digital human

Kurzgesagt's animated overview of human origins and the vast prehistory before recorded history. It covers how modern humans emerged and spread.

Monty Montgomery of Xiph.org gives real-time demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit depth and dither using real audio equipment, including both digital analysis tools and vintage analog bench gear. It shows that sampled audio is not stair-stepped and corrects common misconceptions about digital audio.

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.

Kurzgesagt explains the Holocene or Human Era calendar, which adds 10,000 years to the current year to anchor dates to the start of human civilization. It argues this gives a more sensible frame for human history.

A Kurzgesagt animation on longtermism, arguing that because the future could hold trillions of people, our actions' effect on future generations may be what matters most.

Vsauce asks how many holes a human has and uses topology to show the answer depends on what counts as a hole, with animations and expert input.

Curious Droid asks what traces human civilization would leave in the geological record 65 million years from now. It considers how thin the fossil record of humanity might be.

Scott Manley surveys the research on whether people can adapt to rotating artificial gravity, from early Soviet centrifuge tests to modern studies. He concludes it is an engineering problem and discusses Coriolis effects and station radius.

Practical Engineering explains how engineers and agencies put a dollar value on a human life to weigh cost against safety. It covers the legal and regulatory basis for these calculations.

CGP Grey explains how traffic jams come from human driving behavior such as tailgating and reaction delays, and how leaving gaps and smoothing speed would reduce congestion. It also touches on self-driving cars.

Kurzgesagt explains how accumulating space junk could trigger a collision cascade (Kessler syndrome) that makes launches too dangerous and traps humanity on Earth.

A Kurzgesagt explainer on why the human population exploded and why growth is slowing, drawing on Our World in Data. It argues that birth rates fall as countries develop, easing overpopulation fears.

Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.

Ivor Cummins gives an 82-minute presentation on the history and science of vitamin D and human health. He draws on expert interviews to argue that sun exposure and vitamin D status are linked to many chronic diseases.

Veritasium explores why the number 37 turns up so often, drawing on Tom Magliery's collection of 37 sightings and a poll of about 200,000 people asked to pick a random number. It covers how humans choose numbers and why 37 stands out.

Rational Animations explains Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model, which argues that humanity looks suspiciously early in cosmic history. Expanding civilizations set a deadline that explains our timing and bears on the Fermi paradox.

PBS Space Time examines the Silurian hypothesis, the idea that an industrial civilization could have existed on Earth before humans. It looks at what traces such a civilization might leave in the geological record.

PBS Space Time explains the quantum eraser experiment, in which erasing which-path information appears to reverse causality in a double-slit setup. It discusses what this means for quantum mechanics.

Numberphile with Simon Pampena on how humans misunderstand randomness, including coin-flip sequences, run lengths and the gambler's fallacy.

A PBS Space Time episode introducing de Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory, an interpretation of quantum mechanics that avoids much of the strangeness of the mainstream views. It is aimed at curious lay viewers.

A PBS Space Time episode asking what matter, mass, and energy really are, starting with inertial versus gravitational mass and what mass-energy equivalence means.

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.

A 20-minute S3 episode touring Terraform Industries, a startup making synthetic natural gas from air and solar power. It walks through the reactor, injection system, direct air capture and electrolyzer, plus the company's cost goals and next milestone.

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.

Historia Civilis tells the story of 46 BCE, the 445-day year in which Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar. It covers the political context, including the civil war, Cato and Cicero.

PBS Space Time explains the Higgs field and how the Higgs mechanism gives particles mass within quantum field theory. It is a ten-minute overview for a lay audience.

PBS Space Time explains the Bohr-Einstein debate over quantum mechanics and how quantum entanglement settled it. It covers the weirdness of measurement and nonlocal correlations.

This Place argues that the uncanny valley is a flawed concept, since 'human likeness' is too broad and the supporting evidence is cherry-picked. It proposes that the creepiness really comes from how animated characters and robots move.

A two-minute animated introduction to Bitcoin from 2011, explaining it as a peer-to-peer digital currency. It was widely shared in Bitcoin's early days as the standard newcomer explainer.

Vsauce explores how human reasoning works, drawing on the social theory of reason and the extended mind thesis, made in partnership with Bill Gates around climate change.

Kurzgesagt explains why, even with science-fiction technology, most of the universe is permanently out of reach because of cosmic expansion and finite resources.

Joe Scott takes a serious look at space sunshades as a climate fix, asking how big they would need to be, what they would cost and whether they would work. He draws on Roger Angel's paper and launch options.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.

Robert Miles explains the orthogonality thesis: how an agent can be highly intelligent while pursuing goals that seem stupid or alien to humans. He separates intelligence from goals and touches on the stamp-collector example.

Kurzgesagt's hour-long animated film that compresses Earth's 4.5 billion year history into one hour, roughly a million years per second. It follows the evolution of life through to humanity's tiny final stretch.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Rob Miles explains for Computerphile why simple rule sets like Asimov's Three Laws cannot make robots and AI safe. Terms like harm and human are too ambiguous to specify precisely.

Veritasium visits the US Navy's Crane facility to test top night vision goggles. It explains how image intensifier tubes and thermal or digital systems work and compares the generations of the technology.

A nutrition-science explainer reviewing the human evidence on whether seed oils cause inflammation. It looks at nine different seed oils, heated oils, and genetic variability, and compares omega-6 intake with saturated fat.