Awesome Etc

One of the coolest things about metal is that it can be heated over and over again to make new things. My Mechanics, shows us how they transformed an ordinary steel nut into a tool that can turn nuts. The miniature wrench they made can grab onto nuts up to 8.5 mm across.

The vehicle physics simulator BeamNG.drive has given us countless hours of entertainment. In this crazy video from wecrashgames, they pitted various cars, trucks, and vans against a trio of massive baseball bats. Side impacts appear to be easier to escape. Play ball!

We’ve heard several amazing performances by the talented guitarist Marcin Patrzalek. His latest is a cover of Derek & The Dominos 1970 track Layla. While nobody will ever live up to Eric Clapton and Duane Allman, Marcin’s percussive fingerstyle technique adds a new depth and dynamic to the rock classic.

These days, a typical non-stop flight from New York City to London takes about seven hours. But when the Concorde was still operating, it could perform the feat in just three hours. Bright Sun Films looks back at the rise and fall of this iconic supersonic jet that never reached its true potential.

How It’s Made takes us inside the Merkur blade factory for a look at the equipment and materials that go into producing razor bladed. They start as a flexible strip of steel that is perforated, hardened with a heat-treating process, and run through a grinder to sharpen their edges before they’re separated and coated.

After showing off a simple rocket built from a soda bottle, Integza was inspired to make a more powerful see-through rocket. He built its combustion chamber from a glass cylinder with a custom-made metal swirl injector. Along the way, you’ll learn how fuels and oxidizers work and a little about turbochargers and top-fuel dragsters.

More than a decade ago, a grainy black-and-white video turned up of a bullet hitting steel at 1 million FPS. The Slow-Mo Guys were inspired to replicate the experiment using a modern Phantom TMX 7510 camera. While Gav and Dan’s footage is “only” 800,000 FPS, they did capture full-color shots at 400,000 FPS. The explosions looks like tiny fireworks.

Not to be confused with the bonkers 1982 film of the same name, Zach Tolchinsky’s stop-motion animated short has a decidedly more coherent plot. It follows a man living in the ruins of civilization when a flash of light appears outside his bunker. He could stay safely inside, but instead, he risks everything and heads into the Forbidden Zone to investigate.

Nitecore’s compact lantern provides a splash of light for your campsite or backyard bash. It has a retro style with a low-glare light source. It has cool and warm LED light sources and a blinking red SOS light. Its maximum output is just 100 lumens, so it’s best for ambiance rather than situations where you need brightness.

This handmade bag from Japanese accessory maker SEAL carries small items that you want readily accessible. Its slick exterior is made from a recycled tire tube attached to 1680D nylon. A magnetic FIDLOCK closure provides easy one-handed opening and closing, and it offers carabiner clip and strap mounting options.

We’ve all thought we saw faces in places they shouldn’t be, like buildings, outlets, and wood grain patterns. Duncan Clarke explores pareidolia, the tendency for humans to perceive faces and familiar forms where they don’t exist. Along the way, you’ll learn about other ways our brains really want us to see faces.

This compact bolt-action pen works in almost any weather or environment. Its pressurized ink cartridge won’t run, writes at any angle, and even functions underwater. Its plastic shell won’t corrode, and it’s small enough to carry without bulking up pockets. Sold in 2-packs in orange or black.

You hear a creature creepin’ up behind; she had dumps like a truck, truck, truck. DJ Cummerbund pulls out all the stops for his sublime Halloween 2023 remix. The unholy offspring of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Sisqó’s Thong Song is not like other songs – and that’s a good thing.

Nile Rogers has written and produced some of the biggest songs and albums ever. Among his creations is the disco-funk group CHIC, who stopped by NPR Music with Rogers. The mini-concert’s six mega-hits: CHIC’s Le Freak and Good Times, Diana Ross’ I’m Coming Out, Sister Sledge’s We Are Family, Daft Punk’s Get Lucky, and David Bowie’s Let’s Dance.

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.

Designed by blade maker Jon Graham for CRKT, the Razel GT features a snub-nosed straight blade with a chiseled tip that’s great for push-cutting and scraping. It has a smooth-opening ball-bearing pivot and supports easy one-handed closing. Its 3″ long blade is made from 8Cr13MoV steel, while its handle is 6061 aluminum.

It doesn’t seem like balloons would be particularly complicated to make, but How It’s Made shows us how creating party balloons requires lots of industrial equipment, including electrically-charged vats of liquid latex, balloon-shaped molds, and spinning brushes to create the openings we blow into.

If you thought that each of the moons in our solar system were similar in size, you’d be very wrong. Like they did before with stars, MetaBallStudios compares the relative sizes of the natural satellites orbiting around planets, from the tiny rocks zooming around Saturn, to Jupiter’s massive Titan and Ganymede.

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.

Destin from Smarter Every Day and his pals got together for an unusual competition. The goal? Evaluate the power and durability of eight kinds of weed eater lines as they whack into each other at full speed. The battle took place in front of a high-speed camera to see exactly what happened in slow-motion.

Most knives have an uninterrupted cutting edge, but this unique blade has a serrated edge that makes it look like a metal feather. Knives Project shows us how they created the knife by forging a hunk of steel, cutting and grinding its edge, and then etching a pattern into its blade. The shiny brass handle gives it a truly elegant look.

Guinea pigs are neither from Guinea nor are they pigs. But that didn’t stop scientists from naming them that. Language expert Name Explain talks us through some other improperly-named animals, like the mountain chicken and the bearcat, and explains the origins of their monikers.

Scientists estimate that life began on Earth about 3.7 billion years ago. But it’s quite plausible that life existed before this, shortly after the Big Bang created the universe. Kurzgesagt explains why this might have been possible and what sort of life forms might have been cooking in the universe’s primordial soup.