From TED Ed: If you were a jackrabbit in the desert, you’d be glad to stumble across a cactus: the flesh of these plants is a water source for many animals. Known for their spines and succulent stems, cacti of all shapes and sizes have evolved to not just survive, but thrive, in some of […]
Nothing can escape a black hole, so when a sun gets too close to one, its planets might escape its gravitational pull, leading them to a catastrophic “end of time” event. Respect to the cameraman, the silent hero of this short clip, who sacrificed himself to capture this on tape for us. Ok, that was […]
From Seán Doran: 78,846 frames of ångström-171 data from Solar Dynamics Observatory were repaired, processed & rescaled to create the film, which is the month of August from 2014. These frames amount to 22 minutes of footage at 60 frames per second. The opposite limb of the Sun is shown in the second half of […]
The Death Star, as seen in the original Star Wars trilogy, has nothing to do with how laser weapon actually work. Here is a short 35-second video showing the space station firing on a fleet of ships in a scientifically accurate way. Sure, it might not be as visually stunning as in the movies, but […]
A ravenous swarm stretches as far as the eye can see. It has no leader or strategic plan; its only goals are to eat, breed, and move on. These are desert locusts— infamous for their capacity for destruction. But most of the time desert locusts are no more dangerous than grasshoppers. So what does it […]
In 2013, a group of researchers wanted to create an AI system that could beat every Atari game. They developed a system called Deep Q Networks (DQN) and less than two years later, it was superhuman. But there was one notable exception. When playing Montezuma’s Revenge, DQN couldn’t score a single point. What was it […]
You are not a person, you are a planet, made of roughly 40 trillion cells. There is so much of you, that if your cells were human-sized, you would be as big as 20 Mount Everests. For your creepy-crawly inhabitants, this makes your body an ecosystem, rich in resources and warmth and space. A perfect […]
Youtuber Jake Laser made a real liquid Venom suit that actually expands to cover his whole body. The first part of the suit is made form magnetic beads, and then Laser dips his arm into a vat of ferrofluid, a black magnetic liquid saturated with iron particles, allowing the liquid to crawl up onto his […]
Toxicologist Anne Chappelle answers the internet’s burning questions about poison. How do antidotes work? Can a pencil give you lead poisoning? Can you overdose on vitamins? Anne answers all these questions and much more! [Wired]
Since many cancers don’t have symptoms early on, they may go unnoticed until they are at an advanced stage. But that is changing, thanks to a newer, non-invasive tool. [SciShow]