Awesome Science

Most fire is orange, or maybe shades of yellow, white or blue. But it turns out if you spray sodium salts and ethanol into a flame and then view it in front of a sodium vapor lamp, it looks black. Natasha Simons of The Royal Institution explains the science behind this phenomenon.

After seeing the Disney flick The Black Hole, we already were pretty cautious about visiting such an astrophysics phenomenon. But this clip from NASA Goddard provides significantly more scientific reasons you’d never want to get close to one.

Despite being one of the most common (and lifegiving) chemicals on Earth, water behaves in ways that it probably shouldn’t. This clip from Seeker dives into the deep end of the ocean as it explains some of the strange properties of H2O, and why scientists are still learning things about this theoretically simple compound.

The lack of gravity in space can have strange effects on equipment and experiments. If you want to test in near zero-G conditions on Earth, you head to the Bremen Drop Tower, a 140-meter-tall chamber in which objects experience microgravity for up to 10 seconds at a time. Seeker explains how it works.

Beyond the comfort issues, one of the reasons people don’t like wearing masks is that it covers their face. Engineers from EPFL’s EssentialTech Center and Empa have developed a mask that both acts as a filter and is transparent. The trick is the weave, made from incredibly thin nanofibers, woven together using electrospinning.

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections are frequent occurrences on the Sun. Some have been known to disrupt radio waves, but could they actually cause damage? Kurzgesagt stares directly into the Sun to educate us on solar storms, why they occur, and if a strong enough super storm could actually wipe out civilization.

Rising temperatures have been melting Earth’s glaciers, increasing sea levels, damaging precious habitats, and causing water shortages. But is it possible to create new, man-made glaciers? TED-Ed looks at ancient methods of stockpiling ice, and how these techniques could help battle at least one aspect of climate change.

The human body is an amazing organic machine that performs countless tasks every minute of every day. In this video from The Infographics Show, they tally up some of the things that your body will do in the next minute – or twice as much while you watch the entire 2 minute clip.

The core of the Scientific Method is the experiment. But not every hypothesis pans out, and failure is always an option. The Mental Floss List Show looks back at 14 times when tests failed spectacularly, including McDonald’s bubble gum flavored broccoli, which surprisingly isn’t the grossest thing on the list.

Scientist Steve Mould introduces us to one of the strangest insects we’ve seen. Like other caterpillars, the uraba lugens aka gum leaf skeletoniser gradually sheds its exoskeleton as it grows, but it keeps a stack of its old head shells stacked on its head like a crazy hat. And nobody seems to know why it does this.

Computers are pretty capable these days. And while most problems boil down to a series of mathematical computations, Tom Scott points out that there are some kinds of abstract problems that even the smartest programmers with the most powerful supercomputers can’t figure out.

Metamaterials are materials that are defined by their structure, rather than their composition. In 2017, researchers from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences designed a modular framework which can reconfigure as if by magic, resulting in entirely new structures when directional forces are applied.

Among the many memorable scenes in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was the one where Charlie and Grandpa Joe steal Fizzy Lifting Drinks. While it’s impossible that sipping a little soda could lift a human, Kyle Hill of Because Science figured out how much gas it would have actually taken to send Charlie sky high.

Did you know that most bees don’t have yellow and black stripes, or that most Christmas trees aren’t pine trees? MinuteEarth sets the facts straight on four very different subjects where we thought things were one way, but aren’t.

Dr. James O’Donoghue posts all kinds of informative motion graphics on his YouTube channel. Here, he stacked slices of the Solar System’s planets to show how their rotational speeds vary. You can view it flat, or projected onto a sphere. He’s also got a version that accounts for for differences in rotational direction.

Artificial intelligence is getting better at identifying objects in still images, and more recently in video. Now machine learning tech is getting smart enough to look at what’s happening in a video and answer questions about what it has seen. Two Minute Papers provides a brief overview of CLEVRER and its capabilities.

Using an ultra high-speed camera and Schlieren imaging, scientists from RMIT University captured incredible footage of the jet bursting forth from a pressurized plastic soda bottle. The shapes that emerge are called “shock diamonds,” which occur due to pressure differences between exhaust and the surrounding air.

We’ve all heard the advice to wash our hands, avoid touching our faces, and clean our smartphones if we want to avoid catching and spreading coronavirus or other bugs. Mark Rober uses some UV-reactive powder to demonstrate why that’s so important, and shows just how much stuff we touch and leave our germs on.

Did you know that the smartphone in your pocket has moving parts inside of it? Devices such as accelerometers use a hybrid of mechanical and electronic mechanisms known as MEMS. New Mind puts this fascinating and complex tech under the microscope to explain how they work, and how they’re made.

Lauri and Anni of Hydraulic Press Channel fame dropped by the X-ray laboratory at the University of Helsinki to see what objects look like when crushed in front of an X-ray camera. With the help of scientist Samuli Siltanen, they were able to capture some very unique images. We’d love to see some more complicated objects.

You’d think it would be pretty difficult to get a 110-pound iron anvil to float on top of a liquid, but it’s definitely possible with the right substance. In this clip from Cody’s Lab, he shows how a tub filled with shiny liquid mercury does the trick. The much higher density of the mercury is why this experiment works.

Amateur philosopher and space enthusiast exurb1a reminisces about the history of lunar exploration, from the Apollo missions through NASA’s plans to return to the moon in the 21st century. Along the way, you’ll learn a thing or two about the moon’s origins, its relationship to Earth, and more.

There’s a lot of debate as to whether the universe goes on and on forever, or if you kept going, you’d eventually reach its edge. PBS Space Time digs into this astrophysics quandary. Whether the universe is geographically-flat and infinite, or it curves in on itself, it’s still more enormous than most of us can fathom.