The BEST episodes of Bill Nye: The Science Guy season 2
Every episode of Bill Nye: The Science Guy season 2, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Bill Nye: The Science Guy season 2!
Comedian/scientist Bill Nye stars as the host of this show designed to get kids interested in the science of everyday, and some not-so-everyday, things. On a full range of subjects, including ecology, biology, chemistry and physics, Nye gives an easy-to-understand, yet informative lesson that both kids and their parents can enjoy.
#1 - Chemical Reactions
Season 2 - Episode 4 - Aired 3/11/1994
Bill is practically exploding with excitement about the "Chemical Reactions" show. Every single thing around you is made of chemicals. Plants, rocks, computers, food, and you are bunches of chemicals. All chemicals are built with elements, the 109 different symbols on the Periodic Table. Different combinations of elements make different chemicals. Lots of times, chemicals just sit around, but sometimes, when certain chemicals get together, they react. Chemical reactions take the starting chemicals and end up with new chemicals. Sometimes chemical reactions are hard to miss. Explosions, burning, color changes, and gas are all good signs that a reaction is going on. Some chemical reactions are less obvious - changes in temperature, a different smell, or differences in taste are clues that a chemical reaction is happening. The key is to figure out if you could get back the same chemicals you put in. If the answer is no, you've got a chemical reaction on your hands. Jus
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#2 - Light Optics
Season 2 - Episode 7 - Aired 9/10/1994
Don't stay in the dark - Bill Nye will help you absorb the science of light optics. Light is energy that normally moves in a straight line, but often something gets in the way. When light runs into something, three things can happen - the light can bounce off, it can go through, or it can be absorbed. Often all three things happen at the same time. Light bounces off mirrors. You see yourself in a mirror when light bounces off your face, into the mirror, and then into your eyes. Light goes through glass. If the glass is bent or curved, the light gets bent on its way out of the glass. The glass in a magnifying glass or a pair of eyeglasses is curved so that it bends light, making things look bigger. More light is absorbed by dark-colored things than by light-colored things. Colors are made when some light is absorbed while other light is bounced back. Black things look black because when light hits them, they absorb almost all of the light. In outer space, there are obj
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#3 - Balance
Season 2 - Episode 12 - Aired 10/15/1994
Bill Nye's going to use the force to pull you into the world of balance. A force is a push or a pull. You can feel a force when someone pushes you. You can use a force to pull a door shut. Anyone can make forces by pushing and pulling, and you don't need to be Luke Skywalker to use a force. In a game of tug-of-war, if the pull of your team is the same as the pull of the other team, the forces are equal. The two teams are in balance, and the rope doesn't budge. Things are in balance when forces that are pushing or pulling them are equal. If your tug-of-war team pulls harder than the other team, the forces are not equal. The other team falls all over the place. Unequal forces make things move and twist. A lot of things are designed to take advantage of unequal forces. Wrenches, screwdrivers, door handles, and water faucets use forces made by you to do work. A well-balanced science diet starts with Bill Nye.
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#4 - Food Web
Season 2 - Episode 6 - Aired 3/25/1994
Feeling a little hungry? Then grab a snack and watch Bill Nye the Science Guy's episode on the Food Web. When it comes to eating, all living things depend on other living things. Take a chicken sandwich, for example. The bread came from plants. So did the lettuce and tomatoes. The cheese was made from milk, which came from a cow. To make milk, the cow had to stay alive by eating grass. The meat came from a chicken who once ate seed, and maybe the occasional bug. The animals that helped to make your sandwich depended on other living things to survive. The lettuce, grain (for the bread), and tomato got by fine on their own. Then some animal came along (you). Plants are the only big living things that don't need other living things to survive. All they need are sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water to make their own food. But it doesn't stop them from being eaten -- no way. In fact, plants are great things to eat. All animals need them in some way for food – by the way,
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#6 - Magnetism
Season 2 - Episode 1 - Aired 2/18/1994
They're on your refrigerator, they're inside your computer, and you're even standing on one right now. They're magnets, and forget about being repulsed. Bill Nye the Science Guy's "Magnetism" episode is totally attractive. All magnets have certain things in common. All magnets have two poles - north and south. You could take a magnet and break it into pieces and all of the pieces would have north and south poles. Ever play with two magnets? If you hold them with one magnet's north pole facing the other's south pole, they will stick together. If you put two of the same poles together, the magnets will push apart. With magnets, opposite poles attract, and "like" poles repel. Ever wonder why the Earth has a North and South Pole? The Earth's hot, churning, iron core is like a giant magnet. The magnetic force of the Earth stops a lot of harmful radiation from reaching us. Charged particles streaming from the Sun get pulled down by the Earth's magnetic field, creating the
