My PhD: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au..../super/theses/PhD(Mu
It is a common view that "if only someone could break this down and explain it clearly enough, more students would understand." Khan Academy is a great example of this approach with its clear, concise videos on science. However it is debatable whether they really work. Research has shown that these types of videos may be positively received by students. They feel like they are learning and become more confident in their answers, but tests reveal they haven't learned anything. The apparent reason for the discrepancy is misconceptions. Students have existing ideas about scientific phenomena before viewing a video. If the video presents scientific concepts in a clear, well illustrated way, students believe they are learning but they do not engage with the media on a deep enough level to realize that what was is presented differs from their prior knowledge. There is hope, however. Presenting students' common misconceptions in a video alongside the scientific concepts has been shown to increase learning by increasing the amount of mental effort students expend while watching it.

The Nobel Prize for physics in 2011 was awarded to Brian Schmidt, Adam Riess, and Saul Perlmutter for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This finding was completely unexpected because it was thought that gravity should slow the expansion of the cosmos. The best current explanation of why the universe is accelerating is that there is some energy tied to empty space which pushes matter apart. This 'Dark Energy' makes up 73% of the universe but is very difficult to detect. Images courtesy of NASA/NASAimages.org and Maritza A. Lara-Lopez

Spinning objects have strange instabilities known as The Dzhanibekov Effect or Tennis Racket Theorem - this video offers an intuitive explanation.
Part of this video was sponsored by LastPass, click here to find out more: https://ve42.co/LP

References:
Prof. Terry Tao's Math Overflow Explanation: https://ve42.co/Tao

The Twisting Tennis Racket
Ashbaugh, M.S., Chicone, C.C. & Cushman, R.H. J Dyn Diff Equat (1991) 3: 67. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01049489

Janibekov’s effect and the laws of mechanics
Petrov, A.G. & Volodin, S.E. Dokl. Phys. (2013) 58: 349. https://doi.org/10.1134/S1028335813080041

Tumbling Asteroids
Prave et al. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2004.07.021

The Exact Computation of the Free Rigid Body Motion and Its Use in Splitting Methods
SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 30(4), 2084–2112
E. Celledoni, F. Fassò, N. Säfström, and A. Zanna
https://doi.org/10.1137/070704393

Animations by Iván Tello and Isaac Frame

Special thanks to people who discussed this video with me:
Astronaut Don Pettit
Henry Reich of MinutePhysics
Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown
Vert Dider (Russian YouTube channel)

Below is a further discussion by Henry Reich that I think helps summarize why axes 1 and 3 are generally stable while axis 2 is not:

In general, you might imagine that because the object can rotate in a bunch of different directions, the components of energy and momentum could be free to change while keeping the total momentum constant.

However, in the case of axis 1, the kinetic energy is the highest possible for a given angular momentum, and in the case of axis 3, the kinetic energy is the lowest possible for a given angular momentum (which can be easily shown from conservation of energy and momentum equations, and is also fairly intuitive from the fact that kinetic energy is proportional to velocity squared, while momentum is proportional to velocity - so in the case of axis 1, the smaller masses will have to be spinning faster for a given momentum, and will thus have more energy, and vice versa for axis 3 where all the masses are spinning: the energy will be lowest). In fact, this is a strict inequality - if the energy is highest possible, there are no other possible combinations of momenta other than L2=L3=0, and vice versa for if the energy is the lowest possible.

Because of this, in the case of axis 1 the energy is so high that there simply aren't any other possible combinations of angular momentum components L1, L2 and L3 - the object would have to lose energy in order to spin differently. And in the case of axis 3, the energy is so low that there likewise is no way for the object to be rotating other than purely around axis 3 - it would have to gain energy. However, there's no such constraint for axis 2, since the energy is somewhere in between the min and max possible. This, together with the centrifugal effects, means that the components of momentum DO change.

The Earth is clearly old, but exactly how old was difficult to work out. People long believed the Earth had only existed for several thousand years. Then, in the 1800's, a study of geological features (including fjords) led scientists to the conclusion that the planet must be much older - at least millions of years old. Later, the discovery of radioactivity provided a mechanism by which the Earth's core could be continually heated. This meant it was much older than previous estimates of 20-40 million years based on the cooling rate of the Earth. Today through many different methods we have established that the Earth is roughly 4.54 billion years old!

