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.
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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 This makes silica aerogel incredibly light (it was once the lightest solid but has now been superseded by graphene aerogel), transparent and adsorbent.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.

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

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 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"

This is what a nuclear disaster area looks like.
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
Broadcast locations and times:

North America: PBS, July 28 & 29 @ 10pm ET / 9pm Central
Europe: ZDF/arte, July 31 @ 10pm
Australia: SBS, August 6, 13, 20 @ 8:30pm EST

Not broadcast in your country? Contact your local broadcaster and/or email www.genepoolproductions.com

Music by Kevin Macleod http://incompetech.com 'Come Play With Me' & 'Lost Frontier'

I always wanted to know why film looked better than video. Moving electronic images have as long a history but were invented for a different purpose. This video was sponsored by B&H Photo: https://www.bhphotovideo.com

Huge thanks to:

Richard Diehl, Video Labguy https://www.youtube.com/user/videolabguy
https://www.labguysworld.com

Branch Education for awesome animations
https://ve42.co/BranchEd

Minutephysics for mechanical TV animations
https://www.youtube.com/minutephysics

Mark Schubin
Engineer and explainer, SMPTE Life Fellow
https://www.smpte.org

This is a video I've long wanted to make, about what makes video look like video and, up until 10 years ago or so, not as appealing as film. I grew up with the two technologies (film and video) in parallel and to me they always seemed like two ways of achieving the same ends: recording and replaying moving images. But their histories are quite distinct. Film was always a way to capture moving images for later replaying. Video started out as a way to transfer images from one place to another instantaneously. This dates back to the first fax machine, mechanical TV, live broadcast tv and ultimately videotapes. This history focuses on the early decades of video and not the more recent switches to chip cameras and solid state storage. Maybe that's a story for another day.

Additional resources and references:

The Dawn of Tape: Transmission Device as Preservation Medium
https://ve42.co/dawnoftape

What Sparked Video Research in 1877? The Overlooked Role of the Siemens Artificial Eye
https://ve42.co/sparkvideo

Video Preservation Website:
http://videopreservation.conservation-us.org

Image Orthicon Tube:
http://interiorcommunicationse....lectrician.tpub.com/

Film vs Digital
https://stephenfollows.com/film-vs-digital/

Eyes of a Generation:
http://eyesofageneration.com

Television in the US:
http://www3.northern.edu/wild/th100/tv.htm

http://www.classictvinfo.com

Music from https://www.epidemicsound.com "Seaweed" "Capture a Picture 1" "Colorful Animation 4"

If you drop a heavy object and a light object simultaneously, which one will reach the ground first? A lot of people will say the heavy object, but what about those who know both will land at the same time? What do they think? Some believe both objects have the same gravitational pull on them and/or both fall to the ground with the same constant speed. Neither of these things is true, however. The force is greater on the heavy object and both objects accelerate at the same rate as they approach the earth, i.e. they both speed up but at the same rate.

Baby photos of our universe show huge early growth spurt!
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
Regression to the Mean: http://bit.ly/1lgZQAQ

Some clarifications:
- The lengthening of wavelengths is not strictly due to stretching by the expanding universe but by the way the photons were emitted and absorbed in different frames of reference.
- The effects of gravitational waves have been observed in the decaying orbital periods of some binary star systems, however detectors built to measure gravitational waves stretching and squeezing matter on Earth have not as yet detected them.
- In the video I sometimes use the term Big Bang to refer to the beginning of time as we know it. The Big Bang actually refers to the whole process from the formation of our universe, through inflation, to the expanding mass of plasma in the early universe (not just the first instant).
- Quantum gravity is by no means established by this observation but it is suggestive that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are working together here.

Thank you to Professor Geraint Lewis and Henry Reich for comments on earlier drafts of this video (even if I haven't accepted all of your corrections).

There is a common perception that weight and mass are basically the same thing. This video aims to tease out the difference between mass and weight by asking people what makes a car difficult to push. The standard answer is that it is difficult to push because it's heavy. But heaviness is a measure of weight, the gravitational pull of the Earth attracting the car to Earth's center. When the car is pushed on a flat road, the force of gravity does not oppose the motion. Instead the resistance felt is an indication of the car's mass which determines its inertia. Inertia is the property of matter that means it tends to resist acceleration - the greater the mass, the less the acceleration for a given amount of force.

A story is worth a thousand data points.
My second channel: http://bit.ly/2veritasium
More info on this topic: http://wke.lt/w/s/TzNC0

Want to help plant 20M trees by 2020? Go to https://teamtrees.org #teamtrees
Huge thanks to all the YouTubers who organized this. My apologies for the repost.
These videos are from 2012 so my interest in trees goes back a long ways. I think these videos discuss two of the most interesting and amazing facts about our leafy friends: they are made mostly of CO2 (which comes from us breathing out amongst other sources) and they can transport water up a tube higher than any we can currently manufacture. So trees are out to get you. But we do much worse to them so we owe it to them to plant some more. 20 mil is a good start.

On the surface of Earth all objects accelerate downwards at the same rate - at least, they're supposed to. But we all know dust, pieces of paper, and feathers fall slower. This is of course due to the influence of air resistance. In this experiment we use an evacuated cylinder to test whether a coin and feather really do accelerate at the same rate.

One of the most common physics misconceptions is that an unbalanced force causes constant motion. In truth, an unbalanced force leads to changes in motion - accelerations.

There are a few persistent misconceptions about what causes the seasons. Most believe it is the distance between the Earth and sun which varies to give us seasonal temperature variations. However it is actually the directness of the sun's rays leading to more intense sunshine in summer and less in winter.

A basketball and a 5kg medicine ball are dropped simultaneously. Which one hits the ground first? It seems obvious that the heavy one should accelerate at a greater rate and therefore land first because the force pulling it down is greater. But this is forgetting inertia - the tendency of mass to resist changes in motion. Therefore, although the force on the medicine ball is greater, it takes this larger force to accelerate the ball at the same rate as the basketball.

How Schlieren imaging works in color, black and white and slow-mo.
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Special thanks to Patreon supporters:
Tony Fadell, Donal Botkin, Curational, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen, Corvi

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

Filming by Raquel Nuno
Sound Effects by A Shell in the Pit

Have your voice heard at the UN Climate Summit in NYC, September 23: http://bit.ly/WhyNotVe



Interview filming by Chris Cassella: http://bit.ly/ScienceAlertVe

Vitamins are 13 molecules essential for life that our bodies can't make themselves.
Watch Vitamania here: https://ve42.co/vita

Now available worldwide, except France and Germany where it will be broadcast on ARTE soon. Subscribe on the Vitamania website for updates.

Use #vitamania to join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.

Vitamania is a Genepool Productions feature documentary for SBS Australia, CuriosityStream, and ARTE France. Principal production investment from Screen Australia, in association with Film Victoria.

Thank you to Rodney Fox for sharing his story. He was attacked by a shark 50 years ago - Dec. 8 1963. If you're interested in his book or in going shark cage diving in South Australia, check out: http://bit.ly/rodneyfox

I actually have many, many more questions and answers so if you want to see them, like this video and let me know in the comments and I will edit them. Thank you for your support! I wouldn't have gotten this far without you.