Awesome Smarter Every Day

Over a decade ago, Destin from Smarter Every Day and his pal John Henry tested the idea that you could light a match with a bullet. Now that he’s got a much better high-speed camera, he and John wanted to revisit the experiment. Once they dialed in the aim, they captured some incredible slow-motion macro footage at speeds up to 380,117 FPS.

Destin from Smarter Every Day and his pals got together for an unusual competition. The goal? Evaluate the power and durability of eight kinds of weed eater lines as they whack into each other at full speed. The battle took place in front of a high-speed camera to see exactly what happened in slow-motion.

A while back, Smarter Every Day showed off an air cannon that can launch a baseball at speeds over 1000 mph. This time, they used the cannon to observe the physics at work as the ball leaves the cannon and is obliterated. Stick around for some amazing 36,000 fps slow-motion footage of exploding sprinkles and mayonnaise.

The vast majority of still and video images captured today are shot with digital equipment. But for more than 150 years, film was king. Destin from Smarter Every Day offers a deep dive into the physics and chemistry of film photography, along with some thoughts on the upsides of using the analog medium vs. digital.

After building a supersonic baseball cannon, Devin from SmarterEveryDay and his friends turned their attention to the business end of the cannon. The goal of their latest experiments? To see how many leather baseball gloves it takes to stop a baseball moving at 1.3 times the speed of sound.

An excellent MLB pitcher can throw a 100 mph fastball. But what would it take to pitch a ball faster than the speed of sound? Destin from Smarter Every Day set out to answer that question, and enlisted his engineering pals to build a high-pressure cannon that can launch a ball so fast that it explodes on contact.

As far as we know, the longest home run hit ever was 582 feet by Joey Meyer – and that was with the help of Denver’s thin air. But pesky human ball players are no match for Smarter Every Day and Jeremy Fielding’s terrifying motorized batter built to hit a ball at speeds up to twice as fast as an pro player – if it doesn’t self destruct first.

Destin of Smarter Every Day put together a device that demonstrates reversible laminar flow. He uses it to blend together several different colors of corn syrup, then geeks out about how reversing its direction can completely unmix the blended fluids.

“Anytime you combine 2 billion people in one location, people are gonna exploit that for money, power and influence.” After looking into how YouTube and Twitter are abused, SmarterEveryDay looks at the worst spot of manipulation online: Facebook.

After looking at how evildoers mess with YouTube, Destin of Smarter Every Day takes a look at Twitter and its never-ending battle against bots. He spoke with security experts at Twitter and NATO to find out how these bots work, and why they are there.

“The Internet is fake.” Destin of Smarter Every Day got duped into watching an automatically generated video on YouTube about sensationalist politics. So he researched how it was happening and came up with this defense: stop hating and be more considerate.

Destin of Smarter Every Day follows up his epic high-speed video of a Prince Rupert’s Drop being shot by shooting it with a bigger bullet. Instead of a lead-tipped .22, he works up to a .38 cal bullet with a full metal jacket, and it doesn’t behave as expected. (Thanks Orion!)