The kilogram, mole, kelvin, and ampere will be redefined by physical constants. For a limited time, get 3 months of Audible for just $6.95 a month: http://audible.com/VERITASIUM or text VERITASIUM to 500500

Will this be the last video I make about SI units? Quite possibly. There's something about being so precise and defining the systems within which science works. When we can more accurately and routinely measure a kilogram, a mole, a kelvin and an ampere, then we can make better observations, we can better detect anomalies and improve our theories. That is why this is so important to me.

Special thanks to Patreon supporters:
Donal Botkin, Michael Krugman, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen, James M Nicholson, Terrance Shepherd, Stan Presolski

Special thanks to NIST: http://nist.gov

Additional graphics by Ignat Berbeci

Music from http://epidemicsound.com "Experimental1"

Chaos theory means deterministic systems can be unpredictable. Thanks to LastPass for sponsoring this video. Click here to start using LastPass: https://ve42.co/VeLP
Animations by Prof. Robert Ghrist: https://ve42.co/Ghrist

Want to know more about chaos theory and non-linear dynamical systems? Check out: https://ve42.co/chaos-math

Butterfly footage courtesy of Phil Torres and The Jungle Diaries: https://ve42.co/monarch
Solar system, 3-body and printout animations by Jonny Hyman
Some animations made with Universe Sandbox: https://universesandbox.com/
Special thanks to Prof. Mason Porter at UCLA who I interviewed for this video.

I have long wanted to make a video about chaos, ever since reading James Gleick's fantastic book, Chaos. I hope this video gives an idea of phase space - a picture of dynamical systems in which each point completely represents the state of the system. For a pendulum, phase space is only 2-dimensional and you can get orbits (in the case of an undamped pendulum) or an inward spiral (in the case of a pendulum with friction). For the Lorenz equations we need three dimensions to show the phase space. The attractor you find for these equations is said to be strange and chaotic because there is no loop, only infinite curves that never intersect. This explains why the motion is so unpredictable - two different initial conditions that are very close together can end up arbitrarily far apart.

Music from https://epidemicsound.com "The Longest Rest" "A Sound Foundation" "Seaweed"

The total solar eclipse from Madras, Oregon on August 21, 2017. As the moon passed in front of the sun turning day to night and revealing the sun's corona, apparently all I could think to say was 'Oh my goodness!'

Special thanks to Patreon Supporters:
Nathan Hansen, Donal Botkin, Ron Neal, Zach Mueller, Jeff Straathof, Curational, Tony Fadell

Everyone says not to photograph your first solar eclipse and I think they might be right. I was focused on getting the exposure right for Bailey's beads and the diamond ring, plus making sure to get the corona and solar flares. This was a bit stressful but I'm delighted with the results.

This video originally included more info but since I'm uploading from Madras where the internet is sluggish, I cut out three minutes so the upload would happen before I had to leave for my flight.

Special thanks also to Dr. Teagan Wall for sharing this experience with me and Raquel Nuno for inspiring me to come to Oregon.

Music from http://epidemicsound.com "Spinning Earth 2" and
Kevin MacLeod http://incompetech.com "Big Mojo"

An experiment on how turbulent convection in Earth's core makes a magnetic field
Get a free audiobook with a free 30 day trial at http://www.audible.com/Veritasium or text Veritasium to 500-500

Huge thanks to Prof. Dan Lathrop and team: http://ve42.co/Lathrop

Companion video to explain Earth's magnetic fields in more detail:
https://youtu.be/lWHxmJf6U3M

Australians! I'm on my way. I'll be doing live shows in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Details and tickets here: http://ve42.co/tour

Find out more about the film Vitamania: http://ve42.co/VITA

Special thanks to Brady Haran and Periodic Videos for sodium vs water footage. Original clip is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzEOL-N2cbw

Special thanks to Patreon supporters:
Donal Botkin, Michael Krugman, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen, Yildiz Kabaran, Terrance Snow, Stan Presolski

I learned a lot in making this video and the one on my second channel with Prof. Jon Arnou. I changed a lot of my preconceptions, specifically I thought:

1. That the Earth's magnetic field was a passive thing - it shouldn't need a continuous input of energy to maintain itself (that seemed reasonable to me because the magnetic field has been around for a long time and it seems mostly stable). But as it turns out, the Earth is a giant electromagnet, and so of course those currents dissipate their energy as they encounter resistance in the liquid metal through which they flow. So the energy to continuously create these currents comes from the kinetic energy of the liquid metal flows in the Earth's outer core.

