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Veritasium rides a boat across the Los Angeles reservoir covered in 96 million black plastic balls. He explains why they were really introduced, which was not primarily to reduce evaporation.

Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.

A PBS Space Time episode on fuzzballs, the string-theory proposal for black holes that replaces the singularity with a tangle of strings. It explains why black holes seem to both have to exist and break known physics.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

Roy Beck's short gumball presentation using World Bank and Census data to argue that letting people immigrate to the US cannot solve world poverty because the numbers are so large. It is made by NumbersUSA, an immigration-restriction advocacy group.

Mick West analyzes the Navy "Go Fast" UFO footage and shows with simple trigonometry and the data overlay that the object is slow and high up, consistent with a balloon. He explains how parallax makes it look fast and argues the original TV claims were wrong.

Scott Manley explains the Cold War experiments in which steel and aluminium spheres, known as Lew Allen's Balls, were placed near nuclear detonations. The spheres survived the fireball, and he walks through what the declassified results show.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

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.

Kraut traces centuries of political development, from Mongol rule and the Orthodox church to Muscovite autocracy, that shaped Russia's authoritarian state. It uses countryball animation and compares Russia with Europe and China.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains how a US Navy nuclear submarine surfaces through Arctic ice, filmed during the ICEx exercise. It shows ballast and control systems and the physics involved.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

A short CGP Grey explainer on the alternative vote (instant runoff voting) versus first past the post, made around the 2011 UK referendum. It shows how ranked ballots are tallied and why they avoid spoiler effects.

CGP Grey explains the Single Transferable Vote, a proportional ranked-ballot system, and why politicians have little incentive to adopt it. It is a short animated explainer of how multi-winner ranked voting works.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy uses slow motion video to show how the IBM Selectric typewriter works. He focuses on its fully mechanical digital-to-analog converter, which turns key presses into rotation of the type ball.

Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether Venus would be a better colonization target than Mars. It covers Venus's habitable altitudes, floating balloon habitats, and the term surfacism.

Jared Owen's 3D animated breakdown of how a Brunswick GS-X bowling pinsetter works, showing its mechanisms for sweeping, lifting and resetting pins and balls.

Numberphile talks with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown about a darts puzzle with a shrinking bullseye. Solving it takes the volumes of high-dimensional spheres, and the answer turns up Euler's number.