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!
MinutePhysics
Geosynchronous Orbits are WEIRD
This video is about the physics of geosynchronous and geostationary orbits, why they exist, when they don't, when they're useful for communication/satellite TV, etc.
MinutePhysics
Another Portal Paradox
What happens if you extend a piston through a portal? Or try to sandwich a cube between two portals? That's right, it's time to explore more portal paradoxes!
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.
MinutePhysics
Windmills Are NOT Like Dams
The Solution to the Windmill Paradox. This video is about the tradeoff of Windmills: the fact that the more kinetic energy you extract from the wind the slower the wind goes, the less wind you have to extract energy from, etc. How much...
MinutePhysics
Why is it Harder to Drive Backwards?
One Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in one minute!
MinutePhysics
Why Do Boats Make This Shape?
This video is about the "Kelvin wake" shape of water wakes behind boats - we talk about mach angle, dispersion, superposition of many waves, and how these all lead to the pattern of a wake. We don't get into Froude number though...
MinutePhysics
The Physics of Windmill Design
This video is about how physics dictates the design of modern windmills - why they are so big, have so few blades, and have such skinny blades.
MinutePhysics
Most Collisions Are Secretly in One Dimension
This video is about elastic and inelastic collisions in 1D, 2D and 3D - and how the collision of conservation of energy with conservation of momentum, plus a secret direction, results in a completely predetermined behavior for most...
MinutePhysics
Minute Physics: What is Gravity?
In this episode, we discuss the basic nature of gravity, one of the four fundamental forces in our universe.