Awesome Science

Science educator Steve Mould shows off a fascinating thing that happens when you ignite lighter fluid in a narrow channel. The flame travels around and around until the fuel is fully burned. He started with a circle and tested various shapes to see how the flames behaved. Along the way, you’ll learn about the concept of an excitable medium.

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.

NileBlue wanted to recreate grapples: apples that taste like grapes. You’d think it would be a complicated process involving genetics and plant breeding, but it turns out to be a hilariously simple task. We’re not going to spoil it, but the video ends up explaining why grapples are not around anymore and why you shouldn’t try making your own.

Animals come in all shapes and sizes. In this video from Posit Pixel, they use pixel art to describe some of the extremes of the animal kingdom, from diminutive parasitic wasps to a 42-foot-long snake. Along the way, you’ll learn about a fingernail-sized frog and Quetzalcoatlus, an extinct flying animal with a wingspan as big as a single-engine airplane.

If you put a powerful fan on a boat and blew it at its sail, would the boat move? Engineer Mark Rober channels Mr. Wizard with a series of experiments and easy-to-understand explanations of this and six other perplexing physics questions. He also debunks a viral video along the way.

Astrophysicists estimate that our universe came into existence roughly 14 billion years ago, and it’s been expanding ever since. Kurzgesagt ponders the question whether the universe is truly infinite if it keeps growing, or if it has an edge somewhere that we just can’t see.

Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal because they spread diseases like malaria and dengue. Scientists have developed a fascinating way to reduce this threat – infecting mosquitoes with Wolbachia, a bacteria that limits mosquitoes’ ability to carry other diseases. To jumpstart the process, they’re releasing millions of infected bugs. AsapSCIENCE explains.

Imagine, for a moment, that it was possible to pitch a baseball at 90% of the speed of light. Not only would you easily eliminate the batter, but there would be other major consequences according to this hypothetical physics exploration by the mighty Randall Munroe of xkcd. Weapons makers, don’t get any funny ideas.

According to the National Earthquake Information Center, there are roughly 20,000 earthquakes around the Earth every year. This fascinating animation from the NOAA, NWS, and Pacific Tsunami Warning Center shows every earthquake and tsunami recorded from January 1901 through December 2020. There’s also a spherical version that ends in 2000.

Have you ever wondered how the gravity on different planets might affect your ability to throw a ball? Dr. James O’Donoghue created this infographic that explores how far and high you could toss a ball, assuming no air resistance. Basically, on Mars, Mercury, and Pluto, you could hit a home run without a baseball bat.

Time isn’t as simple as what shows up on your phone’s screen. Erin McCarthy of Mental Floss offers up a number of interesting tidbits about the nature of time, how humans perceive its passage, how space and time relate, and the different ways of measuring time itself.

Nature can be truly amazing, bestowing creatures with all kinds of wondrous capabilities to help them survive and thrive. Ze Frank looks at creatures with superpowers like transparency, squeezing prey to death, and the ability to sling slime.

Using large syringes, Tom Stanton shows us how the vacuum captured inside can be used to drive gears, a belt, and an axle. The result is a mini dragster that travels an impressive distance compared to the short distance that the syringe’s piston moves.

Journey to the Microcosmos explores whether it is possible for microorganisms to spontaneously generate out of thin air. With the help of a powerful microscope and modern scientific knowledge, host Hank Green explains what’s really going on when microscopic organisms seem to show up where there was no life before.

We rely on batteries to power everything from our watches to our phones to our vehicles. But where did batteries come from, and who invented them? Origins explores the history of batteries and their evolution since 1799. Along the way, you learn we don’t see “B” cell batteries and what frog legs and torpedo fish have to do with it all.

Imagine, if you will, that the entire 4.5 billion year history of the Earth was collapsed down to a 24-hour single day. Bright Side’s educational video does just that, taking significant events in the development of our world and giving us a relative sense of how closely together they played out.

Video games have been simulating way that organisms thrive, evolve, and die ever since 1970 with John Conway’s, Game of Life. Over the years, simulations have become far more sophisticated but don’t always produce realistic results. Curious Archive looks at the strange evolution of games that simulate life.

Despite their lack of wings, spiders can actually take flight. This video from the University of Bristol video explains a process called ballooning, in which spiders take advantage of static electrical charges and wind currents to carry silk – and their bodies – through the air.

When you think about something being microscopic, it all seems the same size from our perspective. But this video from RED SIDE cleverly demonstrates the vast differences in the size of things we can’t see with the naked eye, from the tiniest atom to the relatively gargantuan amoeba. Also, there are way too many viruses.

An assassin’s teapot is a trick vessel that was designed to let its user serve a safe drink to themselves and a deadly one to their victim. And while you should never do such a thing, it’s fascinating to see how one works. Science educator Steve Mould shows us the physics at work, and inspired us to use one of these to serve drinks at cocktail parties.

The opposing forces of magnets can produce a tremendous amount of energy, and can even be used to levitate and move trains along a track. In this clip from Magnetic Games, he demonstrates these physics at work, though on a smaller scale using a bunch off-the-shelf neodymium magnets he got from Supermagnete.

After a series of heavy downpours this week, our neighborhood has lots of puddles. In a couple of days, these stagnant pools of water will be teeming with minuscule creatures. Journey to the Microcosm gets us up close and personal with some of these tiny organisms through the optics of high-power microscopes.

When you think about how the whole six degrees of separation thing, it’s not a stretch to imagine that we’re all related in one way or another. It’s Okay to Be Smart explores the mathematical and genealogical complexities of our ancestral connections.