When your partner moves in - Many life forms live in partnership with other organisms. The cooperative relationship is called symbiosis. Sometimes, one of the cooperating creatures lives inside of the other, even inside the cells.

The tickle me plant - Today, we talk about another fast moving plant, called mimosa pudica, AKA. Shame plant, shy plant, touch me not, or the tickle me plant. This little plant will curl up its leaves when they are touched. -

By request, the Venus flytrap - We move and eat via our nerves and muscles, but there are some plants that have no nerves and no muscles, and yet they still move and eat. Today, we talk about the Venus flytrap, and how it why it does what it does.

DNA that does nothing? - It seems that most of our DNA is dormant. It doesn’t encode for protein production. Some of this supposedly dormant DNA has recently been shown to have important functionality, but there still seems to be much more information...

Not how we’d do it - Evolution creates designs in ways that human engineers probably wouldn’t. We probably wouldn’t use eyes to grow a brain, or pseudo-gill-slits to grow a face, but evolution does.

When eyes are a problem - Sometimes, evolution can take it back. Many cave dwelling animals have lost their eyes. Theories as to why this happen range from genetic drift, to mutations that improve other senses interfering with the proper development o...

Be afraid - Sometimes, you feel like something is wrong. Most of the time, it’s just a feeling; it doesn’t mean anything. But, every now and then, something is wrong, you really are in danger, you really should be afraid. -

Eyes - “ To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances… could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree… Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and c...

The Cambrian explosion - Between 520 and 550 million years ago, a sudden explosion of animal types appear in the fossil record. This example of rapid evolution is known as the Cambrian explosion. Theories of how and why it occurred range from the noti...

We’re upside-down? - In today’s rather short episode, we talk about the first creatures to have developed a centralized nervous system, though not a central nervous system as of yet. It was a simple worm like creature,