While waiting for the bus in the dead of winter, you’ve probably wondered if taking a run around the block would help you battle the freezing cold. After all, your body generates heat and warms up when you exercise, right? It turns out that strategy has some merit, but only at certain speeds.
Astronaut Scott Kelly returned from a year-long sojourn in space in June. His slightly older astronaut twin, Mark Kelly, stayed home as a control—part of NASA’s twin study to monitor the effects of space on the human body. But there’s a physical change that NASA might not be able to measure that easily. Mark is now…
You might not want to check this out for yourself, but do you know how long it would take for a person to fall through the Earth? Around 42 minutes.
If you like the Explain Like I’m Five subreddit, which demystifies life’s mysteries in layman speak (like this one about why kids eat boogers), then you should bookmark MinutePhysics. It’s a popular YouTube channel that breaks down one of the more confounding branches of science by drawing cartoons with a Crayola…
The MinutePhysics series has always been a goldmine of interesting facts and science explainers. But prepare to have your mind blown wide open this time as Henry Reich shows you an alternate way to manually subtract large numbers—by doing addition instead.
The latest installment of MinutePhysics tackles the enduring question of why the sky appears blue, and the less common (albeit related question) of why the sun appears yellow.
MinutePhysics is a YouTube channel that aims to deliver complex science to your brain in short, easily digestible videos. The channel has hundreds of eye-opening bits of science you can click through, but the team's latest video seemed ambitious—explaining the concepts of antimatter in only three minutes.
If stars themselves are giant balls of gas and appear as dots in the night sky, why is it so common to draw them with pointed arms? Minute Physics explains how the light from stars interacts with our eyes to create that "star-shaped" image.
If you've ever tried balancing something as short and skinny as a pencil on your fingertip, you know it isn't easy. Why is that? How is it possible to create a free-standing rock sculpture like this one, when it's all but impossible to balance a stinking pencil for more than a couple seconds?
The ocean is full of plastic. Not big pieces of plastic, as you've probably heard, but tiny bits of plastic. Microplastic. Plastic that hasn't decomposed, but broken down into small pieces that are incredibly durable. We've found this stuff throughout the world's oceans, at every depth. What kind of environmental…
Ever wonder why squinting helps you focus when you've misplaced your glasses? Or why things appear clearer when viewed through a small hole? Here's the answer in video form.
Whether or not you knew what you were doing, there's undoubtedly been a time when you found yourself squinting to get a better look at something you otherwise couldn't see. Minute Physics' newest video breaks down this wildly useful little phenomenon.
Winter makes for longer nights and shorter days. It also boasts the year's greatest lunar displays – but there's more to this fact than an increase in daily hours of darkness.
Most of us have probably never given a second thought as to how sea level is determined. It's basically where the ocean starts, right? Not even close. It turns out there are countless factors that have to be taken into account because the oceans simply aren't at the same level all around the world.
With Minute Physics videos we pretty much expect to have the universe explained to us in . . . a minute. Or maybe a few minutes. But this rundown of temperature and how to achieve "negative temperature" only takes 10 seconds. Impressive.
Henry Reich of Minute Physics may have just set a world record for providing the quickest explanation to that infamously inexplicable phenomenon: Earth's tides.
It's a match made in YouTube Science Heaven: In the latest episode of Minute Physics, Henry Reich teams up with the folks at Veritasium to address one of the Internet's favorite scientific conundrums: MAGNETS.
Between 2006 and 2012, 127 Americans died from being struck by lightning. Here's how you can avoid joining their ranks.
It's no secret that finding yourself outside and exposed during a thunderstorm greatly enhances your risk of being struck by lightning. But it turns out there are some simple tricks you can use to increase your chances of survival if the clouds do decide to strike you from above.
When you think of the big bang, that cosmic explosion that jump-started the ever-expanding universe as we know it, it's only natural to imagine it as a single point. One corner of space that just blew up into the galactic being. But where was it?
