Awesome Etc

We love hot sauce as long as it adds flavor and doesn’t wreck our taste buds. In this video, Weird History Food delves into the origins of the spicy condiment and how it spread like wildfire to achieve global popularity. While hot peppers can have health benefits, they can also be dangerous.

After making a neodymium magnet float inside a thick copper tube, metalsmith Seth Robinson thought he’d see if he could achieve the same inside of a sphere. What he ended up casting was a cool-looking truncated icosahedron with holes in it so we can see if the magnetic orb inside would levitate. (Thanks, Jesse!)

From a young age, we learn what animals are called. There’s no mistaking a horse for a hippo. Like every word, there’s an origin story for each animal’s name. Mental Floss List Show host Erin McCarthy digs into the history of names for 25 mammals, insects, and reptiles. We’re just glad we went with “bear” instead of “hŕ̥tḱos.”

Since 2010, Tom BetGeorge has been wowing us with his Halloween light shows, and they get better every year. The 2024 video playlist includes awesome displays set to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, Maroon 5’s Harder to Breathe, Rockwell’s Somebody’s Watching Me, PSY’s Gangnam Style, and closes with Michael Jackson’s Halloween classic Thriller.

Primitive Technology’s latest construction project is impressive. He started with an empty patch of dirt, some sticks, reeds, and leaves and used those to build an A-frame structure. After completing the shelter, he gathered clay from the river and some old shards, then hand-formed dozens of roof tiles. Of course, he built his own kiln for firing the tiles.

Our planet is teeming with life on its surface and in its oceans, but did you know that some organisms live beneath the Earth’s crust? Kurzgesagt drills deep to explore some of the microbes and other life forms that thrive in the world’s most inhospitable environments. Scientists are just beginning to understand what’s going on in the deep biosphere.

Who says phone chargers need to look like boring black or white bricks? Angry Miao’s tiny Emptiness charger looks like a tiny work of modern art. Beyond its shiny organic shell, it packs a GaNFast charger with a powerful 40W USB-C output, making it perfect for the iPhone 16 series. Available in silver or gold finishes.

Jellyfish are fascinating creatures, but they’re also known for delivering a nasty sting. Ze Frank dives deep beneath the surface to explain how these marine animals use their unique properties for hunting prey, feeding themselves, and moving through the water. It’s amazing how a single jelly baby splits into multiples.

The Slow Mo Guys have been spending time with Kentucky Ballistics, because he’s got lots of things that go BOOM. In this video, they tested the one weapon in Scott’s arsenal that even he dreads shooting. The 950JDJ FAT MAC is the world’s largest sporting rifle. It fires a huge 20mm diameter bullet, kicks out a massive muzzle flash, and has insane recoil.

After trashing a PT Cruiser with their giant steel dart, How Ridiculous takes aim at a bunch more stuff with their pointy 1300+ pound projectile. Among its latest victims are a pile of inflated tires, a thick piece of timber, a safe, and the ultimate challenge, a stack of cars. The crane operator deserves a raise for his precision.

This compact screwdriver from Klein Tools is perfect for turning screws in tight places. The palm-sized driver has a ratcheting mechanism to help you work faster and a cushioned grip to improve torque and comfort. The set includes #1 and #2 Phillips bits, 1/4″ and 3/16″ slotted bits, and 1/4″ and 5/16″ nut drivers.

Fermenting sugar and yeast is the most basic way to produce alcohol. After several attempts to turn Monster Energy Drink into an alcoholic beverage, Golden Hive Mead finally figured it out. It turns out that some Monster ingredients make it inhospitable to yeast and require a special brewing process. Turns out it makes pretty good wine.

Filmmaker Joey Shanks got his hands on an AmScope SM-4TP stereo zoom microscope and hooked it up to his Canon DSLR camera to capture some amazing images of liquids reacting. The mixtures he used included milk, soap, oil, peroxide, and alcohol, accented with glitter. Bonus points for the stop-motion animation at the start of the clip.

The “glass half-full/half-empty” idiom offers a simplistic way of comparing pessimistic and optimistic thoughts. xkcd’s What If? explores the physics at work if a glass was literally half-empty and that space was filled with a vacuum. The outcome would be quite different depending on which half was liquid and which half was the vacuum.

Almost everyone carries a device capable of shooting instant photos in their pocket these days. Vox delves into the history of snapshot photography and the significant contributions made by Kodak, which brought us the earliest compact cameras and democratized photography. Sadly, the beloved company fumbled the ball during the transition to digital.

We recently saw a tiny steam engine that could fit atop a pencil eraser. That was small, but this video from MetaBallStudios shows some objects that are much, much smaller, including machines, computer circuits, and structural materials. The engineered items are impressive, but it’s those handmade sculptures that really blew our minds.