Awesome Learning

Sixty-six million years ago, everything seemed to be going just fine for the dinosaurs. But then something changed, wiping out the thriving beasts. Kurzgesagt looks at how one seemingly minor change in the skies led to the rapid extinction of most life on Earth. It’s a dramatic reminder to live each day as if it was your last.

We love us some gummy bears. There’s something so perfect about their chewy texture, fruity flavors, and adorable form that makes them special. Mental Floss series Food History looks back at the origins and evolution of the tasty candy treat, which first took their bear-shaped form in the 1920s in Germany.

Large groups of people can be intimidating and occasionally dangerous. But why are some crowds well-behaved and others chaotic? Wendover Production digs into the science and psychology at work when it comes to crowd behavior. Competitiveness, stress, and crowd density have a lot to do with the worst-case scenarios.

Beer has been around for thousands of years, and it’s been a social lubricant for everyone from frat boys to world leaders. Weird History Food explores a few interesting facts about the bubbly brew from its origins in China and Mesopotamia through its spread around the globe to become the world’s most popular alcoholic beverage.

Art of Engineering explains how the tall construction cranes used to build skyscrapers are able to increase their own height. The process known as “climbing” a tower crane requires precision and patience and can be incredibly dangerous if not done properly.

We drive past construction sites all the time and see all kinds of heavy machinery. But most of us have no idea what the difference is between a bulldozer, a skid-steer, and an excavator. Practical Engineering offers a concise explanation of the jobs each of these machines is designed for.

We’ve stopped at the Bong Recreational area in Wisconsin and driven through Dildo, Newfoundland, but many other places have funny names too. Language expert RobWords takes us on a virtual trip around the globe to introduce us to places with names like Dick’s Knob, Scratchy Bottom, and Fan y Big.

When you think about how the whole six degrees of separation thing, it’s not a stretch to imagine that we’re all related in one way or another. It’s Okay to Be Smart explores the mathematical and genealogical complexities of our ancestral connections.

When it comes to getting kids hooked on fast food, few things have had a bigger impact than McDonald’s Happy Meals. Conceived in the 1970s, the junk food giant’s combination of colorful packaging, a packed-in prize, and a complete meal in a box was the perfect storm for choosy kids and lazy parents. Weird History Food has the complete story.

Epic Spaceman explores our home galaxy, using a map of the United States to illustrate the relative sizes and distances of celestial objects like Earth and the Sun. We won’t spoil it, but suffice it to say the Milky Way is a massive place, and humanity occupies a teensy-weensy piece of it.

Nature can be weird, wonderful, and at times, gross. Ze Frank teaches us much more about elephants than the “has big ears and a trunk, likes peanuts, hates mice” education we had before. Along the way, you’ll learn why their skin looks so scaly, how they communicate with their feet, and how many pounds they can lift with their trunks.

Printed full-color images are often made from dot patterns called halftones. From a distance, they produce the illusion of smooth shades and millions of colors, but made from just four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Posy’s video offers a brief overview of the technique and a series of close-up dot patterns zoomed out to see their full images.

We may take the roof over our heads for granted these days, but in the 18th century, families venturing into the interior of North America had to build their own shelters to survive the elements as they headed westward. Frontier lifestyle expert Jon Townsend shows us how they might have constructed a shelter without any nails.

Mention the word “Vikings” and it conjures up images of burly warriors with horned helmets, laying waste to all who stood in their way. But as Justin from Mental Floss explains, most modern conceptions about these feared Norsemen are totally wrong.

After looking at the variety of fonts on his computer, vlogger and documentarian struthless wanted to know more about their origins. But as he started to pull at that thread, he learned so much more – about the history of written language, design, pop culture, and communication.

Kurzgesagt has a long history of exploring existential threats. Like many revolutionary changes, biotechnology can be used to improve civilization or bring it to its knees. In this video, they talk about how rapid advancements could wipe us all out by engineering an unstoppable virus, then propose some things we could do to limit those risks.

You might not think that plants, spiders, or bacteria make sounds, but it turns out that they can’t be heard by human ears or we’re just not listening closely enough. SciShow host Stefan Chin explains how modern audio technology is helping researchers discover and experience sounds we never knew were there.

Have you been saying “pass mustard,” “for all intensive purposes,” or “wet your appetite?” You’re saying them wrong. Linguistic expert RobWords delves into these and other commonly misspoken phrases, which are often simply the result of mishearing words, much like that time we thought Kings of Leon were singing “Ohh, dyslexics on fire.”

Any day is a good day to enjoy a bowl of Count Chocula or Franken Berry cereal. It’s part of a complete breakfast! Dan Larson of Toy Galaxy looks at the strange and sometimes controversial history of General Mills’ spooky and sugary Monster Cereals, including the elusive Yummy Mummy. Since this video was released, Carmella Creeper was added to the mix.

The English alphabet works perfectly well for what it is, but it also is pretty inefficient at times. Cunning linguist RobWords sharpens his pencil to come up with some improvements to the alphabet that would eliminate redundancies and wasted letters, making spelling, reading, and writing more efficient.

Do you immediately toss out food the second it hits its expiration date? TED-Ed is here to explain how you’re probably wasting food if you do that. It turns out that the dates stamped on food are often quite arbitrary. In most cases, your best bet is to use your senses of touch, sight, and smell to suss out when food is no longer suitable to eat.

3D illustrator Jared Owen loves to take things apart to show how they work. In this video, he looks at the mechanisms inside of two old-school mechanical scales to see how they use springs, gears, and plates to measure how much something weighs. It’s all about something called Hooke’s Law.

What If explores the hypothetical question of what would happen if you were like Ant-Man, and could shrink yourself down to whatever size you wanted. As you descend from the size of a frog’s egg to the size of an atom, would things be totally awesome at that scale, or absolutely horrifying?