call stack

Practical Engineering explains Mechanically Stabilized Earth, where layers of reinforcement make soil strong enough to hold heavy loads, shown with a sand structure supporting a car. It notes that MSE walls are everywhere in infrastructure.

CGP Grey narrates an animated adaptation of Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. The story uses a dragon that demands a daily toll of lives as a metaphor for aging and society's acceptance of death.

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.

Tom Scott-style exploration by suckerpinch (Tom7) of generalized anagrams where letters can be broken into pieces, called anagraphs, with a whimsical computational approach.

CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply" argues that automation will make a large part of the workforce economically obsolete, much as engines did for horses. It surveys robots and software replacing both physical and mental labor.

CGP Grey explains that the City of London is a tiny, separate entity with its own governance, history and privileges, distinct from the city called London. He covers its financial role and how it is run.

Technology Connections takes apart a 1940s Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster. It senses the toast's own browning and lowers and raises it automatically using purely mechanical parts and no electronics.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

The first video in Not Just Bikes' Strong Towns series explains the financial instability of North American cities, based on Strong Towns research. It argues that low-density suburban growth costs more to maintain than it brings in.

A 10-minute 3Blue1Brown chapter explaining the determinant as the factor by which a linear transformation scales area or volume. It builds the idea geometrically with animations before any formulas.

ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

An animated visualization of basic quantum mechanics using a free particle, with simulations based on the actual equations. It covers waves, particles, and how measurement collapses the wavefunction.

Kurzgesagt's animated take on climate change argues that, despite alarming headlines, there are real reasons for hope as technology, policy and public attitudes shift. It surveys trends and solutions while acknowledging the scale of the problem.

A Veritasium video on the logistic map, showing how a simple population equation leads to chaos and bifurcation. It connects the idea to convection, neuron firing and the Mandelbrot set, with interactive animations.

Real Engineering examines the efficiency of hydrogen as an energy carrier. It follows production, storage and fuel cell conversion losses and compares hydrogen cars with battery electric vehicles.

Numberphile's Ben Sparks shows why the golden ratio is the most irrational number, using seeds, continued fractions and rational approximations. He also explains why plants use it for spacing leaves and seeds.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

A short clip from Carl Sagan's Cosmos in which he explains how Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth using shadows in two Egyptian cities. It is a clear, visual account of an ancient scientific feat.

Not Just Bikes argues that people in walkable, bikeable Dutch cities stay healthy because exercise is built into daily life, which he calls the gym of life. It contrasts this with car-dependent cities that require deliberate workouts.

Guitarist Jim Lill methodically tests what in an electric guitar affects its tone, swapping parts on a partscaster and even trying a 2x4 body. He finds that wood and construction matter far less than people assume.

Climate Town gives a comedic, fast-paced account of how the plastics industry promoted recycling, including the resin-code recycling symbol, while knowing most plastic could not be economically recycled. It points viewers to the Frontline documentary Plastic Wars for a deeper treatment.

PBS Space Time explains the Hubble constant tension, in which two precise, independent methods of measuring the universe's expansion rate disagree. It covers why this calls some standard cosmology into question.

PBS Space Time introduces Miguel Alcubierre's warp drive, explaining how spacetime itself could be warped rather than moving a ship through it, and whether it is physically possible.

Andrew Huang explains the harmonic series, which he calls the foundation of almost all music. He builds the idea up step by step, with demonstrations of overtones and how harmonies derive from them.

PBS Space Time explains what happens as you approach and cross a black hole's event horizon, using Penrose diagrams and light cones as the tool for understanding spacetime there.

jan Misali traces the history of the letter W, including why it is called double u. The video is part of a series of deep dives into individual letters.

Kurzgesagt's animated explainer on the human immune system, describing the body as an ecosystem and how immune defenses cope with the variety of invaders. It promotes their book Immune.

A Numberphile video in which physicists Tony Padilla and Ed Copeland show a seemingly astounding result that 1+2+3+4+... equals -1/12. The argument is informal and has drawn criticism for glossing over what the result actually means.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

A filmmaker explains why the Apollo moon landing footage could not have been faked in a studio, based on the video and film technology of the late 1960s. He walks through the limits of cameras, frame rates and effects of the era.

Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

Veritasium explains the Dzhanibekov effect, also called the tennis racket theorem, where a spinning object flips unexpectedly about its intermediate axis. The video gives an intuitive account of the underlying rotational dynamics, drawing on Terry Tao's explanation and the original papers.

A 1951 Bell System training film showing how telephone calls are routed through a step-by-step (Strowger) switching office.

A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos from a future.

Computerphile video in which Mike Pound explains a University of Maryland paper on watermarking LLM output. The method biases token choices so generated text can later be detected statistically.

Veritasium short showing Drew Berry's scientifically accurate animations of the molecular machines that drive cell division. It walks through mitosis, chromosomes and motor proteins.

Illumina's 3D animation of its sequencing-by-synthesis workflow, from sample preparation and cluster generation to sequencing on a flow cell and data analysis.

Two Minute Papers covers a paper on speeding up fluid and smoke simulation with convolutional networks. It contrasts the approach with earlier regression forest methods.