2. If it's convection, I'm thinking hot things rising, cooler things falling. But apparently the main effect driving convection is the compositional differences at the boundary with the Earth's inner core. This is because of the differential freezing at the boundary. Things like iron freeze into the inner core, while elements like sulfur do not. Hence the pockets of lighter material which then rise outwards.

3. I didn't get why the fluid motion was necessary for the generation of the magnetic field. I mean if it's a conducting liquid, it can conduct currents whether it moves or not. But the key is that the liquid metal can 'trap' magnetic fields. I imagine this like how iron channels magnetic fields. Then once these fields are channeled, they can be pulled and stretched, making more magnetic field.

4. Fluids operate very differently in rotating frames of reference. This is something I didn't intuitively grasp. But, as fluids move from the inner core outwards, those particles are moving much more slowly in the direction of rotation than the matter that has been there for a long time, which means the convection currents get deflected and form helices.

Music by Kevin MacLeod http://incompetech.com Brandenburg Concerto No4

A planet has been predicted to orbit the sun with a period of 10,000 years, a mass 5x that of Earth on a highly elliptical and inclined orbit. What evidence supports the existence of such a strange object at the edge of our solar system?

Huge thanks to:
Prof. Konstantin Batygin, Caltech
Prof. David Jewitt, UCLA

I had heard about Planet 9 for a long time but I wondered what sort of evidence could support the bold claim: a planet at the very limits of our ability to detect one, so far out that its period is over 60 times that of Neptune. The planet 9 hypothesis helps explain clustering of orbits of distant Kuiper belt objects. It also explains how some of these objects have highly inclined orbits - up to 90 degrees relative to the plane of the solar system. Some are orbiting in reverse. Plus their orbits are removed from the orbit of Neptune, the logical option for a body that could have ejected them out so far. The fact that the perihelion is so far out suggests another source of gravity was essential for their peculiar orbits.

Special Thanks to Patreon Supporters:
Alfred Wallace, Arjun Chakroborty, Bryan Baker, Chris Vargas, Chuck Lauer Vose, DALE HORNE, Donal Botkin, Eric Velazquez, halyoav, James Knight, Jasper Xin, Joar Wandborg, Kevin Beavers, kkm, Leah Howard, Lyvann Ferrusca, Michael Krugman, Mohammed Al Sahaf, Noel Braganza, Pindex, Ron Neal, Sam Lutfi, Stan Presolski, Tige Thorman

Music from http://epidemicsound.com "Observations - From Now On" "Magnified XY"

Acrylic Ball: http://bit.ly/BBBacrylic
Ping-Pong Ball: http://bit.ly/BBBpingpong
Balanced: http://bit.ly/BBBbalanced

This problem has made the rounds on the internet but I felt it deserved a treatment like this.

Special thanks to Gary and the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences at UCLA, to the students for participating, to Ivy for helping me coordinate everything and to Raquel for filming.

Music by Kevin MacLeod, http://incompetech.com "Monkeys, Spinning Monkeys"

A trip to #Mars involves radiation, muscle and bone loss, intermediate axis theorem and liquids.
Check out Mars on National Geographic, Monday Nov 12 at 9/8c
#sponsored

When I got offered the chance to fly in another #zeroG plane, I jumped at the chance. Do you know how hard it is when you are thrust into low-gravity, like the 37% of Earth's gravity of Mars, and you have to remember what you were going to say in a 30 second window as blood floods your head? It's pretty hard. It would be even harder to actually travel to Mars. It would take about 8 months in microgravity during which time your muscles and bones would weaken substantially, even if you exercise for hours a day like the astronauts on the space station. And your heart is a muscle too so it weakens as well. Before I contemplated these rates of muscle and bone loss, I thought the major challenge with a round trip journey to Mars would be the logistics of spacecraft and having enough fuel to get back. But with the weakening of the human body, it's an open question whether anyone would really want to come back.

Filmed by Steve Boxall

Music from Epidemic Sound: http://epidemicsound.com

Check out 2Veritasium! http://dft.ba/-ve2
MinutePhysics has a great video on Milkman, vomiting levitator: http://dft.ba/-vomphysics
Jetpacking was awesome fun! Despite the fat lip I had a great time. I think knowing a bit about physics actually helps fly the jetpack. It works on the same principle as a rocket (Newton's 3rd law) but unlike the shuttle, you don't carry your own propellant with you. Instead, water is pumped out of the lake by the jetski at up to 60 litres a second. It is then fired out of the nozzles at around 15 m/s creating 1800 N of force, the equivalent of about 150 fire extinguishers. On me this can produce acceleration of about 1.5g's.

