scientific writing

Yuta, a Japanese YouTuber, explains whether Japanese speakers can read Chinese text. He shows how shared kanji let people guess meanings while the two languages remain completely different.

The first video in potholer54's climate series, giving a basic look at how climate scientists infer that man-made carbon gases are changing the climate. It is a short explainer meant to present the scientific evidence plainly.

Tom Scott makes a short descriptivist argument that language keeps changing and that casual internet writing conventions, like lowercase typing and dropped full stops, are legitimate. It is part of his Language Files series, written with Gretchen McCulloch.

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.

Rick Beato analyzes the music and production of Max Martin through Ariana Grande's Into You, breaking down its layering and songwriting craft.

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.

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.

A Veritasium video that runs the 2-4-8 rule-guessing puzzle on people to show how they test only examples that confirm their hypothesis. It uses this to illustrate confirmation bias and falsification.

Yuta asks whether native Japanese speakers can actually write kanji by hand, showing that many struggle to recall characters from memory.

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.

A cardiologist runs a detailed, skeptical review of the Wim Hof Method, covering the research on cold exposure and breathing techniques. It also teaches how to read scientific statistics critically.

Zack Freedman gives advice on why makers fail to finish projects, including scrapping bad ideas, showing work publicly and writing a plan that keeps projects fun. It is aimed at hardware DIY but generalizes.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

A Veritasium video on AlphaFold, DeepMind's protein structure prediction system, and the protein design work it enabled. It features interviews with John Jumper and with David Baker's protein design group and explains why predicting protein folding matters.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder explains how 5G works and examines the health concerns around millimeter wave radiation. She reviews the scientific evidence and the open letters from scientists.

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.