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#7 - Blood & Circulation
Season 2 - Episode 3 - Aired 3/4/1994
It's time for a heart-to-heart talk about blood and circulation with Bill Nye the Science Guy. Your blood is your bud. Without blood, your skin would dry up and fall off, your internal organs would die, and your brain would be kaput. Blood gives every cell in your body the food and oxygen it needs to survive. Blood also cleans up after our cells by carrying away waste. Blood even protects your body from disease. What more could you ask from a friend? Blood patrols your entire body. Blood is pushed around by a powerful pump called the heart. Every time your heart lub-dubs, blood is propelled through tubes called arteries, capillaries, and veins. Your heat pushes your blood in a complete loop around your body about 2,000 times every day. Your heart is a muscle, and, like all muscles, it can get stronger. A healthy heart needs exercise to stay strong. An average heart pumps about 70 times a minute, but a healthy, well-exercised heart pumps 50 or 60 times a minute. Heal
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#8 - Heat
Season 2 - Episode 10 - Aired 10/1/1994
Things sure are heating up at Nye Labs. Snow cones, flowers, hot dogs, people -- everything is made of molecules. No matter what they're in, solid, liquid, or gas, molecules are always moving, even if just a little bit. The speed of the molecules depends on their temperature. Cold things have slow-moving molecules, while hot things have fast-moving molecules. In fact, temperature is really a measurement of molecule speed. For a cold thing to get warm, its molecules have to speed up. Heat moves in three different ways -- conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction is the flow of heat between two solid objects that are touching. Heat conducts from your warm fingertips into a cold can of soda. Convection is the transfer of heat with a liquid or gas. A hot bath feels warm all over not just where you're sitting. Convection also happens naturally. When air gets warmed by a hot burner, it's molecules speed up and spread out. Then, cold air molecules squeeze the warm spread-out molecules
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#9 - Insects
Season 2 - Episode 11 - Aired 10/8/1994
Bill Nye's not here to bug you - he just wants to tell you about insects. Do you know when you're looking at an insect? All insects have six legs, three body segments, antennae, and an exoskeleton. Insects don't have bones. Instead, they have hard shells called exoskeletons. Like a little suit of armor, an exoskeleton protects the insect's body and also keeps it from drying out. Although people call any crawling critter with an exoskeleton a "bug", the "true bugs" are insects that have special mouth parts for piercing and sucking. And, spiders are not bugs or even insects. They're built differently with only two main body parts and eight legs instead of six. If you think you have a wild time growing up, take a look at an insect's life. Most insects go through at least four stages of growth -- egg (little round thing), larva (a bit like a worm), pupa (insect in a cocoon), and adult. It's a long road to maturity for an insect. Everyone's buzzing about the "Insects" episode. Don't miss it
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#10 - The Sun
Season 2 - Episode 13 - Aired 10/22/1994
The Sun is huge. It's bigger than huge. It's so big that 1.3 million Earths would fit inside a hollowed-out Sun. It's really far away, too - about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) Even at that distance the Sun affects everything on Earth. All the energy we have comes, or once came from, the Sun. That includes energy to light a lamp, energy to kick a soccer ball, and energy in batteries that play your personal stereo. We're talking about nearly all of the energy. There's a little bit of energy that comes from nuclear reactions deep in the Earth's core. But that energy pales compared with the nuclear fusion fueling the Sun. Without the Sun, the Earth would be a big hunk of rock with nearly nothing on it. The Sun is made of gas. It has so much gravity that it's atoms are smashed into hot gas. In the sun, atoms of gas are constantly crashing into each other. When they collide, they form new atoms and release energy. Scientists call this atom smashing "nuclear fus
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#11 - Bones & Muscles
Season 2 - Episode 8 - Aired 9/17/1994
In this show, you can Bone up on Muscles. When you clicked on the Nye Labs web site to read this, you used your bones and muscles. Without them, you can't click, surf, or even sigh. Bones and muscles work together, or you aren't going anywhere. Muscles always pull, even when you push on something like a door somewhere in your body your arm and leg muscles are in tension. They are all attached to bones, and those bones are pushing; they're in compression. By pulling on bones you can breathe, talk, and move all over the world. Your bones support your weight like beams of steel or wood. They're stiff and strong. Rigid as they might seem though, they do flex. And, if you bang one hard enough, it swells up. You have a lump. That's because bones are full of blood vessels. Bones are not solid like rocks or skeletons in a dinosaur museum. Bones flex and grow. In fact, putting healthy amounts of stress on your bones is good for them. The flexing helps them get nutrients and
