Awesome Videos

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.

The car that Doc Brown drove (and flew) in the Back to the Future movies was a DeLorean DMC-12. Mixing things up for the 21st century, the guys from Supercar Blondie show off the TMC-12x, a Tesla Model X Plaid modified by The Shop in Tampa to look like the time machine. The EV even leaves a trail of fire on the ground. Stick around for a second awesome car.

Given its softness, copper is not a great material for weaponry or tools – but it sure looks awesome. In this video from Mini Katana, they teamed up with a metalsmith to turn thousands of pennies into a unique sword. But hunting down enough vintage copper pennies was only the start of their problems.

Handy Geng was tired of the look of ordinary power tools and decided he wanted something special. His goal was to make a drill that looks like an oversized revolver. He started by taking a motor and housing from a cordless drill and handcrafted metal parts for the gun from steel tube and sheet metal. Then, he built an even more powerful version.

Abandoned Films imagines what a Super Mario Bros. movie might have looked like as a movie shot in Super Panavision 70 back in the 1950s. The surreal take on Nintendo’s iconic plumbers is made extra trippy courtesy of generative AI tech. The images are by Midjourney, video by Runway, voices by ElevenLabs, and the script by ChatGPT.

(PG-13: Language) They’ve got 99 problems, but a beach ain’t one. Thanks to the warped mind behind There I Ruined It, we no longer have to imagine what Jay-Z’s 99 Problems might have sounded like if The Beach Boys had sung it back in the 1960s. The irony of five white boys singing the track isn’t lost on us.

Engineers from Microsoft Research Asia are showing off VASA-1 an AI technology that can take a single photo and text input and produces a photorealistic talking head animation. Controls allow the user to adjust things like emotion, gaze direction, and head size. The intent is to generate lifelike virtual avatars, and not for impersonating real people.

If you attach different-weight objects to a string and hang them over a bar, the lighter object can prevent the heavier one from hitting the ground when dropped. As this happens, the rope spirals around the bar. Science teacher Bruce Yeany attached LEDs to the objects and captured long-exposure photos of this fascinating looping pendulum action.

Filmmaker James Parris pokes fun at those 1950s and 1960s educational films with an etiquette lesson on how to properly use a sidewalk so you don’t bump into people walking in the opposite direction. But what do you do if there are three or more people coming at you, James?

The United Kingdom produced some of the greatest punk rock bands of all time, from The Clash to The Sex Pistols to The Buzzcocks. BLOXSY put together this compilation of 12 potent electric guitar riffs from U.K. punk tracks, which will have you standing up and moshing at your desk.

This incredible short film, directed and animated by Duncan Hatch, takes us on a surreal journey that travels from outer space to a cubicle farm to a colorful forest populated with weird creatures. Noah Kowalski’s sound design and Tom Ippolito’s music deliver a sense of immersion that is truly headphone-worthy.

There are lots of awful things that happen in the wasteland of Fallout, but it’s the gigantic mutant cockroaches that freak us out the most. With some sponsorship bucks from Prime Video, The Hacksmith set out to create a life-size robotic Radroach. Or five. Two of the remote-controlled creepy crawlers roll on wheels, and they’re all filled with nasty green goo.

Like most longstanding structures, the New York City Subway is an urban Ship of Theseus, gradually expanded and reshaped over the last 120 years. This evolution inevitably led to several once coveted corridors and tunnels being rendered obsolete. It’s History takes us through some of these forgotten paths and the stories behind them.

In Fallout, Walton Goggins portrays actor Cooper Howard and his post-apocalyptic incarnation, The Ghoul. This behind-the-scenes video shows the time and effort that goes into applying the prosthetics and makeup to bring his creepy and rogueish character to life, thanks to SFX makeup artist Jake Garber. P.S. Walton’s nose gets removed with CGI.

Robotics company Boston Dynamics just bid farewell to its oddly lovable ATLAS robot, only to reveal a new, more capable version of their humanoid droid. The new ATLAS can stand itself up from lying down and spin its arms, legs, and head around like some possessed demon. It’s awe-inspiring tech but also nightmare fuel.

Mind The Map discusses the fake bus stops outside several senior homes in Germany. Supposedly, they have prevented patients with dementia from wandering off and getting lost should they happen to escape. It seems like a simple ruse, but the longer we think about it, the more we are met by a novel’s worth of metaphors and meanings.

We’ve seen time and time again that there are other ways to move around besides ordinary wheels. LEGO builder Dr. Engine put together vehicles that run on seven kinds of wheels to see how they performed against various obstacles, including a pile of tires, a staircase, and a hill covered with wood chips. It ends with a tug-of-war between the vehicles.

A Thousand Suns is a series of science fiction short films created by BlackMilk Studio and Macgregor, sci-fi fanatics tired of the remake and sequel cycle in mainstream media. Each short is under 5 minutes long, but they all have that imaginative spark and are wonderfully shot. The first six episodes are available at the bottom of this post or on YouTube.

Randall Munroe and Henry Reich’s What If? attempts to answer the hypothetical question of what might happen if every living human stood close together, jumped off of the ground, and landed at the same exact time. While the answer to that question is less exciting than you might think, there would be plenty of unintended consequences of such an event.

This way-too-short film from Yeti Pictures and director Tony Zagoraios features a series of miniature vignettes inspired by classic movie scenes, including The Exorcist, King Kong, Jurassic Park, and more. The animation and modeling team did a great job making it look like it was filmed with models and action figures, but it’s all CGI.

There’s a whole sub-genre of YouTube videos featuring various objects being jammed into industrial shredders. Atomic Marvel went to the extreme and stuck the entire sun into a shredder to see what would happen. We’re surprised it didn’t melt the machine as soon as it hit the gears with its 10,000-degree surface temperature.

It’s hard enough to protect a soccer goal from a single kicker, so what happens to the goalie when a hundred balls are kicked their way? The gang from How Ridiculous tested this and other ideas where the visiting team has way more players than the home team. Every game basically turns into dodgeball on steroids.

Engineer James Bruton adds to his collection of unusual vehicles with the creation of a single-seater that rolls on four 3D-printed mechanum wheels. The not-quite-a-bike uses motors and an inertial measurement unit to remain balanced. By changing the speed and direction of each wheel, it can move forward, backward, sideways, and spin around on a dime. Its agility is quite impressive.