racing plane

Walt Disney Animation Studios' short introduction to path tracing, showing how rays are traced and bounced through a virtual scene to simulate light. It explains how this approach is used in animated films.

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.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

CGP Grey compares airplane boarding methods, based on an arXiv paper, and shows why the intuitive back-to-front approach is slow while random or outside-in boarding does better.

Real Engineering analyzes whether electric planes are feasible, focusing on battery energy density limits compared with jet fuel. It concludes electric flight works mainly for short ranges.

A Two Minute Papers episode on NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder, which cleans up noisy Monte Carlo path-traced image sequences. It shows how a neural network can produce usable renders from very few samples.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.

Wendover Productions explains why Boeing's efficient 787 beat Airbus's giant A380, contrasting hub-and-spoke with point-to-point routes. It covers the economics of long-haul flights.

Joseph Everett, with Dr. Frank Mitloehner, argues that eating less meat will not do much for the climate. He covers beef's water footprint, land and feed use, and methane.

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.

A short Wendover Productions explainer on ETOPS, the rules that let twin-engine jets fly long routes over oceans. It covers the economics that favored twinjets like the 787 over four-engine aircraft like the A380 and 747.

A Blender-animated explanation of the Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive, showing how the engine, two motor-generators, planetary gearset and battery work together as an eCVT.

Wendover Productions explains why modern airliners fly no faster than they did decades ago, covering the economics of speed and fuel efficiency, and why supersonic travel faded.

Vox explainer arguing the two Boeing 737 Max crashes were not just a software bug but the result of a company's drive to beat its rival, with a flawed MCAS design.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli analyzes the safety record of the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), looking at the 90-plus deployments over 20 years of Cirrus flying. He asks whether the whole-aircraft parachute has actually saved lives.

A short animated explanation of the power split device in Toyota-style hybrids, a planetary gearset that works as an eCVT. It shows how engine and motor power are combined.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

Kurzgesagt lays out a speculative plan to terraform Venus, covering its hostile atmosphere and how it might be made Earth-like, with a sources page linked.

A Veritasium video on the asteroid threat, with UCLA's Dave Jewitt explaining detection efforts and how different asteroid sizes compare in damage.

Nature video showing MIT researchers flying the first plane with no moving parts, powered by an ion drive that creates an ionic wind from high-powered electrodes. The 5m-wide craft flies across a sports hall.

3Blue1Brown's visual explanation of how transformers and GPT-style language models work, tracing data through tokens, embeddings and attention.

Veritasium's explainer on Godel's incompleteness theorems and the limits of mathematical proof, tracing set theory, Hilbert's program and the road to Turing and modern computing.

Mick West explains the three Navy UFO videos (FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST) released in 2020, giving mundane explanations such as a distant plane and camera artifacts. He notes the videos were not new and had been circulating since 2017.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

Science journalist potholer54 examines the claim that SARS-CoV-2 came from a Wuhan lab, tracing the sources behind it and the weaknesses in the evidence.

The Map Men explain why British place names are so hard to pronounce, tracing it to layers of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norman influence, with a pronunciation guide.

Wendover Productions explains how overnight shipping works, covering the hub-and-spoke logistics of companies like FedEx and UPS and the use of cargo aircraft. It touches on the economics that make next-day delivery possible.

Adam Ragusea explores why Hershey's chocolate tastes the way it does to many non-Americans, tracing it to butyric acid and Hershey's history, and why familiarity makes Americans love it. He compares it with British Cadbury.

A minutephysics explainer on why the planets orbit in a flat plane. It shows how conserved angular momentum flattens a collapsing cloud of matter into a disk.

Terence Tao and Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown walk through the cosmic distance ladder, showing how humans measured distances from the Earth to the Moon, Sun, planets and beyond. It includes animations and the history behind each step.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG argues that gifted kids can be seen as special needs, tracing a path from the gifted label to burnout and perfectionism.

Kurzgesagt introduces the Fermi paradox: with so many stars and planets, why do we see no sign of aliens? It sets up the question and what it might imply for our own future. It is part 1 of 2.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains that waste heat from ever-growing energy use could eventually boil the oceans in a few centuries, whatever the energy source. She discusses proposed ways to cool the planet.

Isaac Arthur examines options for colonizing Venus, from vast floating habitats in the temperate upper atmosphere to full terraforming of the planet. It is a long-form speculative futurism episode in his solar system colonization series.

Tom Scott explains why Britain historically has separate hot and cold taps rather than mixer taps, tracing it to how water was stored in tanks. He notes why the hot tap is not safe to drink from.

Asianometry explains why India, a chip design powerhouse, cannot fabricate chips, tracing the 1980s government attempt to build a national semiconductor champion and how it collapsed. It includes the sabotage at the SCL fab.

A short explainer from Nat and Friends on where Google Earth's 3D imagery comes from, how it is stitched together, and how often it is updated. It describes aircraft carrying camera rigs and photogrammetry that turns the photos into 3D models.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.