Music by Kevin McLeod (http://incompetech.com) Silly Fun, Also Sprach Zarathustra
Supported by Science Alert: http://on.fb.me/14ehuxA
Slow motion filming by Questacon: http://bit.ly/ZoWFGR

The Mars Helicopter aims to make the first powered flight on another planet when it takes off on Mars as part of the Mars 2020 mission. I learned a lot getting to visit the drone right before it was mounted on the rover.

How do you fly in 1% of Earth's atmosphere:
Have large rotors (they are 1.2m in diameter) and spin them very fast, around 2500 RPM (5x the speed of a helicopter on Earth).

Plus the aircraft has to be light:
The Mars helicopter weighs in at 1.8kg or around the same as a laptop. Every piece had to be stripped down for weight. Instead of using aerogel for insulation, the craft makes use of CO2 gaps between components. Even aerogel was too heavy!

One of the major challenges is surviving the Martian night:
Temperatures plunge to -80C to -100C so two thirds of the craft's power is actually used to keep its electronics warm. Only one third is used for flying. The estimated flight time is 90 seconds.

The craft can't be driven remotely, it will have to fly autonomously, using its own sensor suite to determine how to fly. The round trip 20 minute delay with Earth means steering the craft from mission control would be impossible.

Huge Thanks to Patreon Supporters:
Philipp Volgger, Chris Vargas, Ron Neal, Alfred Wallace, Colin Bellmore, Michael Krugman, James Knight, Donal Botkin, Sam Lutfi, Mohammed Al Sahaf, Kevin Beavers, Chuck Lauer Vose, Bryan Baker, James Wong, kkm, Manuel Zürcher, Tige Thorman, Jasper Xin, Leah Howard, Daniel Milum, Mathias Göransson, Stan Presolski, Lyvann Ferrusca, Arjun Chakroborty, June Kang, Listen Money Matters, Pindex, Joar Wandborg, DALE HORNE, Parker Linn, Roberto Rezende

Jonny Hyman was a legend in editing, animation, filming, and sound design for this video.

UV at ground level is non-ionizing but it damages DNA and causes photoaging - how?
Also, it turns out glass doesn't block all UV (specifically UVA passes through). This is something I learned filming with the UV camera inside.

Special thanks to Dr. Hayley Golbach, @hayleysgold on twitter
https://twitter.com/hayleysgold

Ultraviolet light causes damage to DNA, leads to cancer and photoaging: age spots and wrinkles. I was curious about this because UV is technically non-ionizing. A photon of UV doesn't have enough energy to strip an electron off atoms or molecules. However it does have enough energy to trigger photo-chemical reactions. For example, it causes pyrimidine dimers - the unauthorized covalent bonding of adjacent thymine or cytosine bases in our DNA. If these spots are not properly repaired, they may lead to mutations and cancer. Photoaging is typically the result of degradation of collagen and elastin fibers - scaffolding that supports the skin. This leads to wrinkles and saggy-looking skin.

Huge thanks to Patreon supporters:
Donal Botkin, Michael Krugman, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen, Yildiz Kabaran, Terrance Snow, Stan Presolski, James M Nicholson, KIMoFy

Support Veritasium on Patreon: http://ve42.co/patreon

Music from Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com "Serene Story 2"

The crazy story of the arbitrary temperature scale used in a tiny minority of countries.
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
Snatoms are available again! http://www.snatoms.com
Support Veritasium on Patreon: http://bit.ly/VePatreon

Celsius didn't invent Celsius: http://bit.ly/VeCelsius

Video animated by Marcello Ascani: http://bit.ly/VeMarcello

Thanks to Patreon supporters:
Nathan Hansen, Bryan Baker, Donal Botkin, Tony Fadell, Saeed Alghamdi

Music by Kevin MacLeod: http://incompetech.com "Modern Piano Zeta - Improbable" "Ice Demon" "Divertimento K131" "Sneaky Adventure" "Sheep May Safely Graze" "Professor and the Plant"

References:
A History of the Thermometer and its uses in Meteorology by W. E. Knowles Middleton

Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold by Tom Shachtman

The Science of Measurement, A Historical Survey by Herbert Arthur Klein

Lehrbuch der Chemie by Jöns Jakob Berzelius

Script:
As an Australian-Canadian the Fahrenheit temperature scale always seemsed a bit arbitrary. I mean why does water freeze at 32 degrees? And what exactly does zero represent?

