The Best Episodes of Crash Course Biology

And thus begins the most revolutionary biology course in history. Come and learn about covalent, ionic, and hydrogen bonds. What about electron orbitals, the octet rule, and what does it all have to do with a mad man named Gilbert Lewis? It's all contained within.

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Hank teaches us why water is one of the most fascinating and important substances in the universe.

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Hank talks about the molecules that make up every living thing - carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins - and how we find them in our environment and in the food that we eat.

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Hank tells us about the city of Eukaryopolis - the animal cell that is responsible for all the cool things that happen in our bodies.

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Hank describes how cells regulate their contents and communicate with one another via mechanisms within the cell membrane.

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Hank describes why plants are so freaking amazing - discussing their evolution, and how their cells are both similar to & different from animal cells.

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In which Hank does some push ups for science and describes the "economy" of cellular respiration and the various processes whereby our bodies create energy in the form of ATP.

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Hank explains the extremely complex series of reactions whereby plants feed themselves on sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and also create some by products we're pretty fond of as well.

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Hank and his brother John discuss heredity via the gross example of relative ear wax moistness.

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Hank introduces us to that wondrous molecule deoxyribonucleic acid - also known as DNA - and explains how it replicates itself in our cells.

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Hank imagines himself breaking into the Hot Pockets factory to steal their secret recipes and instruction manuals in order to help us understand how the processes known as DNA transcription and translation allow our cells to build proteins.

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Hank describes mitosis and cytokinesis - the series of processes our cells go through to divide into two identical copies.

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Hank gets down to the nitty gritty about meiosis, the special type of cell division that is necessary for sexual reproduction in eukaryotic organisms.

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Hank guides us through the process of natural selection, the key mechanism of evolution.

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Hank explains speciation - the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise - in terms of finches, ligers, mules, and dogs.

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Hank discusses the process by which organisms grow and develop, maintaining that, in the end, we're all just tubes.

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Hank introduces us to the relatively new field of evolutionary developmental biology, which compares the developmental processes of different organisms to determine their ancestral relationship, and to discover how those processes evolved.

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Hank talks about population genetics, which helps to explain the evolution of populations over time by combing the principles of Mendel and Darwin, and by means of the Hardy-Weinberg equation.

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Hank tells us the background story and explains the importance of the science of classifying living things, also known as taxonomy.

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Hank gets real with us in a discussion of evolution - it's a thing, not a debate. Gene distribution changes over time, across successive generations, to give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization.

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Hank introduces us to comparative anatomy, which studies the similarities and differences in animal anatomy to support the theory of evolution and the shared ancestry of living things.

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Hank introduces us to the "simplest" of the animals, complexity-wise: beginning with sponges (whose very inclusion in the list as "animals" has been called into question because they are so simple) and finishing with the most complex molluscs, octopuses and squid. We differentiate them by the number of tissue layers they have, and by the complexity of those layers.

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Hank continues our exploration of animal phyla with the more complexly organized annelida and arthropoda, and a biolography on insects.

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Hank introduces us to ourselves by taking us on a journey through the fascinatingly diverse phyla known as chordata. And the next time someone asks you who you are, you can give them the facts: you're a mammalian amniotic tetrapodal sarcopterygian osteichthyen gnathostomal vertebrate cranial chordate.

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Hank and his cat Cameo help teach us about animal behavior and how we can discover why animals do the things they do.

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