Awesome Etc

Randall Munroe and Henry Reich’s What If? attempts to answer the hypothetical question of what might happen if every living human stood close together, jumped off of the ground, and landed at the same exact time. While the answer to that question is less exciting than you might think, there would be plenty of unintended consequences of such an event.

There’s a whole sub-genre of YouTube videos featuring various objects being jammed into industrial shredders. Atomic Marvel went to the extreme and stuck the entire sun into a shredder to see what would happen. We’re surprised it didn’t melt the machine as soon as it hit the gears with its 10,000-degree surface temperature.

Electric pencil sharpeners are plenty fast. But say you have 100 pencils to sharpen. Shaving a second or two off of each pencil can add up. Current Concept wanted to see how quickly a pencil could be sharpened by rigging up an off-the-shelf sharpener to various power tools. That exposed sharpener mechanism looks terrifying once it gets up to speed.

A good knife can be a useful self-defense tool. But if you really want to ward off enemies, adding fire to the equation couldn’t hurt. Actually, getting stabbed by a flaming knife would hurt a lot. Integza shows how he made a knife that shoots flames from tiny holes in a porous metal blade. He theorizes that the tech could be used to improve jet engine efficiency.

This retro wallet from Fydelity features an exterior made from the shell of a cassette tape. Its body is made from synthetic leather with a zippered main compartment for cards, cash, coins, and more. Available in a variety of colors – our fave is the shiny rainbow-chrome finish.

Whether you’re a snail or a gazelle, you must move around to survive in this world. In the latest comparison video from RED SIDE, they animated the vast differences in the movements of all kinds of animals, from ants to elephants and everything in between. Watch it in 4K if you’ve got the bandwidth, and find out if a human can outrun a hippo.

Movies and TV shows about space travel usually have a big budget for visual effects. Not so with this short film by Caroline Klidonas, who shot an entire short film about a doomed space mission without leaving her apartment. It’s the low-budget, low-gravity effects and Caroline’s commitment to the performance that really sell it. (Thanks, Rob!)

Infiniti revealed its fancy new 2025 QX80 high above Manhattan on The Edge observation deck. To get the 6,000 pound, three-row luxury SUV onto the outdoor sky deck, a crew spent weeks carefully taking apart then reassembling the vehicle, and took 100 elevator rides to bring the QX80 to the top, piece-by-piece.

Filmmaker Jordan Studdard grew up with dreams of living in New York City. Now that he’s been there for a few years, he created an homage to The Big Apple with a wall-sized map of the city, dotted with tiny lights to mark locations made famous by the movies and TV shows that inspired him.

Tortilla chips are Mexican food, so it’s a little strange to see a Japanese factory cranking out chips by the millions. Process X visited Koikeya to see how they turn corn kernels into deliciously crunchy snack foods. After boiling corn, machines mash it up into a doughy paste, cut that into triangles, bake and fry those before adding seasonings and packaging.

Magic tricks are basically an agreement between the audience and the magician to accept a lie. The Paint Explainer compiled the secrets behind 23 well-known magic tricks and put them all in a single video. While we already knew some of these, like the Statue of Liberty disappearing and the needle-through-the-arm trick, others were new to us.

Guitarist Kfir Ochaion shows off his talents with a phenomenal cover version of Prince’s 1984 classic Purple Rain. The performance is as engrossing to watch as it is to listen to, thanks to The Endorphinmachine guitar by Jens Ritter. The custom version of his Jupiter guitar is covered with more than 11,000 purple Swarovski crystals that sparkle in the light.

The 2024 solar eclipse is a big deal here on Earth – especially if you’re in the path of totality. But are there better places to observe an eclipse? Well, if you leave our planet, things might get better… or worse. MinutePhysics takes us on a journey through our solar system to see what a solar eclipse might look like on other planets, non-planets, and asteroids.

xckd takes on another ridiculous hypothetical question: “What if you swam in a nuclear storage pool?” While it probably won’t kill you the second you dive into a tank filled with spent nuclear fuel rods, it’s not something we would recommend. Also, we can’t believe somebody actually has that as a job.

It’s not often we see a truly unique weapon. In this video from maker DiesInEveryFilm, he shows us how he fabricated a custom sling bow from a kid-sized bicycle wheel and steel tubing. It’s held like a pistol and uses elastic tubing like a slingshot but fires full-length arrows. It looks like something that Hawkeye might have in his bag of tricks.

This rugged bag from 5.11 Tactical works as a duffel or a backpack. It’s made from hardwearing 1050D nylon with self-healing YKK zippers. It has a large main compartment with a 56L capacity, and outside, you’ll find MOLLE webbing for attaching small bags and other accessories. Available in Kangaroo Brown or Ranger Green.

The biggest spiderwebs we’ve encountered are a few feet across. BBC Earth introduces us to the Darwin’s bark spider, an orb-weaver that can shoot bridging lines for webs up to 25 meters (82 feet) across. That’s not the only extraordinary fact—this spider’s silk is also regarded as the world’s strongest natural fiber.

As we’ve learned before, shrimp can be fascinating creatures. Nature show host Ze Frank takes another look at these weird crustaceans to teach us about some unusual adaptations they have developed. From their jumble of gangly legs to their food-specific pincers to their camouflage abilities, each attribute helps them survive and thrive.

If we had to pick the silliest musical instrument, it would be a Jew’s harp or a slide whistle. After building a MIDI-controlled slide whistle, engineer mixtela upped the complexity by creating a slide whistle orchestrion. It combines four mechanical slide whistles to produce 4-part polyphonic sounds. The best way to describe it is a drunken calliope.

Tic Tacs are one of the world’s most popular breath fresheners. How did these little pill-shaped mints come to be? Weird History Food takes us all the way back to the origins of bad breath control and its evolution toward the minty flavors we know today. It turns out the same company that created Nutella and Kinder eggs came up with the Tic Tac.

Most guitar players use their fingertips or a single guitar pick to strum. After “accidentally” 3D printing a triple guitar pick, engineer Mattias Krantz thought it might be fun to play with even more guitar picks at the same time. His compound guitar pick looks like it would a pretty good back-scratcher too.

From Batman to Beetlejuice to Birdman, Michael Keaton is a man of many personas. Keaton sat down for an interview with GQ to talk about some of his most iconic characters, their sources of inspiration, and how he got inside their heads. For some roles, the costume and makeup provided enough of a hook, while others required him to dig much deeper.

Jared Owen presents another fascinating animation of a complex machine—or, in this case, multiple machines working together. In this video, he walks us through the automated donut factory, which you can find at many Krispy Kreme locations. These machines can crank out up to 3000 donuts per hour. Our favorite part is the glaze waterfall.