According to many sources the Fahrenheit scale was defined by setting zero degrees equal to the temperature of an ice, salt, and water mixture and 100 degrees being roughly equal to human body temperature. But that isn’t true.

The real story is much more interesting, and scientific...

August 14th 1701 was almost certainly the worst day in the life of fifteen year-old Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. On that day both of his parents died suddenly from mushroom poisoning. He was sent from Poland, where he lived, to Amsterdam to become an apprentice bookkeeper.

But Fahrenheit couldn’t stand his apprenticeship and ran away so many times his employers put out a warrant for his arrest. Traveling from city to city around Europe, he became fascinated with scientific instruments and in particular thermometers.

In 1708, possibly seeking help with the warrant, Fahrenheit met with the mayor of Copenhagen, who happened to be the famous astronomer Ole Romer.

Romer is known for observing the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons and realizing that variations in the timing of those eclipses was caused by the time it took light to reach Earth. In other words, he found a way to accurately measure the finite speed of light.

But more pertinent to this story, in 1702 Romer was housebound after breaking his leg. To pass the time he devised a new temperature scale with the freezing point of water at 7.5 degrees and body temperature at 22.5 degrees.

This might seem odd until you consider that Romer wanted the boiling point of water to be 60 degrees (as an astronomer, he had experience dividing things by 60). If you take this scale, divide it in half, in half again, and in half once more, you find the freezing point of water 1/8th up the scale, and human body temperature 3/8th up the scale.

So at their meeting in 1708, Fahrenheit learned of Romer’s temperature scale and adopted it as his own, adjusting it slightly because he found it “inconvenient and inelegant on account of the fractional numbers”. So he scaled them up to 8 and 24.

That is the original Fahrenheit scale. He produced thermometers for some time using this scale.

But then, at some later time Fahrenheit multiplied all numbers on his scale by four, setting freezing point to the now familiar 32 and body temperature to 96. It’s unclear exactly why he did this. He may just have wanted finer precision in his measurements but I think there was a better reason.

You see, Fahrenheit was an excellent instrument maker. His thermometers agreed with each other precisely, at a time when that was unheard of. He pioneered the use of mercury as a measuring liquid, which has the benefit of a much higher boiling point than the alcohol used in most other thermometers at the time. For these accomplishments, he was inducted into the British Royal Society.

And we know he read the works of Newton, Boyle, and Hooke, in which he would have come across the idea that a one degree increase in temperature should correspond to a specific fractional increase in the volume of the measuring liquid.

And today a one degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature increases the volume of mercury by exactly one part in 10,000. Is this just a coincidence? We’ll probably never know for sure because as an instrument maker Fahrenheit was secretive about his methods. But I think the data strongly suggests this was the case.

So what exactly did zero represent on the scales of Fahrenheit and Romer? By many accounts it’s the temperature of a salt, ice and water mixture. But there are different descriptions of these mixtures and none of them actually produces the temperature they’re supposed to. More likely I think they picked the coldest temperature in winter, set that as zero and later used ice and brine to calibrate new thermometers. Now his scale is only used regularly in the Cayman Islands, Bahamas, Belize, oh and the United States of America.

Learn how you can help reduce global warming → https://globalwarmingeffect.org
Common misconceptions about climate change.
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
References below:

For CO2, sea levels, Arctic sea ice, Antarctic and Greenland land ice:
http://climate.nasa.gov

Satellite data shows that ground-based stations underestimate recent warming: Cowtan and Way, 2014
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com..../doi/10.1002/qj.2297

For papers published on climate change during the 1970's, see Peterson, 2008
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf

For solar and temperature data see NASA GISS,
PMOD: http://www.acrim.com/tsi%20monitoring.htm
Krivova et al. 2007:
http://www2.mps.mpg.de/project....s/sun-climate/data.h

CO2 ratio of Carbon-13:Carbon-12 decreasing. IPCC AR4:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publication....s_and_data/ar4/wg1/e

CO2 emitted by volcanoes vs by humans: Gerlach, 2011
www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011eo240001.pdf Gerlach

Mauna Loa CO2 data: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

Rising atmospheric water vapour: Santer, 2007
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0702872104v1.pdf

A doubling of CO2 will likely lead to a 3C increase in global temperatures according to many independent pieces of evidence:
Knutti & Hegerl, 2008
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/....knuttir/papers/knutt

Great resource on Milankovitch cycles:
http://www.sciencecourseware.o....rg/eec/GlobalWarming

