Awesome Learning

In 1976, just a few years after the Beatles disbanded, a British journalist published an article about a band named Klaatu. The writer was almost convinced that they were actually the Beatles. Even without today’s social media, the hype train left the station.

Cheddar explores the interesting history of airplane food before sharing why they taste bad. The answer? Much of it actually tastes decent. It turns out that conditions inside an airplane mess with our ability to taste.

The Infographics Show talks about people with hyperthymesia – a highly superior autobiographical memory. While they can’t remember every single detail of their life, they can recall enough – often instantly – that it can sometimes be a curse.

The world’s highest peak is hitting rock bottom. Adam Conover shares how every year, about 100,000 tourists climb Mount Everest. They have left tons of trash and thousands of pounds of human waste, polluting local water sources in the process.

The earliest forms of vocal amplification date back over 1000 years, but microphones as we know them are less than 100 years old. Cheddar looks at how mics changed the way vocalists perform when recording and in live shows, and how they put singers front and center.

Using computer modeling and robotics, scientists are attempting to replicate the movements of creatures who have long been extinct. Nature video shows us how they brought back the Orobates pabsti – a crocodile-like animal who lived before the dinosaurs.

These days we have to watch out for images edited by software. In the future, we’ll be swarmed not just with images but also artificial music and videos. And they won’t be edited by humans; computers will make them from scratch. AsapScience presents a few examples.

For once, Adam Ruins Everything ruins a bad thing. The show reminds us that numerous studies, surveys, and correlative data have shown no concrete evidence that playing violent video games causes people to become more violent or insensitive to violence.

As George Carlin once taught us, there are no blue foods. It’s Okay To Be Smart explores the why there is so little naturally-occuring blue pigment in animals, plants, insects, and other organic matter. Oh, and those Morpho butterflies aren’t actually blue. Minds blown.

Hollywood studios have a long history of releasing movies with very similar plots and/or characters right around the same time. Cheddar looks into this phenomenon, and attempts to explain why we get things like A Bugs Life and Antz, and Top Gun and Iron Eagle.

(PG-13: Language) “The universe is as mad as a bucket of coked-up ferrets.” Exurb1a looks at universal constants and laws of physics which provide us with context for everything, and help us make sense out of the seemingly random nature of things.

We live in a time when people flinch at even the slightest giveaway of plot points. But does knowing the outcome of a story actually decrease one’s enjoyment of a story, or does it actually enhance the experience? Thomas Flight explores the science of how spoilers affect us.

Fingerprints have been used as a reliable method of personal identification for over 500 years. MinuteEarth provides a brief explanation about what makes each of our digits different, and why it’s basically impossible for two to ever be the same.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. The International Spy Museum claims that this tool kit was given to some CIA operatives at the height of the Cold War. It was meant to be stored in the rectum, and contained tools for escaping from a cell.

Albums are typically a collection of an artist or a group’s new songs. Then there are concept albums, which are centered around a theme. Polyphonic explains how Frank Sinatra’s 1955 release In the Wee Small Hours laid the foundation for the concept album.

Think you and your dog make a good team? TierZoo is here to make you reconsider. He presents five of the best mutually beneficial partnerships in the animal world, whether it’s for survival, hunting, or both.

While many video game characters have four fingers, the practice is frowned upon in Japan, resulting in special variants of everyone from Bart Simpson to Crash Bandicoot. Censored Gaming looks at the history behind the strange 4-fingered discrimination in the country.

Native to California, the turret spider is a sneaky predator. Instead of building a web, it builds a small tower out of silk and soil, and covers it with plants and moss. It lives inside the tower for all its life, only springing into action when it senses vibrations nearby.

While there are certainly places on our planet that could use a good downpour, we’d have a whole new set of problems if the rains came and never let up. Life Noggin explores the hypothetical scenario of endless rain, and what it might mean for our planet.

Relics? No, they’re newly made cups. How to Make Everything tried to make biologically-sourced plastic using milk, potatoes and sugar. He actually succeeded in making plastic out of all three ingredients. But molding them was another matter. At least they’re biodegradable.

Over the years, people have used colorful pigments which promised health benefits, beauty, or artistic merit, but ended up being killers. J. V. Maranto explores some of the nastiest colors in this TED-Ed short. Yes, people used to cover themselves with lead paint.

Have you ever wondered just how much room you’d need to store a trilion one dollar bills? No? Too bad, you’re going to find out anyhow, thanks to this short video from Animated Comparisons which shows the relative sizes of stacks of bills in various amounts of money.

Organic food has long been touted as a healthier and more sustainable alternative to conventionally-raised food. But are these more naturally-raised (and more expensive) fruits, veggies, and animals truly better for us and the planet? Kurzgesagt digs into the controversy.