Awesome Learning

There are dozens of apps and filters that let you replicate the look of VHS footage for photos and videos. Tom Scott spoke with film and VFX studio Red Giant to understand why VHS looks so blurry and can have so many artifacts.

How to Make Everything explains how ultraviolet light can damage our bodies as well as what people used to use to block ultraviolet light. He then attempts to make his own sunscreen. He cheated a bit, but the end result actually works.

So what is it about fizzy drinks that makes them so appealing? Quartz takes a look at the history of seltzer water, and how these purified, carbonated beverages became so insanely popular here in the U.S. over the past 100 years.

Veritasium filmed his latest video to show ultraviolet light so that we could see how objects would look like if we could see UV light. Sunscreen becomes dark, as do many light objects. He goes on to explain why this is the case and how it can be useful.

Kurzgesagt explores another really unpleasant hypothetical – what would happen if we detonated a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? But nuking the Earth’s deepest known point might not have the apocalyptic results you’d think it would.

More cars than ever are relying on electricity for propulsion, but using electric motors and batteries for aircraft poses challenges. Real Engineering explores whether a pure electric flyer would be possible, and why it’s so difficult to achieve. Caution, physics equations ahead.

It costs over a billion dollars per year to run an airport. With that kind of investment, you’d think they must be making bank. And that’s exactly the case. Wendover Productions breaks down where airports get their revenues and the tactics they employ to increase them.

(PG-13: Language) We love Simone Giertz for all of the wonderfully sh*tty robots she’s given us. But not too long ago, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Well, the good news is that she’s on the mend from the scary procedure to remove it, and is here to share her story.

Binging with Babish teaches us three ways to make our favorite frozen treat. The first two are easy and require only a handful of ingredients. One uses bananas as the base, while the other uses condensed milk and whipped cream. The third one is the traditional way.

This mobile app makes learning to draw a lot easier and more fun. It uses your phone’s camera so you can overlay an image that you want to copy or use as a template and then sketch over that in real-time. It’s available for both iOS and Android.

Formula One races take place in five continents every year, making logistics a big part of teams’ operation. Wendover Productions shows how months of planning makes it possible for teams to use trucks, buses and planes to transfer to different countries in just a couple of days.

The idea of visiting far-off worlds is the stuff of science fiction, and sadly it’s likely to remain that way for a very long time. You see, the big problem is that we humans just don’t live long enough to travel very far. RealLifeLore explains some of the many challenges we face.

The cloudy white lines that aircraft sometimes leave behind in their wake are commonly known as chemical trails, or chemtrails. But they’re technically called contrails, short for condensation trails. As Reactions points out, that’s because they’re mostly made of water.

While we know it’s possible to extract natural colorings from food and other items, is there a way to completely remove its pigmentation and make it white? The Action Lab performed a series of experiments to test this, and provides a brief lesson on the physics of color.

AsapScience presents a handful of illusions for our ears – actually, the part of our brain that processes sound. These illusions often fool us into hearing sounds that don’t exist, or hearing something else aside from what’s actually there.

“Baked shrimp, broiled shrimp, boiled shrimp…” Binging with Babish takes on the shrimp dishes that Bubba rattled off to Forrest Gump. There are so many of them that they couldn’t fit in one video, but gumbo does make the cut here.

Mental Floss’ latest Scatterbrained dropped a ton of trivia about today’s technological and engineering marvels. Learn about the skyscraper with the biggest clocks in the world, a brief history of robots, Tesla and Panasonic’s massive battery factory and more.

How to Make Everything shares a brief history of fireworks, and how they work. Then he gathers the ingredients he needs to make them from scratch, including bat droppings. The resulting fireworks made for a pretty quiet Fourth of July, but technically they still worked.

Want to make a quick buck playing the stock market? Perhaps you should check out The Motley Fool rather the advice of a guy who has made his money from bad stick figure drawings on YouTube. On the other hand, his point about buying extra monitors is spot on.

There are lots of ways to get yourself into the Guinness World Records without risking life and limb, but some people live for danger. RealLifeLore takes a look at the deadly quest for the highest speed on water, and the many times people have died trying to exceed it.

The Sam O’Nella Academy is here to teach us about one Joshua Norton. This once wealthy San Franciscan decided that he was the head bitch in charge of our nation after a series of misfortunes left him destitute and a bit insane. Then the media gave him a voice and fame.

Kurzgesagt looks at one of the many ways in which mankind is leaving its mark on our planet. Despite its usefulness, this man-made invention is one of the most destructive forces when it comes to the environment. But in some cases, it’s still better than other materials.

While certain words, objects, and even animals have similar traits, it turns out that they didn’t always evolve from the same origin, and sometimes just organically arrived at a similar point. MinuteEarth explains how likenesses between things aren’t always what they seem.