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#12 - Static Electricity
Season 2 - Episode 5 - Aired 3/18/1994
Bill's all charged up about the "Static Electricity" show. It happens to all of us. You're causally walking along, maybe dragging your feet a little, when you reach out to shake a friend's hand and - ZAP! Both you and your friend get shocked. The spark is static electricity, a buildup of charged electrons. Electrons are a part of all atoms, the building blocks of all stuff, including you and me. All electrons have a negative charge. Negatively charged electrons push away from other negatively charged electrons. Like charges repel each other. When electrons build up in an area, a charge builds up, and it's just waiting to be released. This buildup of charge is called static electricity. Charges can jump around between things, especially when things are rubbed together. When you drag your feet on the carpet, electrons from the carpet jump onto you. As the charge builds up, the electrons get too close to each other, and they need a place to escape. They get their chanc
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#13 - Forests
Season 2 - Episode 15 - Aired 11/5/1994
In Bill Nye the Science Guy: Forests, Nye shows students the levels of a forest, which include the canopy, the under story, and the floor. His special guest is Nalini Nadkarni, who has no qualms about going high up in the canopy to check out the wildlife and other happenings there
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#14 - Atmosphere
Season 2 - Episode 19 - Aired 12/3/1994
The air that surrounds Earth is called the atmosphere. Compared to the size of the Earth, the atmosphere is very, very thin. It’s made from gases – mainly nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor, with a little argon, carbon dioxide, xenon, neon, helium, and sulfur. The atmosphere does a lot for Earth. It blocks ultraviolet light and burns up a lot of meteors. It traps in heat, keeping Earth cozy. Even clouds are formed in the atmosphere – keeping the Earth wet with rain.
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#15 - Oceanography
Season 2 - Episode 9 - Aired 9/24/1994
Surf's up! Get the current information as Bill Nye explains why oceans are salty and explores the ocean currents. Go with the flow of ocean currents with Bill Nye the Science Guy. Most of the Earth is covered with water - we're talking 71% of the entire Earth, and most of that water is in oceans. It depends how you count, but you can say that there are five oceans on Earth - the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic, and the Antarctic. They are all connected into one World Ocean by the flow of ocean currents. Ocean water is moving around all the time. Some of the moving water forms rivers in the ocean. Oceanographers, scientists who study oceans, call these rivers of ocean water "currents". Currents help sea animals move around, they bring up deep ocean water with lots of nutrients for small animals to eat, and they push warm and cold water around, creating different climates in the oceans. As the sea surface gets warmed by the Sun, water evaporates, but salt stays in the sea
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#16 - Respiration
Season 2 - Episode 20 - Aired 1/7/1995
How breathing supplies the body with the oxygen it needs
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#17 - Momentum
Season 2 - Episode 17 - Aired 11/19/1994
The momentum of a moving thing, like you riding your bike, depends on how much mass you and your bike have and how fast you’re speeding down that hill. An elephant on a bike has more momentum than a mouse on a bike moving at the same speed. A mouse on a fast bike has more momentum than a mouse on a slow bike. If there’s an elephant on a fast bike, you’d better get out of the way.
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#19 - Reptiles
Season 2 - Episode 18 - Aired 11/26/1994
Bill Nye teaches us about reptiles.
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#20 - Wind
Season 2 - Episode 2 - Aired 2/25/1994
Some answers, my friend, do in fact, blow in the wind. A cool breeze is great on a hot summer day. A cold winter wind can chill you until you can't stop shivering. Where does all that wind come from? It starts with the Sun. Energy from the Sun warms the Earth and the atmosphere, the air, above it. As the world turns into darkness each night, the atmosphere cools off. The molecules in a mass of warm air are more spread out than the molecules of air in a cold air mass. So cold air is heavier than warm air. Cool air masses squeeze warm air up. That's why you may hear people say, "Warm air rises." The Sun warms the Earth with huge amounts of heat each day. And, the Earth is spinning. So, as air masses move up and down, they get nudged sideways along the Earth's surface at the same time. Try drawing a straight line on a spinning ball. It'll curve. The same thing happens to make wind. Air travels all over the Earth moving across deserts, up and down mountains, through val
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