Okay, so he had a lot of help from his dad, but this third grader’s school project—a wooden model of the Steel Bridge in Portland—is totally awesome. It has all the moving parts of the real bridge; both the lower and upper decks can be lifted to make way for boats on the river.
Here’s a British Airways Airbus A380 attempting to land at the Vancouver airport. You can see the world’s largest passenger airplane make its final approach and come so, so close to the ground—but then decide to abort and make a go-around instead. It’s crazy impressive to see such a big plane make a maneuver like this.
Climbing aboard a container ship isn’t exactly the most glamorous way to travel, but when the footage is condensed into a time lapse—oh my, is it stunning. It’s especially neat to see the different layers of the sky dance overhead, but the coolest part is just being around all that blue. It really makes you feel the…
I’m not exactly sure what I’m watching, but I’m into it. Musician Broke For Free created music by re-imagining sounds made by the world around us. Rocks can become a drum set; a palm tree is suddenly a synth organ. Mix in a little partying by the pool and jumping back and forth in time, and it’s a little like being on…
Storms that go on for 400 years. Falling molten glass rain. Temperatures jumping from 500 degrees Celsius to 1200 degrees Celsius in just 6 hours. The weather in our universe is crazy.
As far as building materials go, they don’t come much cheaper than dirt, which is literally everywhere and mostly free. But, as anyone who has ever made a sand castle knows, soil isn’t terribly strong and has a habit of forming a shallow pile rather than more structurally-beneficial shapes. We’re going to let you in…
Willy Wonka’s glass elevator is real! Well, sort of.
Some digital projectors can produce 281 trillion shades of color. That’s approximately 40 thousands colors for each and every person on Earth. What makes them work is theoretically simple, but the technological feat requires extreme precision in practice.
This is a really neat woodworking project from Matthias Wandel: turning a single piece of wood into a chain just by using power tools. It takes very careful planning and specific carving to transform the block of wood into links on a chain, but Wandel shows us his entire process in detail. The end result is really…
This short animation Death in Space by Thomas Lucas is a collection of two-second scenes that show people dying in space in the most random ways. It’s totally silly, but it’s funny because it pokes fun of the careless curiosity of human nature. Yes, we’re going to jab that creature that might swallow us alive. Sure,…
Here’s a really interesting mathematical explanation on how the “catch a dollar” trick works. You know the trick: a person holds a bill vertically and says you can keep the bill if you can catch the dollar with your fingers when it drops. You never catch it. It’s really hard! Why?
Flying in a wingsuit? That’s just not enough anymore. Anyone could do that (I would never do that). You have to make it more extreme, like by hitting a target while you’re cutting through the air at crazy speeds. Or by making that target a small ring that you have to somehow fly through. Or by lighting that ring on…
Metallurgist Grigory Raykhtsaum shows Smithsonian three different ways to test if something is solid gold: a color test, a thermal conductivity test, and a particle test. It’s all computerized now so all he has to do is scan the object to get a read on the color, zap it with an electrical current to measure the…
Lead is a relatively soft metal, and the fact that it deforms on impact is what makes lead bullets so deadly. It expands inside whatever it hits causing more damage to the surrounding area. But there are metals much softer than lead, and their effects on contact are even more pronounced—so naturally someone made them…
When a Polish train driver noticed a truck blocking part of the track ahead of his vehicle, he didn’t have time to bring the carriages to a stop before impact. So he used the three seconds he had to sprint through the train, warning passengers of the impact.
Here’s a fun art piece made by artist Matthieu Robert-Ortis: in one perspective, it looks like two giraffes standing opposite each other while in another, it looks like a single elephant staring straight at you. The piece plays on your perspective and hides two wire sculptures in one, what you see depends on which…
To make a spearhead like a Norman smith from the year 1066, you have to start with an iron steel sandwich. Yup, a piece of hard iron or steel gets sandwiched between two pieces of soft iron until they’re all hammered and welded together. After that, a socket needs to be made, which means the smith flattens out the…
The same folks who realized Owen Wilson is contractually obligated to say “wow” in every film have stumbled upon something truly strange: Matthew McConaughey makes a lot of noises. Noises that are not words. Noises that do not convey almost any information other than “I am Matthew McConaughey and my mouth can make…
Gold is so malleable that a single gram of it can be stretched into a strip nearly two miles long. A tiny little coin can be pressed into a 0.0001-millimeter-thin golden rectangular sheet the size of a tatami mat. So leave it to the talented artisans of Japan to transform a tiny bit of gold into shimmering gold leaf…
A good movie owes a lot to great writing and acting. But the people responsible for the rhythm of emotional arcs and intimate moments of conflict are rarely if acknowledged. Those people are film editors, and counterintuitively, an editor is often at their best when their work is totally invisible.
