Awesome Learning

Bowling alleys typically coat their lanes with oil to protect the wood. This has a significant effect on the ball, so much so that competitions use a variety of oil patterns to challenge competitors. Vox spoke with pro bowler Phil Edwards about bowling’s hidden layer.

Lazy Chief teamed up with narrator Alain de Botton and the School of Life to create this wonderful animation about dreams, and why it’s so difficult for us to remember their details, regardless of how vivid they may have seemed.

ChrisFix shows us how to clean the engine bay of a variety of vehicles, turning them from being covered with dirt, oil and rust to good as new. Watch it all the way through instead of going along with it step by step, because he’s got lots of precautions and tips.

From a spark, or a lifelong itch? From nothing, or anything? From the world, or from within? Andrew Norton farmed answers from both kids and accomplished adults – including David Lynch, Susan Orlean and Ray Barbee – and made neat accompanying visuals for each one.

(PG-13, SPOILERS) Wisecrack uses The Society of the Spectacle to summarize Black Mirror: social media and ads encourage us to subscribe to a commercialized and self-fulfilling form of validation, instead of acknowledging our individuality and imperfections.

A while back, How to Make Everything created every ingredient on a sandwich from scratch. However, he ran into a problem with items going bad, so he decided to see if he could make a sammie last for a year, using various preservation methods. We still wouldn’t eat it.

Minutephysics talks about the “Mountain or Valley?” illusion – a visual distortion that can happen when we look at 3D objects (or illustrations of 3D objects) from an overhead view. It shows how much we rely on shadows to perceive our world.

Seaman JeffHK gives a tour of the amenities, tools and controls of his home away from home, the OOCL Atlanta. It’s fascinating to see the numerous navigation and communication redundancies in place.

Filmmaker IQ answers a ton of questions with this highly informative video that defines most of the roles that are listed in a movie’s credits. The video explains every position from producers to assistant directors to gaffers, key grips, ADR editors, and even crafties.

Casually Explained drops a knowledge bomb and quantifies the chances that you’ll meet the person with whom you’ll want to spend the rest of your life. It’s all in the easy to understand HOPE equation, but it also has a couple of variations.

It costs the US $2M a day to maintain the Global Positioning System. So why is it free? Real Engineering explains the basics of this incredible network and why it’s a global public service. TL;DW: it’s too useful to not be shared. Skip to 4:02 for the free part.

…well, training and learning. Student of the world Mike Boyd wanted to learn how to do muscle ups. But even as a fairly fit person he first had to build up enough strength to do it. He spent… you know what? Let’s just do it. One day at a time.

Sony’s KOOV robot construction system is designed to teach kids basic robotic concepts. The colorful blocks snap together, and can be programmed using a graphical interface which runs on tablets and PCs. Modules include buzzers, sensors, and actuators.

While we’re as excited about space exploration as anyone, adventurers and scientists continue to make discoveries right here on Earth. TheHUB looks at some of these remote and elusive locations, along with the unusual organisms and ecosystems that thrive in them.

We’re assuming they scrubbed the list of all the dirty questions we’re sure are in the REAL top 100, but it’s still entertaining to watch Michael, Kevin, and Jake, of Vsauce, Vsauce2, and Vsauce3, respectively, working as a surprisingly accurate (and literal) human search engine.

(PG-13: Language) Narcissistic life coach exurb1a names 58 things that you can do to help you be happy. Some of them are humorous, some are of course about him, and the rest is a roundabout attempt to get sponsored by Oral-B. Seriously though, good stuff.

It’s Okay to Be Smart describes how prairie dogs as well as certain species of termites and ants build burrows and colonies with natural cooling and air circulation systems. They are all like tiny Willis Carriers.

We’ve all laughed at fail videos, but why is it that we get pleasure from watching the misfortune of others? Nerdwriter1 explores the nature of schadenfreude, the psychology that drives humans to bask in the glow of other’s foibles, and thoughts on where to draw the line.

Pay what you want for this bundle online courses, which will get you up to speed building mobile apps in iOS 10 and Swift 3, and cross-platform apps using React Native, MeteorJS, jQuery, PhoneGap, and more. Beat the average price, and get bonus lessons in Ionic.

“The most raw form of energy in music that we have in the UK.” Drake’s latest album More Life brought grime to the mainstream. Vox spoke with Beats 1 UK radio host Julie Adenuga to find out the origins and characteristics of this fast rising genre.

Automation has been around for centuries, but the rise of machine learning has led to new industries that need relatively few people to operate. As Kurzgesagt and many others have pointed out, this is an unsustainable trend that needs to be answered swiftly.

Vsauce3 provides a layperson’s look at how a video camera breaks down images in such a way that it can be turned into data, and then reconstructed into a realistic picture. In a way, everything we see is simply perception of a thing rather than an actual thing.

Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime have gotten us in the habit of watching an entire series in one marathon session. But is parking it in front of the boob tube for hours on end actually bad for your body and brain? AsapSCIENCE explores.