When you think of the vast emptiness of space, one of the first things to come to mind is probably violent decompression. But is the vacuum of space powerful enough that it could suck out an entire ocean through some sort of gigantic space straw? More »
This is actually a pretty great thought experiment. At first it might seem kind of pointless to talk about what would happen if the sun vanished, but it doesn’t actually result in the immediate destruction of everything. Which is weird. Vsauce walks through a pretty nuanced description of how earth’s natural systems would slowly fail, but over weeks and even years, not seconds. The cold would get us in the end, but extremophiles that live in deep sea volcanoes and thermal vents could survive for billions of years. If you’re not heliocentric and human-centric things don’t look so bleak. [Vsauce] More »
Why Do Humans Play Games?
Posted in: Today's Chili Every March (as well as any number of other months), those of us who aren’t into sportsketball ask ourselves this question: we do people care about sports at all? Vsauce has taken the question a bit further, and dug into why we—as a species—play games at all. Nerds, we’ve got more in common with those jocks than we might have thought. [Vsauce] More »
How Much Would Wikipedia Weigh?
Posted in: Today's Chili The geniuses behind Vsauce scientifically answered a few questions, as only they can, about whether it makes sense to eat yourself if you’re ever suffering from starvation, how does hair know when to stop growing, what eye floaters are, how much would Wikipedia weigh and more. More »
It’s nearly impossible to use Comic Sans on the Internet and not get tarred and feathered. It’s an Internet sin of the highest level. A crime against human decency and people’s eyeballs. A parody of a joke of a fool. Universally hated. So… is it possible to defend the font? Is Comic Sans wrongfully reviled? Maybe! More »
We’ve been taking pictures for almost 200 years now, and we sure aren’t slowing down. But how many pictures have we taken all together, since photography existed? Well the short answer is around 3.5 trillion, but there’s a lot more nuance than just a flat number. Vsauce looked into the matter in more detail, and some of the facts might surprise you. How many of the pictures are actually good? That’s anyone’s guess. [YouTube] More »
MinutePhysics showed us what would happen if the Earth were hollow, but that was just one part of the nerdy YouTube channel tag team this weekend. Here’s the other half, wherein we learn how big a gun you’d need for the bullet to orbit the moon and hit you in the back of the head, and how to put out the Sun. (Please don’t actually put out the Sun.) [YouTube] More »
We’re sending rovers to Mars to try and figure out our place in the universe, but what about our place on Earth? Sure, Earth is a big place, but you might be surprised exactly how insignificant we all are in contrast with its mammoth mass. More »