What Is The Most Average Thing?
The universe is full of stuff, ranging from huge things like stars all the way to tiny particles you can’t see with the naked eye. But what is the most average thing in the universe? We’re on a mission to uncover it with a combination of math, physics, and a little calculator wizardry. The answer is more surprising than you’d think!
Episodes
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What Is The Most Average Thing?
S11 E16 - 17m 34s
The universe is full of stuff, ranging from huge things like stars all the way to tiny particles you can’t see with the naked eye. But what is the most average thing in the universe? We’re on a mission to uncover it with a combination of math, physics, and a little calculator wizardry. The answer is more surprising than you’d think!
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The Biggest Myth About Innovation
S11 E15 - 17m 48s
The idea of the lone genius creating everything isn’t just misleading. It’s harmful and wrong. Innovation thrives when people work together, and rather than nice linear paths, new ideas come from chance events and unexpected connections. This video tells the story of one such invention, and offers a new idea about how new ideas are really born.
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Why Some of the Rainbow is Missing
S11 E14 - 11m 18s
Over 200 years ago, scientists were looking at sunlight through a prism when they noticed that part of the rainbow was missing. There were dark lines where there should have been colors. Since then, scientists have unlocked the secrets encoded in these lines, using it to uncover mind-boggling facts about the fundamental nature of our universe and about worlds light-years away.
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How Scorpions Became Earth’s Ultimate Survivors
S11 E12 - 14m 3s
Scorpions are a frightening and deadly group of animals. But their venom is one of nature's most unique chemical cocktails. Here’s how scientists are using it for inspiration to design new medicines and pain killers.
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Lab-Grown Meat is Here… and I Taste-Tested It!
S11 E11 - 14m 29s
Our appetite for meat is one of the greatest environmental challenges we face. Join me on a mind-blowing visit to UPSIDE Foods, the world's most advanced cultivated meat production facility, as we ask whether cultivated meat can deliver on its promises to help the environment while keeping meat on our plates.
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The Deadly Chemistry That Made Life Interesting
S11 E10 - 14m 3s
Life’s been around on Earth for at least 3.7 billion years. But for most of that time, it was incredibly boring — just simple little cells squirming around in water. It only got interesting in the last few hundred million years. And that might never have happened without the help of a deadly, but also life-giving, element.
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How the CIA Secretly Spied On Climate Change
S11 E9 - 17m 58s
In 1995, a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a top-secret, first-of-its-kind US spy satellite program was declassified, leading to the unexpected story of how former enemies would become scientific allies, and technology invented for Cold War espionage was repurposed to study and combat the newest and greatest threat to human civilization: Climate Change.
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Why Y Is a Vowel According to Physics (and so is W)
S11 E8 - 13m 58s
Human language is an incredible thing: a combination of mouth sounds that we combine into words, sentences, poems, and constitutions. They carry meaning, emotion, and power. But underneath it all, language is really just physics. In this episode, we explore how physics is at the core of every syllable, starting with the first word most of us ever speak.
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How To Go Faster Than Light Speed
S11 E7 - 9m 56s
Nothing can travel faster than light — in a vacuum. But when light slows down, sometimes matter can blaze past that speed limit, creating a stunning glow called Cherenkov radiation. We can see this glow in a nuclear reactor as high-energy particles speed by. It offers us a window into a realm of the universe that is usually invisible to us.
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The Mystery Behind Earth’s Most Epic Migration
S11 E6 - 10m 40s
Nothing can travel faster than light — in a vacuum. But when light slows down, sometimes matter can blaze past that speed limit, creating a stunning glow called Cherenkov radiation. We can see this glow in a nuclear reactor as high-energy particles speed by. It offers us a window into a realm of the universe that is usually invisible to us.
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Why Does Every Animal Look Like This?
S11 E5 - 9m 10s
In the race to survive, both predators and prey use visual tricks to get ahead. One nearly universal trick is countershading, a color pattern that helps animals erase their own shadows or blend into different backgrounds. It’s worked well enough that nature has produced this pattern over and over again, all over Earth, for at least tens of millions of years.
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Can We Solve the Air Conditioning Paradox?
S11 E4 - 12m 59s
As Earth warms, billions of people in the developing world will face life-threatening heat waves, raising demand for air conditioning. But powering all that cooling is going to take more energy, which will, paradoxically, require more fossil fuels burning, creating more carbon and more warming. So scientists are developing new kinds of air conditioning, including solid, refrigerants.
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