Awesome Videos

For those unfamiliar with the One Hacker Band, it’s a roomful of electromechanical musical instruments created and programmed by Aaron Todd. For this performance, he programmed his robotic band to play Video Killed the Radio Star, the 1979 Buggles song that launched MTV and kicked off the music video era.

Emily the Engineer, proves yet again that just because something CAN be done doesn’t mean it SHOULD be. She recently got a bee in her bonnet about 3D printing a toilet. Before printing the full-size version in pieces, she made a working scale model. After she got the real deal working, she started adding a bunch of unnecessary features.

Composer Lalo Schifrin’s theme from Mission Impossible is one of the most recognizeable TV and movie theme songs of all time. But we bet you’ve never heard it like this. Musician Jamie Dupuis found a way to preserve the urgency of the original while adding a dash of bluegrass on the 5-string banjo.

Greg Blanpied makes CNC-machined and laser-cut functional art fabricated using parametric math and geometry. Among his amazing pieces is this elegant bowl, which acts as a zoetrope when filmed or spun beneath a strobe light. He’s also created a zoetrope vase.

Visual artist and musician Ellard Devane creates mindblowing animations out of clay. But these are no California raisins, nope. Ellard makes his works by arranging polymer clay into surreal faces and scenes that reveal themselves as he slices away at them, layer by layer, frame by frame. This video compiles highlights from the past couple of years.

Berlin-based artist Florian Goerlitz makes incredible mechanical artworks that have appeared in large installations and at festivals. This smaller piece is notable because it creates so much movement using just a single motor. Made almost entirely from wooden gears, it has three arms that move around its center, undulating like tentacles on an octopus.

Skateboarding sensei Gou Miyagi is a master of the grind. Thrasher Magazine takes us to Miyagi-Do for a lesson in balance, precision, and style with an entertaining demo reel from the unconventional freestyle. If you never saw it, check out Gou’s classic video from Heroin Skateboards.

Auto mechanics hear all kinds of weird stories about cars and the problems they’re having. Just Rolled In offers up another amusing video of strange sounds that cars are making, then follows them up with the description provided by each customer. Our favorite is the defective blend door actuator, which sounds exactly like the intro to Hot for Teacher.

If you live somewhere cold and your car doesn’t have heated seats and a heated steering wheel, you need to upgrade next time. It’s worth it. In this video from MrFastFox666, he used a thermal camera to show what’s going on inside his Cadillac ELR’s heated steering wheel. We assumed the heating element wire would be straight but it has a zig-zag pattern.

This animated short film follows an overworked woman who’s falling apart at the seams under the stress of everyday life. Can she escape the chaos? Writer/Director Sam Southward and a talented team of artists and animators bring the story to life with brilliant character design and a clever use of space and motion.

While a handful of restaurants make their own ramen noodles, many turn to companies like Sun Noodle to make high-quality noodles to serve their guests. Eater takes us inside family-owned business that produces more than 300,000 portions of the chewy Japanese noodles each day, delivering them to dining establishments around the nation.

MetaBallStudios is usually comparing the sizes of things, but in this wild video, they created a CG simulation of what might happen if the moon took aim at Earth, affected its gravity, and eventually collided with it. The destruction isn’t based on scientifically-accurate calculations, but it sure looks terrifying.

Paul Jackman has made a lot of drink coasters out of recycled pallet wood. This time, he made a bunch of coasters that look exactly like real pallets. After designing a 1:10-scale model on his computer, he got to work fabricating 200 of the tiny replicas, complete with laser-engraved logos. You can grab a 2-pack on the ISOTunes website for $50.

This modern home is anything but a traditional cabin. Levi Kelly takes us on a tour of this unique rental property in Hocking Hills, Ohio, known as The Block Tower. Its stacked 4-story construction packs in five bedrooms, three bathrooms, cozy living spaces, a hot tub, and multiple decks that overlook the surrounding woods. Book a stay on Airbnb.

English speakers have different ways of pronouncing the same letter combinations. RobWords explains why the Roman alphabet is problematic for speaking English and how an alternative alphabet known as Shavian could improve matters if people would adopt it. The 48-character alphabet was first used in George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion.

A round of golf can be pretty challenging depending on your skill and the course’s difficulty, aka slope rating. How Ridiculous went for the maximum slope rating by building a painfully difficult golf hole that requires a hike to the top of a rocky mesa in Utah in order to tee off. They tried their luck with exercise balls, basketballs, and golf balls.

Despite only firing rubber bands, we would not want to be on the business end of this wooden minigun. Generic Woodworking shows off the incredible amount of blood, sweat, and tears it took to build this impressive toy weapon. It uses parts from a lawn trimmer and a belt sander to drive its mechanism, and makes an unnerving popping sound as it fires off rounds.

TraceLoops creates eye-catching mixed-media art and animation. Much of their recent work involves making sequences by layering precision-cut sheets of paper and layering them to create a stop-frame sequence. Their YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram pages are filled with more of these hypnotic animations.

Do you have to replace your gadgets more often than you think you should? You’re not alone. While some products wear naturally, others have been engineered to last a specified time. Veritasium host Derek Muller digs into the sordid history of planned obsolescence, including how a cartel of companies conspired to make light bulbs last less time.

Kristan Toczko is a talented harpist with a knack for playing popular music on a classical instrument. Here, she shows off her skills with a brief performance of the famous guitar intro to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck on an electric lever harp. By connecting it to distortion pedals and retuning the harp, she was able to closely replicate the sound of the original.

There are lots of different kinds of races, from cars to dirt bikes to hovercrafts. In this short video, a full rack of pool balls race their way up an elevator and through a twisty downhill course. Which ball will take the checkered flag? Place your bets now! Find more footage of the track in action on supper J’s TikTok channel.

Musician Gabriel Guardian shows off Excalibur, a versatile new musical instrument designed by Looyay that combines an electric bass, a keyboard, and digital drum pads in one. Gabriel’s performance of Killer Queen takes advantage of Excalibur’s unique capabilities, and shows off his own multitasking skills. Now, enjoy a little Billie Jean.

In 2020, more than 120 billion pieces of cardboard were used to pack and ship items in the U.S. – and that number keeps growing. Cardboard is also one of the world’s most successfully recycled materials. New Mind digs into the history, science, and success of the ubiquitous corrugated paper.