With many of our cities lying along coasts and waterways and with sea levels projected to rise in the future, keeping these land masses from going under is a major concern. Emily Elert of MinuteEarth says many nations have already devised quick fixes for the dilemma, such as “thirsty concrete,” which can absorb 600 liters of water per square liter and funneling it away, and floating homes.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Autumn can be called our transitional month, ushering in mild temperatures, the holidays and the magical transformation of our deciduous trees and shrubs. The splendor of gold- and russet-colored leaves as trees prepare to bare their branches, gives us a fall spectacle like no other, prompting MinuteEarth host Henry Reich to say, “They are the world’s prettiest recycling plants.” But have you ever wondered why the leaves change color? Reich gives us a thorough scientific explanation.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Aging isn’t as universally a fact of life as we think. Naked mole rats, lobsters and rock fish, for instance, seem to stay forever young, or at least middle-aged. Says Henry Reich of MinuteEarth, “Their anti-aging secret may have to do with their ability to rebuild the DNA caps on their chromosomes. These caps, called telomeres, are one line of defense in many species.” But all these critters, including humans of course, will ultimately meet their end, because it’s possible to be immune to aging but not to death.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Are we really 99 percent chimp? Science tells us there are similarities in our tangled genetic make-up, but there are plenty of mismatches, too. “We share 99 percent of our DNA with chimps if we ignore 19 percent of their genome and 25 percent of ours,” Emily Elert says. She sorts the numbers in this edition of Minute Earth.
ARVE error: need id and provider
A touch of salt, a speck of soot, a grain of clay. Believe it or not, microscopic portions of one of these is present in every drop of rain. And they are also absolutely crucial to the existence of rain. Without these small pieces of dirt, there would be no rain at all.. Join Emily Elert in this edition of MinuteEarth.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Extreme weather, snowmaggedon and polar vortex are terms that have dominated your local weather channels. But MinuteEarth tells us that rain or shine, our minds tend to prize their freshest impressions. “Even when we experience the same weird weather events as other people, we don’t always agree on how weird they were,” says host Emily Elert. Even politics plays a major role.
ARVE error: need id and provider
It’s safe to say our relationship with the moon is pretty one-sided–literally. Because it rotates exactly once on its axis each time it orbits Earth, we always see the same old side of the moon. Fact is, the first time we saw the far side of the moon was when Russian satellite Luna III beamed back images in 1959. Join Henry Reich as he discusses the moon’s evolution and how it settled into its current orbit in this edition of MinuteEarth.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Henry Reich tells us that the poorest places on the planet can also be the richest. Although this is especially prevalent in nature, it can also apply to the human landscape. “In nature, as in human society, plenty of resources doesn’t necessarily translate into ‘everyone gets plenty,'” Reich says. He gets into the nuts and bolts about why poor places are more diverse in this edition of MinuteEarth.
ARVE error: need id and provider
It was a mystery to geologists why our continents drifted about the planet, occasionally glomming together then breaking apart. Not until the 1960s was it discovered that the Earth’s crust is broken down into fragments called tectonic plates–and they are moving. Host Henry Reich explains the fundamentals of this phenomenon in this edition of MinuteEarth.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Lord William Thompson Kelvin, of absolute temperature fame, attempted and failed to determine why the heat of the Earth increased exponentially the deeper you descended. He theorized that Earth actually started off hot and had been cooling off ever since. Unfortunately for Kelvin, he failed to factor in radioactivity in the Earth’s core. In this edition of MinuteEarth, Emily Elert digs deeply into what really keeps the Earth’s core toasty.
ARVE error: need id and provider
