Awesome Learning

This Humble Bundle is packed with over $1000 worth of reading material from Morgan & Claypool to help you learn about electronic circuits, microcontrollers, and engineering principles. Pay what you want, and if you spend more than $15, you’ll get all 17 e-Books, while supporting the National Coalition Against Censorship.

After seeing the Disney flick The Black Hole, we already were pretty cautious about visiting such an astrophysics phenomenon. But this clip from NASA Goddard provides significantly more scientific reasons you’d never want to get close to one.

Breakfast in most other countries isn’t as packed with sugar as it is here in the U.S. So how is it that America ended up eating desserts for breakfast, and is it really the most important meal of the day? Journalist Johnny Harris digs into the story and offers his thoughts on our bad morning eating habits.

Despite being one of the most common (and lifegiving) chemicals on Earth, water behaves in ways that it probably shouldn’t. This clip from Seeker dives into the deep end of the ocean as it explains some of the strange properties of H2O, and why scientists are still learning things about this theoretically simple compound.

As long as we’re not carrying a heavy suitcase, we generally take the stairs when given a choice. But for those times when you feel like giving your legs a break, the escalator is quite the invention. Jared Owen provides an animated explanation of the inner workings of this engineering marvel that dates back to the mid-19th century.

Flatulation is one of those rare forces of nature that’s both essential and the source of endless giggles. From the first fart joke ever told to the composition of your flatus, Mental Floss editor Erin McCarthy is here to school us on the finer points of our bodies’ gaseous emissions.

Off the Cuf’s video not only takes us on a tour of the enormous Iowa 80 Truck Stop, it spends a good bit of time delving into the history of trucking goods across America, and the importance of this critical industry in delivering food and other items that we rely on every day.

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections are frequent occurrences on the Sun. Some have been known to disrupt radio waves, but could they actually cause damage? Kurzgesagt stares directly into the Sun to educate us on solar storms, why they occur, and if a strong enough super storm could actually wipe out civilization.

The human body is an amazing organic machine that performs countless tasks every minute of every day. In this video from The Infographics Show, they tally up some of the things that your body will do in the next minute – or twice as much while you watch the entire 2 minute clip.

Film Radar made this great video about wardrobe design in film and TV. Good costume designers inhabit the minds of both the characters and the director. In terms of production, costumes are often custom made, even for extras, and may have multiple replicas.

Who gives a f**k about an Oxford comma? Maybe you will, once you learn about these tiny but costly mistakes. Half as Interesting shares four cases wherein a misplaced comma or a missing character had million-dollar consequences or more.

You might think that robots are a 19th or 20th century invention, but the idea of a humanoid machine dates back way further. TED-Ed looks back to an ancient Greek myth that involved a giant automaton warrior built to defend an island kingdom. It was also the first story about a robot struggling with its humanity.

The Royal Ocean Film Society gathered snippets from animation experts that point out the importance of walking in cartoons. We can learn a lot about a character – even a live one – by their walk, and changing even one element of it can drastically change the character.

Computers are pretty capable these days. And while most problems boil down to a series of mathematical computations, Tom Scott points out that there are some kinds of abstract problems that even the smartest programmers with the most powerful supercomputers can’t figure out.

Science fiction movies love to depict all sorts of nasty consequences of being sucked out into space. But what would really happen if you managed to slip out of your spaceship without a spacesuit on? The Infographics Show does their best to explain the unpleasant repercussions.

(PG-13: Language) Here in America, shopping malls are a dying breed. But what happened to these symbols of capitalism that were once the gathering place for teens as they sipped on Orange Juliuses and perused the black light illuminated aisles of Spencer Gifts? Ordinary Things explores the demise of the mall.