Awesome Vsauce

Most of us are familiar with pentagons, hexagons, and octagons, but did you know there’s a name for a 1000-sided shape? Thanks to its numerous vertices, the chiliagon looks like a circle to the naked eye and only reveals its true nature when viewed close up. Micheal from Vsauce offers a quick take on this unusual shape.

People taking photos of themselves blew up with the advent of smartphones. But the first occurrence of what we now refer to as selfies happened way before the 21st century. Michael from Vsauce digs deep to unwind the origins and evolution of self-portraits in this informative history video.

When you look back at old photos, it often seems like people looked older than they were at the time. Vsauce digs into this phenomenon to explore whether there are biological and medical reasons for this or if it’s strictly a matter of our perceptions and changing styles.

It turns out most of the stuff that comes out of your butt when you pass gas is odorless. Michael from Vsauce explains the 1% that makes farts stink, and the theoretical possibilities if your body emitted much more of that noxious stuff.

There are lots of things to be frightened of in the world, but is there a universally worst terror for all people, regardless of age, race, sex, culture or other attributes? Michael Stevens of Vsauce digs into the notion of fear, and how these unpleasant feelings are triggered in our brains. He also hates purple squares now.

Even though there are 365 days in a year there’s a 50% chance that two people in a group of 23 will share the same birthday. Increase the number of people to 75 and there’s nearly a 100% chance of a match. How can that be? Kevin of Vsauce2 explains the math.

Michael Stevens of Vsauce fame (and now DONG) explains the history of International Morse Code, and offers up tips and tricks to learn the seemingly antiquated system of dots and dashes that’s still used today to transmit and recieve emergency signals.

Vsauce host Michael Stevens digs deep into the ever-changing concept of the direction “down,” what causes things to fall, and digs into how masses really, really want to pull towards each other in our universe, thanks to gravitational forces.

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.

Jake Roper from Vsauce3 talks about some of the different kinds of time travel paradigms in science fiction and pop culture, and along the way finds himself stuck in an endless (or at least a 10-hour long) causal loop.

Vsauce got to see BBC’s Planet Earth II early and spoke with the miniseries’ narrator Sir David Attenborough. The spry 90-year-old talked about using the latest technology to make documentaries, why it’s hard to make a nature doc on humans and more.

“Inner space is as mysterious and deep as outer space.” Vsauce gives Bugatti a new slogan, ruins tofu, dives deep into what we think we know about how we think and advices us to keep moving, keep learning and keep hugging.

Vsauce explains that infinity is not a number but a kind of number, and that some infinities are bigger than others. In fact, it appears you can stack infinities infinitely. Why? Because we say so. Math: the ultimate power trip.

We’re pretty familiar with these three popular YouTube channels, so we were impressed with Conjecture’s spot-on meta parodies of each of their trademark styles. The impression of Vsauce’s Michael Stevens bit is amazingly accurate.

Kevin Lieber of Vsauce2 looks at the complex connection between humans and animals, from the way we treat pets as family members, to the respect paid by ancient cultures to animals that were hunted for sustenance, to how we breed dogs to our liking.

Vsauce talks about how cardists use patterns and probabilities to create long-winded tricks that seem to ensure a random outcome, even though what they’ve really done is the opposite. And then your eyes will glaze over as he explains that 52! is a large number.

In this brain-burner of an episode, Vsauce talks about the messages that NASA and other organizations have sent to space in a bid for humanity to communicate with, or at least be remembered by, other intelligent life. Then there’s this.

Did you know that the 100 most used words in the English language make up about half of what the average English speaker says ? Learn that and more in Vsauce’s episode on Zipf’s law, which shows how seemingly complex patterns follow a shockingly simple rule.

Vsauce explains why the bright side of the moon doesn’t always align with its apparent position relative to the sun. Our vision is influenced by visual clues and previous experiences, making us susceptible to optical illusions.

Vsauce wonders if we’ll ever run out of names. The answer is a resounding no, although our descendants might have unmemorable names. Then Michael goes off on his usual tangents and explores how our identities can influence us.

Vsauce talks about awkwardness, including why we feel the same symptoms when we’re embarrassed as when we’re in danger of physical pain. He also explains that in a stupid way, people who are easily embarrassed are being narcissistic.

Vsauce talks about the upbeat topic of human extinction – its probability and possible causes, its impact on our planet and more. He didn’t mention that we’re still merely a blip in time though. We could still get better at this. Or worse.

Vsauce breaks down this classic high school physics question. On one hand, we love this episode because Michael was laser focused. On the other hand, it still hurt our brain. Einstein was a freakin’ Einstein.