Bozeman Science
Average Value of the Electric Field
In this video Paul Andersen explains how the average value of the electric field can be determined by dividing the potential difference by the displacement. Equipotential lines can be used to determine the potential in an electric field...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What is "normal" and what is "different"? | Yana Buhrer Tavanier
The word "normal" is often used as a synonym for "typical," "expected," or even "correct." By that logic, most people should fit the description of normal. But time and time again, so-called normal descriptions of our bodies, minds, and...
Crash Course
Mean, Median, and Mode Measures of Central Tendency - Crash Course Statistics
Today we’re going to talk about measures of central tendency - those are the numbers that tend to hang out in the middle of our data: the mean, the median, and mode. All of these numbers can be called “averages” and they’re the numbers...
Be Smart
Is Height All in Our Genes?
I'm tall. Most of the people in my family are tall. Does that mean my son will be tall? Turns out the inheritance of height is a lot more complicated than we thought. Scientists know that nature (genes) and nurture (environment) both...
MinuteEarth
How Long Did People Use To Live?
By analyzing survivorship curves over the centuries, we can learn what’s changed about how - and when - humans die.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you solve the riddle and escape Hades? | Dan Finkel
The underworld is overcrowded, and Zeus has ordered Hades to let some spirits out. Hades arranges all the souls of the dead in a line before Cerberus. When one of his three heads bites down on the soul in front of it, they'll get...
TED Talks
TED: 3 creative ways to fix fashion's waste problem | Amit Kalra
What happens to the clothes we don't buy? You might think that last season's coats, trousers and turtlenecks end up being put to use, but most of it (nearly 13 million tons each year in the united States alone) ends up in landfills....
MinuteEarth
The Problem With Life Expectancy
In order to truly understand differences among animal lifespans, we need to stop thinking about a specific number and start thinking about a distribution.
SciShow
Will the Moon Ever Leave the Earth's Orbit?
Every year the moon’s orbit gets a little bigger and it moves just a little farther away. Should we worry about the Moon breaking free?
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The coin flip conundrum - Po-Shen Loh
When you flip a coin to make a decision, there's an equal chance of getting heads and tails. But what if you flip the coin repeatedly, so that one option would win as soon as two heads showed up in a row, and another would win as soon as...
Crash Course
Passing Gases: Effusion, Diffusion and the Velocity of a Gas - Crash Course Chemistry
We have learned over the past few weeks that gases have real-life constraints on how they move here in the non-ideal world. As with most things in chemistry (and also in life) how a gas moves is more complex than it at first appears. In...
MinuteEarth
Why Apple Pie Isn't American
Our diets are more global than we realize, because our common food crops and animals were domesticated far away in diverse locations. __________________________________________ If you want to learn more about this topic, start your...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The chemistry of cold packs - John Pollard
If you stick water in the freezer, it will take a few hours to freeze into ice. How is it, then, that cold packs go from room temperature to near freezing in mere seconds? John Pollard details the chemistry of the cold pack, shedding...
SciShow
3 Strategies to (Kind of) Change Someone’s Opinions
You might not be able to completely reverse a person’s stance on any given issue, but you might be able to change their mind a little by presenting your argument in just the right way.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Game theory challenge: Can you predict human behavior? | Lucas Husted
Given a range of integers from 0 to 100, what would the whole number closest to 2/3 of the average of all numbers guessed be? For example, if the average of all guesses is 60, the correct guess will be 40. The game is played under...
Crash Course
Geometric Distributions and The Birthday Paradox - Crash Course Statistics
Geometric probabilities, and probabilities in general, allow us to guess how long we'll have to wait for something to happen. Today, we'll discuss how they can be used to figure out how many Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans you could...
TED Talks
TED: Keep your goals to yourself | Derek Sivers
After hitting on a brilliant new life plan, our first instinct is to tell someone, but Derek Sivers says it's better to keep goals secret. He presents research stretching as far back as the 1920s to show why people who talk about their...
Bozeman Science
Kinetic Theory and Temperature
In this video Paul Andersen explains how the macroscopic measure of temperature can be related to the average kinetic energy of molecules in motion. The Boltzmann constant and distribution can be used to calculate the root mean square...
SciShow
Why You’re More Afraid of Sharks Than Cows
Tons of people are afraid of sharks, but the reasons have a lot more to do with how our brains deal with risk than anything to do with these super cool sea critters. Heads up: This video contains footage of sharks.
Crash Course
How P-Values Help Us Test Hypotheses - Crash Course Statistics
Today we're going to begin our three-part unit on p-values. In this episode we'll talk about Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (or NHST) which is a framework for comparing two sets of information. In NHST we assume that there is no...
Crash Course
Measures of Spread - Crash Course Statistics
Today, we're looking at measures of spread, or dispersion, which we use to understand how well medians and means represent the data, and how reliable our conclusions are. They can help understand test scores, income inequality, spot...
Bozeman Science
Standard Deviation
In this video Paul Andersen explains the importance of standard deviation. He starts with a discussion of normal distribution and how the standard deviation measures the average distance from the mean, or the "spread" of data. He then...
SciShow
The Real Reason It's So Hard to Lose Weight
You probably know that losing weight is really hard. But it may not be just because of your cheat day frequency; your body actually fights back to make losing weight harder.