anti-corruption act

The Thought Emporium tests so-called negative ion and anti-5G wellness products and finds they are radioactive, with some coated in powdered thorium.

A short RepresentUs explainer on how money corrupts American politics and what an anti-corruption act could do about it. It covers lobbying, super PACs and campaign finance, and pitches the group's proposed reforms. The video was later superseded by an updated version.

An animated Kurzgesagt explainer on bacteriophages, viruses that kill bacteria, covering how they infect and burst cells and their potential as therapy against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

3Blue1Brown explains fractal dimension and shows why many fractals are not strictly self-similar. Self-similarity turns out to be a special case of the broader idea of fractional dimension.

3Blue1Brown visualizes Feynman's lecture on the refractive index, explaining why light appears to slow down in glass and why the effect depends on color. It builds the idea from waves produced by oscillating charges in the material.

Mathologer uses continued fractions to show why the golden ratio is the most irrational number, comparing it with root 2, e and pi and pointing to where this shows up in nature.

Perun analyzes how corruption and theft in defence procurement hollowed out the Russian military before its invasion of Ukraine. It explains the mechanics of graft and how it degrades capability.

Applied Science explains how retail anti-theft tags work. A tiny magnetostrictive strip acts as a mechanical oscillator excited by a magnetic field, and magnetizing or demagnetizing it arms or disarms the tag.

Every Frame a Painting analyzes how Jackie Chan stages action comedy, with nine principles such as starting from a disadvantage, using the environment, clear shots, and keeping action and reaction in the same frame.

A 2011 remix of over six hours of talks by Kirk Sorensen and other thorium advocates, explaining thorium as a nuclear fuel and the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). It argues LFTRs could produce energy without long-lived transuranic waste.

An animated xtranormal explainer on quantitative easing, what the Federal Reserve was doing and how things got there. It was made by Omid Malekan.

Extra Credits explains from a game developer's perspective why AAA games have stayed at $60 despite inflation, and how that pressure drives DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.

Numberphile's James Grime discusses highly composite numbers, nicknamed anti-primes, which have more factors than any smaller number, using 5040 as the central example. It touches on Plato and Ramanujan.

Veritasium examines which experts have real expertise, drawing on chess research and work by Klein and Kahneman. It explains that expertise comes from pattern recognition built through deliberate practice in valid, feedback-rich environments.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

The Thought Emporium's update on the home-brewed gene therapy he took to cure his lactose intolerance. It reports how the effect held up over two years and what future versions might look like.

Huygens Optics shows how DIY photon sieves shape a laser's wave front, explaining how they differ from zone plates and how aperture count affects the focal point, with time-resolved visualizations of the diffraction.

A Kurzgesagt animation of how the immune system responds to a bacterial infection, depicting immune cells as an army defending the body.

A short RepresentUs explainer arguing that US politics is shaped by money, citing the Gilens and Page Princeton study on how little average citizens influence policy.

Branch Education walks through a semiconductor fab and the dozens of steps used to turn silicon wafers into microchips, with 3D animation. It covers lithography, deposition and etching at a high level.

3Blue1Brown introduces group theory and abstract groups, then builds toward classification of finite simple groups and the enormous Monster group with its 196,883 dimensions.

Dialect coach Erik Singer analyzes how accurate the accents are of 32 well-known actors, including Brad Pitt and Will Smith, in WIRED's breakdown.

3kliksphilip summarizes Valve's GDC talk on VACNet, a deep-learning system that flags CS:GO cheaters and feeds the Overwatch review queue. It covers Trust Factor, VAC, and how the data is collected and analyzed.

A Vox explainer on how many of the British Museum's treasures were taken during British imperial rule, focusing on the Benin Bronzes and requests for their return.

Fermilab's Don Lincoln explains why light travels slower in water and glass. He knocks down common wrong explanations such as absorption and re-emission, then gives the wave-mechanics reason tied to refractive index.

A Veritasium video that follows the principle of least action from Bernoulli and Newton to quantum mechanics, asking whether light takes all possible paths at once. It includes experiments showing quantum waves.

Veritasium visits Chernobyl, Fukushima and other places to find who on Earth is exposed to the most ionizing radiation. The answer turns out to be surprising and puts radiation risk in context.

Practical Engineering gives a short introduction to concrete, covering the difference between concrete and cement, the ingredients, and reinforcement. It includes a hydraulic press demonstration of compressive strength.

Practical Engineering explains what a 100-year flood actually means, combining statistics, hydrology and how society treats risk. Grady walks through local drainage infrastructure and the caveats in estimating flood probability.

3Blue1Brown explains the math and mechanics behind Bitcoin visually: ledgers, digital signatures, proof of work and the blockchain, building up a decentralized payment system from first principles.

Veritasium explains quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance, walking through Bell's inequality and the experiments that rule out hidden variables, in under ten minutes.

CGP Grey explains split-brain patients, where severing the corpus callosum lets the two hemispheres act independently. He uses this to explore the idea of two minds in one head.

VFX supervisor Jonas Ussing examines what studios mean by "no CGI", showing how much invisible CGI hides behind practical-effects marketing. It is the first part of a multi-part series that includes analysis of doctored behind-the-scenes footage.

A short video on the US Sprint anti-ballistic missile, which accelerated to around Mach 10 in seconds under extreme g-forces and heat. It includes striking launch footage and a brief development history.

The School of Life sets out principles for making attractive cities, arguing that the art has been lost in the modern world.

Ben Felix explains how central bank money creation and quantitative easing actually work, and what they do and do not imply for asset prices and currency. He addresses the common belief that the Fed prints unlimited money and props up markets.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

Yuta explains what Japan's 99% conviction rate actually means, noting that prosecutors drop cases unless confidence is very high. He argues that the number is widely misunderstood and cites his sources.

A SciShow episode in which Hank Green introduces five of the most dangerous chemicals, from lethal toxins to substances that explode on contact. It is an entertaining overview of extreme chemical hazards.