Witness what one commenter calls “a comically absurd amount of tumbleweeds” as they blow across a desert road. The gathering of spiny skeletal balls was captured on a phone cam by Tim Tower while he was driving in Owyhee County, Idaho in 2014. He writes, “This was just after a ‘snow’ plow made a path down the center of the road.” Suspenseful music completes the moment.
When we think of a desolate plain or a foreboding frontier town in the wild west, we might think of the iconic tumbleweed rolling through the scene. Or they might roll through as a joke. But for people who live in dry...
See a kidney bean plant germinate, spreading its roots and sprouting up and up with its undulating green leaves, in this time-lapse by YouTuber GPhase. Each shot is captured 9 minutes 36 seconds apart at 30 frames per...
Endemic to the Namib Desert, shovel-snouted lizards (Meroles anchietae) have learned how to survive in extreme conditions. They are fast, able to run at over 91.5 cm/3 feet per second. When they rest, they must carefu...
Who might you find drinking from a water bucket in the desert heat of southwest Texas? John Wells of The Field Lab, an experiment in sustainable off-the-grid living, found bees, birds, chickens, and other animal faces...
Brass wire and liquid plastic flutter open and close like flowers in time lapse, driven by motorized mechanisms within the wooden scaffolding below. Bequeath These Seeds was created by kinetic sculptor Casey Curran fo...
Giant sequoias, the planet's largest trees and among the oldest living things on Earth—many of the largest are over 3,000 years old—depend on fire to help them reproduce. Learn how a destructive force is necessary for...
Death Valley is the driest place in the United States and is known as the hottest place on Earth (though there are places that are hotter). On top of that, average rainfall is less than 2 inches (5 cm). How can a plac...
On the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault protects around 865,000 seed samples from all over the world. Most of those seeds are of staple crops. "There are nearly 160,000 samples of wheat,...
Can we pull enough water out of the air to sustain drought-stricken places around the planet? It might help to Think Like A Tree... or a Namib Desert Beetle called the Stenocara gracilipes, who harvests water from the...
"Every single picture of the solar system that we ever encounter is not to scale. If you put the orbits to scale on a piece of paper, the planets become microscopic and you won't be able to see them. There is literall...
Search & enjoy 4,000+ smart & super-cool, “not-made-for-kids, but perfect for them” videos in the classroom or together at home, curated by Rion Nakaya with her 7 & 10 year olds. Click play and start a conversation.
