experiment

Veritasium revisits Thomas Young's original double slit experiment with light, showing how interference supports the wave nature of light. It uses a pond-wave demonstration to explain the pattern.

A short experiment dissolving the aluminum of a Coca-Cola can with drain cleaner to reveal the clear plastic film lining inside.

A Swedish fiber provider's short experiment in which volunteers wear Oculus Rift headsets that add lag to their view of real life. They try to do everyday tasks like making pancakes.

A short animated lesson, featuring Dr. Quantum, on the double slit experiment and how observing electrons seems to change their behavior.

Excerpts from W. Edwards Deming's Red Bead Experiment, where workers draw beads from a bowl and are judged on red ones that are largely down to chance. It shows how system variation, not individual effort, drives results.

A BBC Earth clip from Super Powered Owls in which the team uses sensitive sound equipment to compare owl flight with other birds. It shows why owls fly almost silently.

A one-minute clip from Frans de Waal's TED talk showing two capuchin monkeys given unequal rewards (cucumber versus grape) for the same task. The monkey receiving the lesser reward reacts with protest.

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.

Technology Connections experiments with filtering white and colored LEDs to make holiday lights look less garish. He explains why narrowband LED strings look harsh compared with incandescent bulbs.

Shahriar of The Signal Path tears down and experiments with Keysight's UXR real-time oscilloscope, which offers 110GHz bandwidth and 256GS/s sampling, and compares architectures from Keysight, LeCroy and Tektronix.

Ron Garret tells the story of the Remote Agent Experiment on NASA's Deep Space 1, where autonomous software controlled a spacecraft in 1999. He describes debugging Lisp code remotely from millions of miles away.

Eric Seidel presents Sky, an experimental open-source framework for writing mobile apps in Dart with fast development cycles and 60Hz UI. Sky later became Flutter.

Gary Wilson's TEDxGlasgow talk argues that internet pornography hyperstimulates the brain's reward system and can cause symptoms that reverse when people stop. TED notes that several claims are not supported by respected academic studies.

Allieway Audio gives an informal introduction and live-coding demo of ORCA, a free esoteric programming environment for building procedural sequencers from Hundred Rabbits. It walks through the interface and how to make music with it.

Stanford Health Care hosts Christopher Gardner and Robert Lustig on whether all calories are equal, with a focus on processed food and sugar. The talk questions the idea that calories in versus calories out fully explains weight and health.

TED talk by biochemist Cynthia Kenyon on how a simple genetic mutation can double the lifespan of the worm C. elegans, and what that suggests about extending healthy human life.

A hidden-camera social experiment in a park where three people try to steal a bike in the open: a white teenager, a black teenager and a young woman. It records how bystanders react to each.

Vsauce's Michael Stevens stages a realistic version of the trolley problem with unsuspecting subjects who believe they must decide a life-or-death outcome. The Mind Field episode compares what people say they would do with what they actually do.

A demonstration comparing what a month of vaping versus a month of smoking cigarettes does to the lungs, using a filter to show the residue. It is part of a series of similar experiments.

NightHawkInLight demonstrates how a Tesla valve works by sending a propane flame front through one, making the flow visible. It is a short, hands-on experiment video.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett visits Google to discuss his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, describing thought experiments and thinking tools across psychology, biology, computer science and physics.

The Hydraulic Press Channel folds an A3 sheet of paper past the supposed seven-fold limit and then crushes it with a press. It is a short, quirky experiment.

Casey Neistat's social experiment in New York City where he tries to 'steal' his own bike with various tools, showing how little stops passers-by from helping.

Alvin Lucier's 1969 minimalist piece in which a spoken text is repeatedly played back and re-recorded in a room until the room's resonances replace the words. This is the 1981 Lovely Music recording.

A short social experiment video in which people mimic the New York subway practice of workers pointing at signs and signals. It makes the point cheerfully.

Peter Sripol builds and flies an RC aeroplane whose wings are rotating KFC buckets, using the Magnus effect (Flettner rotors) for lift. It is a hobbyist experiment in unconventional aerodynamics.

Cody's Lab obtains pure heavy water (D2O) and drinks it as a taste test, reporting its flavor and feel. It is a short self-experiment.

Sciencium examines the Mpemba effect, the claim that hot water freezes faster than cold water. It walks through experiments and a published paper questioning the effect.

Two experimenters hold blades of grass near a radio transmitter antenna and hear the AM station through the arc between antenna and grass. It is a short, informal demonstration of unintentional AM demodulation.

A performance recording of Alvin Lucier's 1969 experimental piece in which a spoken text is repeatedly played back and re-recorded in a room until the room's resonances overwhelm the words. It is a landmark of electronic and conceptual music.

Veritasium shows an experiment from Prof. Dan Lathrop's lab with a spinning sphere of molten sodium, used to study how turbulent convection in Earth's core generates a magnetic field. It is a short demonstration of dynamo physics.

A short demo of a walking droplet on a vibrating silicone oil bath passing through a double slit and producing interference, a macro-scale analogue of pilot-wave behavior.

CGP Grey asks whether Star Trek-style teleportation would kill you and recreate a copy, working through the philosophy of identity and the Ship of Theseus. It is a short animated explainer.

A four-minute demo of the greenhouse effect showing how increased carbon dioxide raises temperature. It uses a simple setup that is dramatic and easy to understand.

A 72-hour timelapse of Reddit's 2017 April Fools' experiment r/place, a collaborative pixel canvas where each user could place one pixel every few minutes. The frames come from an image archive and the Reddit API.

Frans de Waal's TED talk shows videos of behavioral experiments on primates and other mammals that reveal empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity. He argues these moral traits are not uniquely human.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

A silent PLOS ONE video of New Caledonian crows solving Aesop's Fable puzzles by dropping objects to raise water and reach food. It shows example trials from experiments testing causal understanding of water displacement.

A short excerpt from Frans de Waal's TED talk showing a capuchin monkey fairness experiment in which two monkeys are paid unequally, one with cucumber and one with grapes. The shortchanged monkey reacts angrily.

Builder Matt Risinger freezes water-filled copper and PEX piping capped with SharkBite fittings to see which survives. The video compares how each pipe type handles freezing.