research

Microsoft Research demonstrates holoportation, which reconstructs and compresses high-quality 3D models of people in real time and sends them anywhere. With a HoloLens, remote participants appear as if present in your room.

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

Microsoft Research's Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition and translation system, built on deep neural networks, that turns his spoken English into Chinese speech in 2012.

Sabine Hossenfelder reads a confidential email and uses it to explain her worries about academia and incentives in theoretical physics research. She ties it to her earlier Nature Physics comment on research quality.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on whether aging could be cured within our lifetimes, made with Lifespan.io and the LEAF foundation. It introduces the idea of treating aging as a medical problem.

A short clip of molecular biologist Cristina Sanchez describing her lab research on how THC affects cancer cells. It is uploaded on a channel promoting cannabis as a cancer treatment.

Dr Brad Stanfield recounts the research history and scandal around resveratrol, the supposed anti-aging supplement, including problems with the original studies.

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.

Jensen Harris of the Office 2007 design team tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Ribbon at MIX08. He covers early prototypes, mistakes, and the UX principles used to design and validate it.

A Chinese state-TV-produced documentary segment, with English subtitles, about virus sample collection in the field, including scientists collecting live bats. It was published in December 2019.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

Nardwuar interviews Pharrell and Shay of N.E.R.D. in Vancouver, using his trademark deep research and gifts. The extended version runs about ten minutes.

Ben Felix rebuts common arguments for holding only US stocks, such as past outperformance and international revenue exposure. He supports the case for international diversification with cited academic research.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

Bill Gates's 2015 TED talk, given after the 2014 Ebola outbreak, argues the world is unprepared for the next fast-spreading epidemic. He calls for scenario planning, vaccine research, and trained health workers, in the way countries prepare for war.

A video presenting an Intel research paper on enhancing the photorealism of synthetic images. A convolutional network uses rendering intermediates, shown on GTA V footage that comes out looking like real street scenes.

First part of a six-part recording of the 1973 Lighthill debate on AI, where Sir James Lighthill's critical report on AI research was contested by figures including McCarthy and Michie.

A Healthcare Triage episode summarizing the evidence on the health benefits of exercise, made in response to people misreading the host's column on exercise and weight. It argues exercise offers large benefits.

Robert Miles covers a paper where researchers ran real versions of his earlier mesa-optimizer thought experiments. They show inner misalignment, where an AI learns the wrong goal in training and misbehaves when deployed.

A restored 1994 video of Karl Sims' research on evolved virtual creatures, where simulated block creatures are bred through artificial evolution to swim, walk, follow and compete. It is a landmark demonstration of genetic algorithms in physics simulation.

Veritasium examines research suggesting science explainer videos like Khan Academy's make students feel they understand while tests show they have not learned, because misconceptions go unaddressed. It suggests how to partly fix this.

A SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 research demo of 3-Sweep, a tool for extracting editable 3D objects from a single photo using a few user strokes. It predates modern AI image tools.

A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.

A JRE clip in which Bret Weinstein explains his concern that most American lab mice descend from a single lab lineage. He argues this undermines how well mouse research translates to humans.

Kurzgesagt addresses whether viewers can trust its videos, describing its research process and how it handles older videos with errors or overstated claims.

Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.

A short IBM behind-the-scenes documentary on how researchers moved individual atoms to make the world's smallest movie. It introduces the scientists and their work on atomic memory and data storage.

3Blue1Brown's first chapter on deep learning explains what neurons and layers are and the math underlying a basic neural network, using handwritten digit recognition with visual animations.

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.

Tom7 explains and demos software that learns to play NES games by finding score patterns in memory and then searching for inputs that raise it. It is the video companion to his SIGBOVIK paper.

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

CGP Grey explains why European diseases devastated the Americas while few deadly diseases traveled the other way. He ties it to livestock domestication, dense cities, and the ideas of Guns, Germs and Steel.

Tom Scott writes a more honest VPN ad, with the sponsor's name redacted, and explains why the typical claims in VPN advertising are misleading. He notes the sponsor was not happy about it.

Folding Ideas uses the rise and fall of the YouTube competitor VidMe to examine why platforms are not friends to creators. It argues that alternatives to big platforms tend to attract the users banned from the original and lack a core vision.

Dr. Terry Wahls tells how she used diet to manage her multiple sclerosis and get out of a wheelchair, drawing on mitochondrial biology. TED flagged the talk as health advice based on personal narrative.

A short street-level clip of Joe Ades, the New York pitchman who sold vegetable peelers to crowds on the sidewalk. It shows his patter, showmanship and crowd handling in action.

A short animated simulation comparing how Multics and Unix were developed, showing why Unix's small composable programs and pipes gave it a efficiency advantage. It frames Unix as a moonshot achievable by a small team.

Simon Sinek's TEDx talk arguing that great leaders and companies inspire action by communicating why they do something before how or what. He uses Apple as his main example.

A short !!Con 2016 talk by blind developer Sina Bahram on how he uses a computer and writes code with a screen reader at about 1,000 words per minute. He plays how common interfaces sound and challenges the audience to go a day using only the keyboard.