PBS_ItsOKToBeSmart

What does a ginkgo tree have in common with a dinosaur?

Among living things, the color blue is oddly rare. Blue rocks, blue sky, blue water, sure. But blue animals? They are few and far between. In this video, we'll look at some very cool butterflies with Bob Robbins, Ph.D. from Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History to help us learn how living things make blue, and why this beautiful hue is so rare in nature. To understand how <a href="https://rumble.com/v4up5j-blue-spotted-stingray.html" target="_blank">blue</a> works, we need to take a look at the most colorful animals of them all - butterflies. If you didn’t already know, butterflies have evolved from moths to be able to frolic in the sun. Their wings have developed lots of different colors, ranging from earthy browns to the most spectacular blue colors. The natural occurring colors in our bodies actually come from the food that we are eating and they are usually browns, reds and yellows, so how come some people have blue eyes? The scientific explanation is that, well, they don’t. There is no real blue color in nature, rather it’s all physics. The blue hue that we are constantly mesmerised by is nothing more than refraction of blue light. The animals that have been able to produce blue coloring for their skin do it by having a complex skin structure on those parts of their body. The wings of the <a href="https://rumble.com/v31rsl-butterfly-eat.html" target="_blank">butterflies</a> have the tiniest ridges where the light is refracted and the only colored light being able to deflect is the blue light. Everything else is absorbed at the bottom of the wing and that is why nature is the greatest scientist of them all!

Most people are taught that dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago when a giant meteor crashed into the Yucatan peninsula. I’m here to tell you that’s wrong. Dinosaurs are alive and well today, and you don’t have to go to Jurassic World to see them (although hanging out with Chris Pratt would be cool).

Day by day, country by country, we tend to measure seasons differently.

The flu might feel like some minor illness that you don’t need to worry about much, but tens of thousands of people still die from it every year. And back in 1918, Flu killed up to 5% of the world’s population. Could a flu that bad happen again?

We've got two perfectly good hands attached to two perfectly good arms, so why do most people prefer to use one over the other for common tasks?

Ever not felt completely like yourself? There's a good reason for that. Because a large part of you isn't actually you. Our bodies are home to ten times as many microbes as human cells. We are walking ecosystems, each of us home to thousands of different species on and inside of us. Meet your microbiome!

…or why we live on an onion made of magma

Learn about asteroids, meteors, and comets and how they can affect earth!

Biology textbooks are full of drawings of DNA, but none of those show what DNA actually looks like. Sure, they’re good models for understanding how DNA works, but inside of real cells, it’s a whole lot more interesting. Learn why we can’t look directly at DNA, and find out how DNA is actually packed inside cells.

Why do humans cook? Holidays are celebrated in many ways, but chances are they involve eating, and eating a LOT. Ever wonder why we cook our food? We do it because it tastes good, of course, and because our customs and traditions are built around it. But we also cook our food for some basic biological reasons, because of evolution.

The amazing legacy of animal cells.

We live in one of a hundred billion of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. And now, thanks to modern astronomy, we know that the Milky Way is home to perhaps a hundred billion planets! In the past two decades, these exoplanet discoveries have spawned new questions about our universe, and if there might be another Earth, or other life, somewhere out there.

It’s okay to be… small?

How does math keep a folded slice from drooping? And what does pizza have to do with the speed of light?

SPOILERS: It doesn't end well.

Does anyone really remember what we used to do when we were bored before we had these hi-tech devices to keep us occupied? In the old days, people just had to be more creative. Next time you feel that life is going too slow, why don’t you put those idle hands to use and play with the fastest thing in the universe. Here are tree experiments that will bend light itself by using nothing but your own two hands. Try this: close one eye, look at something across the room, preferably something with a nice straight edge or interesting pattern; next, put your finger a few inches in front of your eye, focus on that object and let your eye relax until your finger and the background are slightly out of <a href="https://rumble.com/v4f5r5-iss-spacewalk-underway-robotic-arm-the-focus.html" target="_blank">focus</a>. Look what happens when you move your finger side to side: the light seems to bend around your finger. For some people, it may bend towards the finger, for some it may bend away, but in a few attempts, you should be able to do this quite easily. What is going on here? Is your finger tugging at the fabric of the universe? Well, just a bit. Everything with mass wraps space by a bit, but your finger isn’t massive enough to be noticeable unless you have a black hole in your finger. So, what happened to the <a href="https://rumble.com/v3t82j-artists-create-interactive-light-installation-in-malta.html" target="_blank">light</a> around the finger and what other light experiments are there for us? 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!

Some of the biggest evolution questions finally answered.

You may have heard that a kilogram of feathers weighs the same as a kilogram of steel, but that all depends on where you weigh them. This video is all about the difference between mass and weight, and how weirdly awesome Earth’s gravity really is.

Nuclear weapons represent the darker side of E=mc^2. Science has given us the ability to understand what will happen if these weapons are ever used again… and what will happen if they are *never* used again.

Whales are amazing animals. Since they evolved from land mammals, their biology breaks ALL the rules! Well, as whales say, rules were meant to be broken.

Joe went behind the scenes at Monterey Bay Aquarium to meet the Giant Pacific Octopus, a powerful and curious creature that challenges many of our notions of intelligence!

Some of the biggest evolution questions finally answered.

More people have food allergies than ever before. Peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, eggs, and even milk… the list of possibly dangerous foods seems to get longer every day. But why do some people’s bodies have deadly reactions food? And why are food allergies on the rise? In this video we explain what food allergies really are, and what the difference is between food allergy and food intolerance.

Why do we go to space? In the beginning of our space program, the answer had a lot to do with war and paranoia. But with the dawn of the space shuttle, that all changed. Where do we go from here?