The windows in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner are awesome. You can electronically dim them for five different levels of sunlight and visibility. That’s so much better than the typical airplane window shade option of blinding or blocked out. But the coolest thing about Dreamliner windows are how huge they are, like vertical…

The Social Network was a fantastic movie for many reasons: the direction of David Fincher, the music by Trent Reznor, the acting of mostly everyone involved, and, of course, the screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. It’s trademark Sorkin, with dialogue being stacked on top of more dialogue and characters expressing so many…

It’s obvious, right? In movies, the camera points us toward what we should look at. We follow the action by following the camera that’s following the action of the scene. But camera movements in films can also make us feel something, too. If the camera pushes in, we’re supposed to look closer. If it pulls out, we…

This particular engine we’re looking at has four strokes: the intake, the compression, the combustion (or power), and the exhaust. Smarter Every Day visited the guys of 805 Road King and their see through engine to show us exactly what’s going on in an engine when we fire it up and it’s pretty fascinating stuff.

Real Life Lore asks a question that I’ve never actually considered before: what if everybody in the entire world lived in just one building? How big would the building have to be to be able to fit all 7.4 billion of us? Surprisingly, not that big. That red cube up above would do the trick and it only takes up a few…

Here’s some free advice if you ever find yourself in a post-apocalyptic world and need glasses: squint. Because after watching How to Make Everything attempt to make a pair of prescription eyeglasses, let me tell you, it’s going to really, really hard for you to actually make a pair yourself. There are just so many…

Fossils don’t exactly come clean and ready to be displayed in museums. Which, duh, of course. They’re a mess because they’ve been in the ground for thousands and thousands of years. So it’s on the job for fossil preparators like Nathan Ong at the Natural History Museum of Utah to clean up the vertebrae of dinosaurs…

Directors make so many filmmaking decisions that go unnoticed by casual viewers because we’re not paying close attention—but the use of color isn’t one of them. Color immediately stands out. Films can be hyper colorful and smack you with the entire color wheel, or they can be totally muted and monochromatic. You’re…

I find the history of numbers so much more fascinating than the application of numbers. Who cares about learning calculus, when you can geek out on the brief history of numerical systems? 

Meet Patty Brennan, she has one of the most interesting jobs that anyone could possibly ever have because she’s an evolutionary biologist who studies the genital structures of sharks, birds, snakes, and more. Basically, she finds out how animals bone by dissecting them, making silicon molds, creating 3D models,…

There are aliens out there (and if there aren’t any, it’s just more fun to believe that there are). But if they are out there, how do we find them? Once we find them, how do we contact them? And once we contact them, how do we actually communicate with them?

When you can’t rely on a computer to improve (or fake) a movie scene, you gotta improvise. And back in the days of silent films, filmmakers were really, really good at coming up with creative ways to cook up special effects. It was a master class of using specific camera angles, splicing together shots, using glass…

The concept of editing a live action film is pretty easy to understand, right? There’s a whole bunch of footage that needs a whole lot of cutting to make the film work as a story. But how does editing work for an animated movie?

I’ll admit to being dumb and not noticing this before, but action movies seem to make all actresses do the same move during a fight scene: the between the legs takedown. There’s different variations of it, of course, but the end result is almost always the same, someone ends up in between the action heroine’s legs,…

Have you ever wondered why the world’s largest cities sprout up where they sprout up? It has a lot to do with water, natural resources, history, and being in the northern hemisphere.

Tsunamis are very probably the scariest natural disaster out there because they ravage everything in their path. But learning about how big they can get makes tsunamis even scarier. It’s just ridiculous. It’s like skyscraper big, man.

Here’s a uselessly amusing idea to wrap your head around: what if history’s largest empire, the British Empire, still existed today? What would it look like? How many countries would it include? How many people? What would they look like? Would the Sun really never set?

It’s not the fault of Hollywood or Netflix or even the internet. Or, well, it’s not all their fault. We’re to blame for encouraging all these nostalgic re-releases and poorly re-hashed versions of things from our childhood, too. 8-Bit Philosophy delves into our need for nostalgia and cites philosopher Svetlana Boyn,…

In these wonderful videos by Glass Distortion, you get to see the creative process of filmmaking: you can read what was written in the script, peek at what was imagined in the storyboards, and see the finished scene that was filmed for the movie. It’s the whole sausage making of turning words on a page into visual art…