Hi, we're here from curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about how agricultural experts make new types of apples,

why a tiny dwarf planet has a giant ice volcano, and why space matters

with former NASA rocket scientist Kevin J. de Bruin.

Would satisfy some curiosity. Have you ever noticed how many different types of apples you can buy?

There are striped ones and freckled ones and ones with names like jazz and pink lady and

honeycrisp. Well it turns out that it takes agricultural experts a long time to breed a new apple.

As in each variety takes more than a decade to come to, wait for it. Frution. Ha!

In fact, the Honeycrisp apple took more than 30 years to create.

So let's talk apple breeding.

When breeders want to cultivate a new apple, they're usually

after specific traits like juiciness, hardiness, or overall flavor. If they want to create a tasty apple

with red instead of white flesh, for example, they'd start with an apple that already

has red flesh, but for whatever reason doesn't have the other qualities they're after.

Then they'll cross that apple with a different apple that does have the traits they're looking for. By pollinating one that seeds that will produce a new kind of apple, hopefully with the right traits of each parent.

That process happens on a massive scale, often many times over.

Tens of thousands of those seeds are planted, and four or five years later they produce

fruit that breeders look at to find the highest quality apples from the crop.

They repeat the crossbreeding process until they get what they're going for.

But the journey isn't over yet.

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