Awesome Videos

Jonny Builds shows off another impressive piece of furniture – a record cabinet with a segmented wood door. He started by assembling grain-matched panels for the top, bottom, and dividers. To make the door, he took an 8-foot-long black walnut slab, cut it into boards, sliced it into 109 strips, glued them to canvas, and CNC milled the awesomely wavy shapes.

Mixing Diet Coke and Mentos can have explosive results. JLaservideo wanted to see if he could harness that fizzy energy on a larger scale to lift himself off the ground. After watching others fail miserably or cheat with other ingredients, he did some experimentation and engineered a homebrew jet pack that runs on the stuff.

From A to Z, every letter in the English language has a story behind its shape. Language expert Olly Richards digs into the origins of all 26 letters we use today, including how “E” started as a little dude with his hands in the air and how “H” was a fence flipped on its side.

LOL, ROFL, LMFAO, I’M DEAD. These are the kinds of silly shorthand we text each other all the time. LAMAR + NIK’s short comedy film looks at the real-world consequences of texting things we don’t literally mean. This is as close as you’re gonna get to a behind-the-scenes video.

As part of the SKYGLOW project, filmmaker Gavin Heffernan captured this time-lapse footage in and around California’s Joshua Tree National Park. As the sun set over the desert, clouds rolled in, and the stars peeped out, creating an awe-inspiring light show during the recent Wolf Moon.

A gravity well is a cone-shaped device that pulls marbles or other small balls into its center like a vortex. JBV Creative built a version of a gravity well connected to an elevator, so as spheres drop through its middle, they head back up to the top and start their journey all over again. It’s incredibly satisfying once he drops thousands of steel balls into it.

For his latest 3D challenge, Clinton Jones, aka Pwnisher, asked CG artists to create scenes based on a template of a character climbing a curved staircase. After receiving 2800 entries from around the world, here are the top 100 renders edited together to create a seemingly endless climb, set to music by Feverkin. It’s hard to choose a favorite interpretation.

To celebrate the release of his new album Everything I Thought It Was, Justin Timberlake and 14 musicians from The Tennessee Kids crammed into the NPR Music offices and turned in this fantastic short concert. The seven-song R&B set includes Señorita, Rock Your Body, Pusher Love Girl, Until The End of Time, Selfish, What Goes Around, and SexyBack.

This stunt combines three thrills in one. After bouncing on a trampoline dangling from a hot air balloon, a team of skydivers jumped off and headed toward Earth. Jay Alvarez teamed up with Yasmin Xavier, Emilliano Ribeiro, FFRacoon, Mainara Fontanella, Ar Quente Balonismo, Igor Bauer, Gabriel Rocha, and sponsor EvoSim Universe to pull it off.

Advancements in voice recognition, large language models, neural networks, and robotics come together in this impressive demonstration. An unnamed human asks the Figure 01 robot to recognize objects, perform tasks, and explain its reasoning. While it takes a moment for the AI to compute its responses, it’s a glimpse of things to come. (Thanks, Myriam!)

Honest Ads offers a darkly humorous take on what could happen if our worst fears about artificial intelligence come true. Along the way, fake CEO Roger Horton exposes the kind of machine-generated garbage that passes for “content” these days and how large language models are just really good at guessing what the next word might be in a sentence.

Coca-Cola sells billions of cases of Diet Coke every year. How did the drink that replaced Tab in the 1980s become a sweet and fizzy juggernaut? Weird History Foods looks at the origins of carbonated beverages and low-calorie soft drinks and how Diet Coke achieved its cult-like status to leapfrog its competition.

John Malkovich is known for his distinctive voice and intense, quirky character portrayals. In this interview with GQ, the award-winning actor revisits his roles from Being John Malkovich, Con Air, Rounders, Dangerous Liaisons, Burn After Reading, and others. We love how Spike Jonze told him, “John Malkovich wouldn’t do it that way.”

Adam from North of the Border made realistic versions of some Super Mario Bros. monsters, so it was only a matter of time before he got to Mario himself. His less-cartoony Mario imagines Nintendo’s plumber as a gritty, stubble-faced human with proportions based on the Norse god Thor. Instead of a hammer, Mario carries a pipe to take down his enemies.

Electric vehicle maker Tesla takes us on an updated tour of Gigafactory Berlin. The drone’s-eye view of the factory puts viewers as close as they’ll ever get to metal stamping presses, industrial robots, and other massive machines. Tesla expects the facility to crank out hundreds of thousands of its Model Y crossovers and millions of battery cells.

Here’s a fun winter activity – a tractor that pulls 28 people on innertubes around a frozen lake. This ride can be enjoyed in Heihe, China, a popular destination for tourists from nearby Russia. We see no reason the same can’t be done anywhere you have a tractor, a frozen lake, and a bunch of rope – the more powerful the tractor, the more people you can pull.

After prototyping a system for organizing the hardware in his workshop (aka “The Cave”), Adam Savage put his nose to the grindstone and built the entire setup. The rolling storage system has a plywood frame and custom-built metal shelves that slide out and hold Sortimo boxes for easy access to parts. It was immensely satisfying to see it all come together.

Felix from BerlinLapse captured this wild 360º hyperlapse video of the Fernsehturm, one of Europe’s tallest free-standing structures. To shoot the footage, he mapped out a walking route around the tower and snapped photos along the way. He then color-graded the photos in Lightroom and used After Effects to track the tower’s position, size, and rotation.

TED-Ed Animations shared this enlightening illustrated overview of how coffee spread and affected societies, cultures, and places all over the world. Learn about the first farms in Ethiopia in the 14th century, the first coffeehouses in London in the 17th century, the rise of coffee breaks in the US in the 50s, and more.

Borrowing a page from Drumeo’s book, the YouTube channel Pianote invites keyboardists to create their interpretations of popular songs they’ve never heard. In this video, Snarky Puppy’s Justin Stanton takes on Dua Lipa’s Don’t Start Now, imparting the dance-pop hit with a smooth blend of jazz and funk after only hearing the drums and vocals.

YouTuber gimbo compiled OMD Chile’s hilarious TV commercials for Cristal beer from 2003. The ads were spliced within broadcasts of the original Star Wars trilogy, complete with costumes or backgrounds that make it appear that the characters were reaching for the beer. The campaign was repeated during airings of American Beauty, Gladiator, and Notting Hill.

Handmade wood bowls are typically created by turning a block of wood on a lathe. But in this video from Taku Woodcraft, he shows how a miter saw can cut a perfectly smooth bowl shape. Working with a loose piece of wood under a power saw is dangerous, but it appears he had a short dowel under the board to keep it centered. Still, don’t try this at home.

Why you would want to glide around on skates made out of ice is anyone’s guess, but Works By Design got us to watch his video regardless. He started by testing various mixtures of water and binders for strength. After that, he fabricated custom metal blades and a special silicone ice mold. Our feet are freezing just looking at this thing.