Be Smart
Measuring the Universe With a 14-Billion Light-Year Ruler
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scientists have been constructing a cosmic measuring tape to measure the universe from our own backyard all the way to its ever-expanding edge: the cosmic distance ladder. In this video, we climb...
MinuteEarth
How To Take A Dinosaur's Temperature
Despite the seemingly basic things we don't know about dinosaurs, we do know some surprising things – like their body temperatures.
TED Talks
TED: The power of personalization in the age of AI | Mark Abraham
With all that spam clogging your inbox, a more personalized experience with the brands you interact with would be a refreshing change of pace. Sharing insights from his research into what brands can do to improve the experience of the...
MinutePhysics
What is Sea Level
An oblate spheroid is a special case of an ellipsoid where two of the semi-principal axes are the same size.
MinuteEarth
How Birds Fooled Military Radar: A Technology Turned Conservation Tool
A technology to ignore birds on radar ended up being useful to study and conserve them.
MinutePhysics
Every Force in Nature (Theory of Everything, Part III)
In which we explain economic equilibrium, how to make money from nothing, and every fundamental force in physics.
MinutePhysics
Einstein's Proof of E=mc2
Ever wonder how Einstein proved E=mc2? This is how. Pi day (3.14) is Albert Einstein's Birthday! To celebrate, we'll explain 4 of his most groundbreaking papers from 1905, when he was just 26 years old
MinutePhysics
2012 Nobel Prize - How Do We See Light
What was the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics given for? Capturing a single photon of light!
SciShow
Why Volcanologists Hate the Dark
You might have heard of the ongoing volcanic eruptions near Grindavík, Iceland. You might not have heard that it's hard to monitor a volcano in the dark. We'll talk about why an Icelandic winter is the worst time for monitoring equipment...
SciShow
Why We'll Never Build a Perfect Clock
We can make clocks that keep accurate time for millions of years. We can also make clocks with such high resolution they tick one billion billion times per second. So why can't we make a clock that does both?
SciShow
Our Galaxy May Be 10 Times Bigger Than We Thought
The Milky Way is often described as measuring 100,000 light years across and containing the mass of a trillion Suns. But our home galaxy is actually far bigger, and might be much less massive. Astronomers aren't sure what the exact stats...
SciShow
How Do You Date a Star?
Figuring out the age of a blinking speck in the sky is a difficult feat, especially if considering how many types of stars there are. This is where a Hertzsprung-Russell meets a gyrochronologist.
SciShow
You Went Through Puberty as a Baby
We all remember the woes and trials of our adolescence. But what you may not have realized is that your middle-school bout with surging hormone's wasn't the first time you went through a sort of puberty. From surging hormones to hair...
PBS
Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Quantum mechanics forbids us from measuring the universe beyond a certain level of precision. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. And in some cases succeeding, by squeezing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to its breaking point.
PBS
What If We Live in a Superdeterministic Universe?
Today we’re going to try to save reality - or at least realism. However this rescue effort has a price; one that you may not be willing to pay. Your very soul, or at least your free will, is on the line.
PBS
What If Dark Energy is a New Quantum Field?
What is Quintessence? Well we know that something is up with the way the universe is expanding - there’s some kind of anti-gravitational effect that’s causing the expansion to accelerate. We don’t know what it is - just that it competes...
PBS
How An Extreme New Star Could Change All Cosmology
A new white dwarf has been discovered (poetically named: ZTF J1901+1458) that’s doing some stuff that no white dwarf should ever be able to do. In fact, it has multiple properties that are so extreme that it almost certainly did NOT form...
PBS
How to Communicate Across the Quantum Multiverse
In the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universal wavefunction is the reality, encompassing all possible histories and futures and all exist. But we are only sensitive to a slice of the wavefunction corresponding to...
PBS
Is Dark Energy Getting Stronger?
The power of Dark Energy may be increasing as the universe ages. Subtle clues are emerging that the accepted model for the nature of dark energy and dark matter may not be all that. We saw the first such clue recently in our recent...
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.
MinuteEarth
When 90dB is LOUDER than 120dB
We often use decibels, a measure of sound pressure, to describe how loud something is - but loudness is caused by how we perceive sounds, and the two often don't line up.
SciShow
Should You Worry About Caffeine Dehydrating You?
There’s a widespread belief that caffeinated drinks will make you dehydrated because the caffeine itself makes you pee. But is caffeine affecting you as much as you think?
SciShow
Can Climate Change Make Lightning… Supercharged?
The oceans absorb a lot of CO2, leading to a variety of effects like ocean acidification. But you might not expect one of those effects: stronger lightning strikes.
SciShow
Astronomy’s Unsung Hero is a Plain Ol’ Aluminum Ball
In 1965, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory saw their Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1 (LCS-1) launched into Earth orbit. It was an empty aluminum sphere and couldn't do any science of its own. But the world's most boring disco ball has played a huge...