chair to the streets of Austin to investigate how it might be written into our neuroscience and evolution. Modern neuroscience says our brains may be wired to pick certain emotions out of music because they remind us of how people move!

Most of us have felt it before, that strange sensation that you’ve been somewhere or seen something before, as if you already remembered what’s happening. Are you psychic? Nope, that’s just déjà vu. Why does déjà vu happen? Well, scientists aren’t completely sure, but they’ve got a few good theories about it.

A look at the science behind pigeons.

It's been one (tropical/sidereal/anomalous) year since I uploaded the very first It's Okay To Be Smart. Here's everything that's happened since!

How does memory work? And how does… un-memory work? Our brain does a lot of remembering and forgetting every day, so you should probably make room for som info on how it works. You’ll also get to meet some people who can’t make memories, and also never forget anything.

Is overpopulation real? Is Earth filling up with too many humans? How many people can Earth hold, anyway? As our species approaches 8 billion, human overpopulation is a major concern for many people. How can we reduce poverty and our impact on the environment? Do we need a forced one-child policy or something? Maybe not, because when we look at the science and history, populations seem to control

We know more about some other planets than we do about the deepest corners of Earth's oceans, and the species we've found there are almost alien. Here's some of the most unbelievable oddities ever observed! Special thanks to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) for help with this video!

If you sometimes feel scared and are ashamed of it after, don’t be. It is a good thing. It means that you are alive and all of your ancestors successfully avoided death at least for a while. It also means that you come from a very long line of people who are good at being scared. Grab your chair folks, this is a story of sound, science and fear. Fans of scary movies know that there are primarily two was movies use sound to scare you: your jump right off the corner trick, or, use sound to set a generally more frightening mood. If sound is nothing more than vibrations, what is about our biology that makes only some of them so scary? And we are not talking about that creepy kind of scary that grabs you slowly with its cold ethereal hands. That slow fear only happens when your higher brain functions take over. Here we are talking about instant fear, the <a href="https://rumble.com/v4i5bd-having-snow-much-fun-dog-filled-with-snow-much-fear-pooch-wont-chill-out-be.html" target="_blank">fear</a> that is built into our very biology. So why do we get scared in the first place? Easy. So we could live long enough to reproduce. If you want to avoid being a lion’s dinner you have to think fast. Luckily, sound moves faster than sight. Wasn’t this the other way round? Yes, in physics, but not in our biology – our <a href="https://rumble.com/v35ury-carbs-make-your-brain-shrink.html" target="_blank">brain</a> gets in the line first. Despite the fact that light travels faster than sound, our brains take much longer to process that light into an image. A millisecond too long for us to react. So, we are wired to have sound as the first alarm. And what happens then? We wouldn’t want to spoil your fun by saying anything more! Grab yourselves a cup of coffee and enjoy the rest of the video!

Why does February only get 28 days when all the other months get 30 or 31? The answer is part superstition, part politics, and parts astronomy. Basically, it’s the Romans’ fault.

For some forms of live, old-age is relative.

Do you ever talk to your dog? Do they ever talk back? Humans and dogs have a truly amazing relationship, developed along an evolutionary journey that goes back nearly 10,000 years. Do they really understand what we say, think, and feel? Recent research suggests dogs know more about our language and emotions than you might think.

It may sometimes seem like things are getting worse, but there’s lots of reasons to be optimistic about the future. More people have access to toilets and sanitation than ever before. Thanks to public health improvements like this, since 1990, 122 million children’s lives have been saved. Diseases like polio are nearing eradication. Women have more access to health care and education than ever bef

Honeycomb. Strawberries. Flower pods. Some people find these things incredibly scary. We call this extreme fear trypophobia. But why does it exist?

No astronauts were harmed in the making of this video.

From spirals to spots to fractals, nature is full of interesting patterns. Many of these patterns even resemble geometric shapes. One of the most common? Hexagons. Why do we see this six-sided shape occur so many times in nature? This week we explore why hexagons are so common in the natural world, from honeycomb to bubbles to rocks, and what their mathematics, physics, and biology may have in com

Got a bad habit you just can’t seem to break? That’s because it’s literally wired into your brain. Every single thought, action, and feeling changes your brain. When repeated enough times, a habit is formed. This week we’ll talk about how an advertiser in the early 1900s got half of Americans to pick up a new behavior - and make it a habit we all know today.

Dorothy went over one. LeVar Burton read to us under one. In a song, Kermit the Frog connected us to one. Even Mork's suspenders were made of them. Our culture, and our skies, are full of rainbows, but do you know how they form? Do we all see the same rainbow? Could cyborg-enhanced mantis shrimp eyes ever see a bigger rainbow?