CO2 lags temperature rise in the southern hemisphere but leads the global average temperature rise, Shakun et al. 2012
http://www.nature.com/nature/j....ournal/v484/n7392/ab

Music by Kevin McLeod, http://incompetech.com Songs: Hidden Agenda, Sneaky Snitch, Harlequin

NEW CHANNEL! http://youtube.com/sciencium

For a long time we thought the Moon was completely dry, but it turns out there are actually three sources of lunar water.
Thanks to Google Making and Science for supporting the new channel! http://youtube.com/makingscience

Thanks to Patreon supporters:
Nathan Hansen, Donal Botkin, Tony Fadell, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal

Support Veritasium on Patreon: http://bit.ly/VePatreon

References:
Great history of water on the moon: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.5597.pdf

Filmed by Raquel Nuno

Music from http://epidemicsound.com "Serene Story 2"

Scientists have JUST published this new observation. On January 4th, 2017 they detected the merger of two black holes 3 billion light-years away. This marks the furthest detection they've been able to make and increases confidence that these events will be seen with increasing frequency as the LIGO interferometers become more sensitive to low amplitude gravitational waves (as sources of noise are eliminated).

Special thanks to:
Prof. Rana Adhikari
Prof. David Reitze

Resources by:
Binary Neutron Star merger: Relastro @ ITP - Goethe University, Frankfurt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOTXC4FG9gU
Numerical simulation of black hole merger:
S. Ossokine/A. Buonanno/T. Dietrich (MPI for Gravitational Physics)/R. Haas (NCSA)/SXS project
Artist's impression of merger and chart: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)
Simulation of black hole merger: SXS Collaboration

Special thanks to Patreon Supporters:
Tony Fadell, Donal Botkin, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen

Support Veritasium on Patreon: http://ve42.co/patreon

Sound Recording by Raquel Nuno

Aerogel has extraordinary properties but it can be tough to work with. This video looks at modifying aerogels to take advantage of their unique characteristics.
Subscribe to Veritasium: https://ve42.co/sub

Huge thanks to Dr. Stephen Steiner and the crew at Aerogel Technologies. To find out more or buy your own aerogel sample, check out: http://www.aerogeltechnologies.com/

Thanks to Dr. Steven Jones and Dr. Mihail Petkov at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

And thanks to FLIR for loaning us the awesome high definition thermal camera. The footage is amazing! https://www.flir.com

Aerogel’s extraordinary properties are due in large part to its structure. Aerogel is a solid but on the nanoscale it has a mesh or sponge-like structure. The struts of this structure are nanoscale, as are the pores at around 20nm across. This makes silica aerogel incredibly light (it was once the lightest solid but has now been superseded by graphene aerogel), transparent and adsorbent.

An ice-cube sized piece of aerogel has an internal surface area roughly equal to half a football field. Aerogel is used in high end museum cases to regulate humidity. Plus it helps maintain the vacuum on the Mars Insight seismometers - it adsorbs moisture and other outgassed volatiles that come from the spacecraft itself. Proposed uses include as a physical insecticide by ‘drying out insects’ reducing the need for chemical and toxic pesticides.

Special thanks to all my Patreon supporters especially those who contributed feedback to an earlier draft of this video:
a human, Albert Jachowicz-Brzeziński, Alfred Wallace, Arjun Chakroborty, Brent Stewart, Chris Vargas, Chuck Lauer Vose, Clip Tree, Coale Shifflett, Colin Bellmore, DALE HORNE, Eric Velazquez, Fedor Indutny, Fran Rodriguez, James Wong, Jasper Xin, Joar Wandborg, Johnny, Jorge Angel Sandoval, June Kang, Kevin Beavers, Kishore Tipirneni, Levan Ferr, Listen Money Matters, Manuel Zürcher, Mark Bevilacqua, Mathias Göransson, Michael Bradley Wirz, Michael Krugman, Mohammed Al Sahaf, Nicholas Hastings, OddJosh, Patrick Čalija, Peter Tajti, Philipp Volgger, Roberto Rezende, Robin DeBank, Ron Neal, Stan Presolski, Swante Scholz, Tiago Bruno, Tige Thorman, Warrior8252

Filmed by Paul Gramaglia

Thumbnail by Ignat Berbeci

Animations by Catherine Chooljian

Music from https://epidemicsound.com “Tonic Zone” “Betelgeuse” “Insidious Mice” “Seaweed” “It’s not that serious” “Platin00m - Sum It”

This is an educational, scientific video.

An introduction to alpha, beta, and gamma radiation