Awesome Learning

A compilation of some of the best six second videos and animations submitted by Vine users to GE’s 6SecondScienceFair. Some are too brief to be informative or even comprehensible, but many of the clips are awesome.

Vsauce Michael explores the history and psychology of clapping. It appears that we clap both to remain anonymous and to conform in public settings. So if we no longer convene, will there still be any reason to clap?

“The audience wants the control. They want the freedom.” Kevin Spacey spent part of his lecture at the Edinburgh International Film Festival encouraging his colleagues to embrace digital distribution. Full lecture here. Transcript here.

Mental Floss lists some of the popular foods that are named after people, although not necessarily after their inventors. Find out the origins of nachos, Eggs Benedict, sandwiches and more. Plus a bonus pun fact.

You may think you don’t have a skeleton in your closet, but Minute Earth reminds us that we all have dirt in our garbage cans. Turns out waste isn’t really waste, because today’s trash heap is tomorrow’s midden.

A brief profile on a group of toy sculptors. Jason Frailey, Adrienne Smith and their colleagues make prototypes and molds of action figures, bobbleheads, busts and other toys and collectibles. Filmed by Anthony Ladesich.

Each face on these wood blocks shows the name of an element, but when viewed through an augmented reality app, they come to life, showing how they interact. We only wish they had the whole periodic table in block form.

ASAP Science prepared this quick and informal test that you can take to see how healthy your ears are. Watch in 1080p and with headphones. But disregard the 19,000Hz part; it was lost due to YouTube’s compression.

Shimi Cohen made this video explaning how social networks can paradoxically make us lonely – or lonelier – by instilling false concepts about relationships. Based on this book and an article by Dr. Yair Amichai-Hamburgers.

Take a break from whatever you’re doing, and learn something new. This single-purpose website offers bite-sized bits of random knowledge at the click of a mouse. It’s like a PowerPoint deck, but interesting. (Thanks Luke!)

In honor of Shark Week, Richard Ryan gives us some fascinating and artistic info, as he shoots hollow point and 9mm ammo underwater and presents it to us in the glorious slow motion.

ASAP Science explains what happens to human feces after we flush it down. TL;DW: Thank goodness for bacteria and we’re not going to eat vegetable soup or chocolate milk for a while. But also, who poops pebbles?

YouTuber manniac explains the basics of a Surveillance State and how fundamentally unsound it is. It criminalizes and curtails the rights of the very people that governments are supposed to protect. English captions available.

Mental Floss’ List Show once again undertakes a task for the public good, enlightening us about some commonly mispronounced words and names along with their proper pronuciashens pronunciations. Also see: Pronunciation Manual.

YouTuber Sam Tucker knows a simple yet effective way to make decent music on a piano even if you don’t actually know how to play one. It’s a significant step up from our go-to piano trick.

Grant Thompson aka The King of Random has some tips to make summer less messy and more enjoyable. Actually you can follow practically all of these tips any time of the year. Don’t let thieves see that shampoo bottle hack.

(Gore) ZeFrank presents the owl. Like bears, many owls are fuzzy and cuddly, and their young are insanely cute. But the truth is they grow up to be well-equipped predators and are more likely to rip your eyes off than be your pet.

NPR’s Planet Money visited a recycling plant and a bottle manufacturing facility in to see how used bottles are recycled. They found out that it takes less energy to turn recycled glass into bottles than if raw materials were used.

Vsauce explains the basics of digital file deletion. As always, he goes beyond answering his initial question, leading to trivia about data scavengers in Ghana, a program that “unshreds” paper files and the death of the universe.

If an asteroid was on its way to Earth, what can we do to stop it? Bill Nye The Science Guy dropped by ASAP Science to talk about possible solutions. None of them involve oil drillers. Because this is serious business.

Did you know that for the last 60 years we’ve been eating banana clones? And that these clones are perennially in danger of being wiped out? Go bananas with banana trivia in this episode of the Sci Show.

Using his Nanoflight technology, photographer Stefan Diller takes amazing color images of plants and insects magnified thousands of times. Check out his videos on Vimeo and his images on Nanoflight.

Destin of Smarter Every Day teamed up with the Slow Mo Guys to capture what happens when you shoot an AK-47 underwater. At 27,450 fps, we see a gas bubble and a water jet emerge along with the bullet.