JUDY WOODRUFF: Mushroom hunters have fanned out across forest floors for hundreds of years searching for what can be lucrative and delicious finds. But is climate change affecting these fungi? From the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, Melanie Porter found weather change, at least, isn’t all bad news for these foragers. WOMAN: […]
Ouch! What do you think you’re doing? The idea of talking trees has been capturing the human imagination for generations. Did you say something? My bark is worse than my bite. Okay, so maybe they don’t talk to us, but it turns out, trees can “talk” to each other. The trees are speaking to each […]
I’m in a wood, a rather pretty wood. And a rather special kind of wood. But more about that later. First, let me talk about a persistent myth, which is that Britain and Europe were a sort of forest. A great big forest until the agricultural and/or industrial revolution. No, they weren’t. This has been […]
New research has revealed that fungi—you know, like mushrooms—barter and trade with other organisms like little stockbrokers. Basically, there’s a whole economy of nutrients right beneath our feet that we are just uncovering. And yes, it can be pronounced either fun-guy or fun-gee, don’t even start, and their classification has been difficult, to say the […]
Captions on! Click CC to turn off. Over time, we’ve gotten some comments asking about our channel name like…why we picked amoebas and what is an amoeba anyway? Well, it turns out amoebas are easy to draw, and we are sisters so our channel name seemed…practical. Kind of. Now, we don’t really resemble real life […]
The internet connects more than half of the world’s population through an invisible web of servers, computers, and devices. It has changed our lives in countless ways by allowing otherwise separated people to interact and by providing access to vast amounts of information. But humans aren’t the only organisms on the planet with an invisible […]
Taxonomy! It’s the science of classifying living things. That sounds exciting. Today we’ll basically be learning the Dewey Decimel System of evolution! It’s like filing! You must be on the edge of your seat. OK, shut up. When it comes down to it, this science doesn’t just categorize organisms, when you look a little deeper, […]
Trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi live on or inside of us, and maintaining a good, balanced relationship with them is to our advantage. Together, they form the gut microbiome, a rich ecosystem that performs a variety of functions in our bodies. The bacteria in our guts can break down food the body can’t digest, […]
Hello and welcome to the wonderful world of fungi (fuhn-gahy), or fungi (fuhn-jahy). Both are acceptable pronunciations. But I say fungi because it’s fungus. Not fun-jus. Though fun-jus is also fun to say. Fungi are a little bit like plants, and more like animals than you might think. They diverged from protists about a billion […]
What if I told you that, more than two billion years ago, some tiny living thing started to live inside another living thing … and never left? And now, the descendants of both of those things are in you? Well, brace yourselves, because I gotta tell you about one of the biggest breakthroughs in the […]
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