SciShow
Mercury Shouldn't Be Liquid. But It Is.
Mercury, a.k.a. quicksilver, is famous for being a liquid at room temperature...and also below room temperature. But you can't use a high school chem class to explain why. Instead, we need a little help from Einstein.
SciShow
The Electric Light Bulb Was Invented Centuries Before Edison
Thomas Edison often gets credit for the invention of the light bulb, but a good argument can be made that they were around centuries earlier in the form of barometric light.
SciShow
Early Earth Microbes May Have Eaten Raw Meteorites
Is it possible that life on earth began with an out of this world rock buffet?
PBS
Can Future Colliders Break the Standard Model?
In June, the consortium of Europe’s top particle physicists published their vision for the next several years of particle physics experiments in the EU. A big part of that is the Future Circular Collider, which, if it happens, will...
PBS
How Do Quantum States Manifest In The Classical World?
In quantum world things are routinely in multiple states at once - what we call a “superposition” of states. But in the classical world of large scales, things are either this or that. The famous thought experiment is Schrodinger’s cat -...
PBS
How Do We Know What Stars Are Made Of?
Pin-pricks in the celestial sphere, through which shines the light of heaven? Or gods and heroes looking down from their constellations? Or lights kindled above middle earth by Varda Elbereth and brightened with the dew of the trees of...
PBS
How Are Quasiparticles Different From Particles?
The device you’re watching this video on is best understood by thinking about positive and negative charges moving around a circuit of diodes and transistors. But the only elementary particle actually flowing in the circuit is the...
PBS
Why Is 1/137 One of the Greatest Unsolved Problems In Physics?
The Fine Structure Constant is one the strangest numbers in all of physics. It’s the job of physicists to worry about numbers, but there’s one number that physicists have stressed about more than any other. That number is 0.00729735256 -...
PBS
What Happens During a Quantum Jump?
Since the very beginning of quantum mechanics, a debate has raged about how to interpret its bizarre predictions. And at the heart and origin of that debate is the quantum jump or quantum leap - the seemingly miraculous and instantaneous...
PBS
Cosmic Microwave Background Challenge | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
If a photon leaves the train station shortly after the Big Bang ...
PBS
Sound Waves from the Beginning of Time
Invisible to the naked eye, our night sky is scattered with the 100s of billions of galaxies the fill the known universe. Like the stars, these galaxies form constellations – hidden patterns that echo the reverberations of matter and...
PBS
The Cosmic Dark Ages
In astronomy we study things that are very far away. It’s a powerful challenge because even the brightest objects are almost impossibly faint when you view them from the other side of the universe. But there’s an up side. If the light...
PBS
Pulsar Starquakes Make Fast Radio Bursts? + Challenge Winners! | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
Fast Radio Bursts were puzzling physicist for quite some time. They were thought to be the result of large cataclysmic events such as supernovae, but this theory was proven wrong when it was discovered that they could repeat themselves....
PBS
Our Antimatter, Mirrored, Time-Reversed Universe
The foundations of quantum theory rests on its symmetries. For example, it should be impossible to distinguish our universe from one that is that is the perfect mirror opposite in charge, handedness, and the direction of time. But one by...
PBS
The Alchemy of Neutron Star Collisions
Carl Sagan’s famous words: “We are star stuff” refers to a mind-blowing idea – that most atomic nuclei in our bodies were created in the nuclear furnace and the explosive deaths of stars that lived in the ancient universe. In recent...
TED Talks
TED: The molecular love story that could help power the world | Olivia Breese
The key to revolutionizing the world's energy landscape may lie in an unlikely love story, says energy innovator Olivia Breese. She details the fateful marriage of a green electron and a water molecule -- a powerful source of...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why your phone battery gets worse over time | George Zaidan
Almost all batteries, even single-use batteries, are theoretically rechargeable. That's because the metals and other chemicals are still there in the battery. So chemically speaking, a dead battery is actually not that different from a...
SciShow
What Are These Weird Rings In Space?
Over the past few years, astronomers have discovered their own kind of UFO called Odd Radio Circles, aka ORCs. They're a little too round, and a little too invisible at non-radio wavelengths, to immediately know what they are and what's...
SciShow
The Giant of Nanoscience
Mildred Dresselhaus was a giant in the field of nanoscience. She didn't invent anything you have in your home right now, but she made it possible for us to have self-charging phones, smarter refrigerators, and more.
SciShow
How to See Really Tiny Things Without Killing Them
Where would biology be without microscopes? But for a long time, in order to see the smallest bits of life, that life had to be dead. Then along came Atomic Force Microscopy, which let us observe things like DNA and proteins moving...
SciShow
The Nuclear-Powered Clocks of the Future
Atomic clocks are the best timekeepers humanity's got these days, but scientists are working toward something even better: a SUB-atomic (aka nuclear) clock.
MinutePhysics
A Better Way To Picture Atoms
This video is about using Bohmian trajectories to visualize the wavefunctions of hydrogen orbitals, rendered in 3D using custom python code in Blender.
SciShow
This Molecule Has Saved Billions of Lives, How Do We Make It Without Killing Ourselves?
Ammonia is extremely useful to us as a crucial ingredient in fertilizers. But producing it also has a significant carbon footprint, which is why scientists have been on the hunt for a way to make ammonia production greener.
SciShow
How Did a Magnet Just Break My Monitor?
If you’ve managed to break your boxy old computer monitor by sticking a magnet on it, you have a lot to learn about the 20th century technology of cathode ray tubes.