MinuteEarth
How We Learned That Water Isn't An Element
For thousands of years, water was thought to be an element. That is, until some of the greatest chemists in the world managed to crack it open.
MinuteEarth
What if We Replaced Nuclear With Potatoes
Energy use can be confusing – I mean, how do you compare gasoline in your car to electricity piped to your house? That's why we made these things spud-tacularly simple.
MinuteEarth
Which Is Worse: Underpopulation Or Overpopulation?
The human population of the world will soon peak – and then decrease – thanks to a combination of two quickly changing economic and educational trends.
MinuteEarth
When Tree Planting Goes Wrong
Trees are a super-efficient way to sequester carbon, but since planting the wrong trees in the wrong place can do more harm than good, we need to go about tree planting more carefully.
MinuteEarth
Why It's Impossible To Win a Nuclear War
Nuclear war is a terrifying existential threat, but we shouldn't only fear the blasts because the ensuing smoke is the real killer.
MinuteEarth
The 3 Reasons This Tree Has Lived 5000 Years
Methuselah’s environment lacks nutrients, water, and oxygen. In other words, it’s the perfect place to grow very very old.
MinuteEarth
When Was The Worst Time In History To Die?
By combining historical demography and epidemiology, we can (sort of) determine how people throughout history have died.
MinuteEarth
What Is The Best Shape For A Farm?
The shape of a farm can tell you a surprising amount about the land it's on and the people that use it.
MinuteEarth
Why Do Heart Attacks Cause *Arm* Pain?
When the brain receives pain from an internal organ, it often projects the pain in the wrong place because of the way sensory nerve paths converge
MinuteEarth
The Disease You Will Never Survive
A simple mis-folding in a certain brain protein causes a disease for which we have no cure.
MinuteEarth
The Weird Sex Lives of Bluegills
When it comes to the mating game, fish have some of the strangest ways of thwarting the competition.
MinuteEarth
How Caffeine Accidentally Took Over The World
Plants don't make caffeine just for us, so what DO they make it for?
MinuteEarth
This Is Not A Bug
It’s common to call creepy crawlies bugs, but because entomologists refer to a specific class of insects as bugs, it’s wrong to call other things bugs - right?
MinuteEarth
Why Most Fossils Are Incomplete
In 1990, fossil collectors in South Dakota stumbled across a dinosaur that turned out to be a really big deal. Not just because it was a T. rex – basically the most popular dino out there – or because it ended up in Chicago’s famous...
MinuteEarth
These Countries Are Cheating
By overcounting how much carbon their forests suck up, and undercounting how much carbon their industries release, countries undercount their total carbon emissions.
MinuteEarth
Should More Species Be Extinct?
Watch these amazing rewilding videos from our friends at Planet Wild, in which they’re saving Europe’s cutest bird from extinction or resurrecting a dying forest.
MinutePhysics
Why Penrose Tiles Never Repeat
This video is about a better way to understand Penrose tilings (the famous tilings invented by Roger Penrose that never repeat themselves but still have some kind of order/pattern).
MinutePhysics
Why LESS Sensitive Tests Might Be Better
This video written & produced in collaboration with Aatish Bhatia, https://www.aatishb.com This video is about how cheap, fast, and LESS sensitive rapid antigen tests might be better for screening (& maybe surveillance) than PCR COVID...
MinutePhysics
The Trinity of Quality
In order to make something good, you need to have the right combination of three things: Quality, Discernment and Taste. This video is about quality vs quantity, the paradox of quality, how to make good content and good videos, etc....
MinutePhysics
The Rocket & String Paradox
This video is about Bell's Spaceship Paradox of Special Relativity, wherein a pair of rockets (or spacecraft) connected by a weak thread accelerate with uniform acceleration, maintaining the same separation, and the question is: does the...
MinutePhysics
The Problem With The Butterfly Effect
One Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in one minute!
MinutePhysics
Passing A Portal Through Itself
This video is about what happens if you try to pass a portal (like in the video game Portal or Portal 2) through itself - do you get a paradox? Infinite recursion? Impossibility? Contradiction? The end of the world? Collapse of the...
MinutePhysics
Is Anything on the Internet Real?
One Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in one minute!