Rosa Parks, her story as a lifelong civil rights activist
On December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested when she bravely refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. In protest of the unjust Alabama law that required African Americans to sit in...
View ArticleAnimated Life: Mary Leakey & the Laetoli footprints
Forty years ago in Laetoli, Tanzania, an elephant dung fight between a couple of paleoanthropologists led to a discovery: a fossilized animal print, at least 3.6 million years old. But the site had an...
View ArticleIn Bavaria, Krampus Catches the Naughty
Long before parents relied on the powers of Santa Claus to monitor their children’s behavior, their counterparts in Alpine villages called on a shaggy-furred, horned creature with a fistful of bound...
View ArticleThe 12 Days of Evolution – It’s Okay to Be Smart
Narwhal tusks? Pangolin scales? Giraffe Weevil necks? Joe Hanson of It’s Okay To Be Smart celebrates the diversity of life with 12 days of videos dedicated to explaining evolution and natural...
View ArticleHow do we know what color dinosaurs were?
The meat-eating microraptor was a black-feathered, four-winged dinosaur. How do we know its feathers were black? The evidence is in the microraptors’ fossils. This TED Ed explains. Plus, more from...
View ArticleThe iPhone of Slide Rules – Numberphile
From Numberphile, science and math writer Alex Bellos introduces the slide rule and then shares “the iPhone of Slide Rules” — the Halden Calculex. On the pocket-sized disk made in Manchester, circa...
View ArticleDriving a Ford Model T at the Henry Ford Museum
In 1908, Henry Ford started selling the Model T, nicknamed the Tin Lizzie, as the first affordable car that everyone could drive, but driving the car “that started it all” is quite different than...
View ArticleMaking a cord drill & pump drill from sticks & rocks
How far can you go without using modern technology? As a hobby, YouTuber Primitive Technology explores this question by making simple tools from scratch using no modern tools or materials. In the video...
View Article40,000 years of London history created with papercraft
Peel back the pavement of a grand old city like London and you can find just about anything, from a first-century Roman fresco to a pair of medieval ice skates—even an elephant’s tooth. As one of...
View ArticlePreparing Pilcher’s Hawk to fly again
According to Wikipedia, The Hawk was the fourth flying machine that British inventor Percy Pilcher built in the 1890s. Following Bat, Beetle, and Gull hang gliders, Pilcher’s Hawk broke the world...
View ArticleLIGO & The First Observation of Gravitational Waves – CalTech
On September 14, 2015 at 5:51am ET, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime. One hundred years after Albert Einstein predicted the...
View ArticleALMA, a telescope so powerful it can see into the past
There’s a telescope deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert that takes pictures so massive that it requires a supercomputer as powerful as 16 million PCs to decipher the images. This is the Atacama Large...
View ArticleMaking charcoal, baskets, & stone hatchets – Primitive Technology
In the modern world, we pick up a bag of charcoal at the market if we want our fires to start easily and get hot quickly. But what did humans from the past do when they wanted their fires to burn hot...
View ArticleHow does Leap Year work?
What is Leap Year, why do we have it, and how does it work? Vox explains and explores another question: When do leap year babies — born on the rare date of February 29th — celebrate their birthdays?...
View ArticleMelodious stone instruments called lithophones
An idiophone, the lithophone is a set of rocks — granite, fossilized coral, petrified wood, and other melodious stones — that are played by striking them. They’ve been made in a variety of forms all...
View ArticleMotorized Bath on Wheels
Travel back to England in the year 1960 to see how these engineering students from Kingston, Surrey Technical College made a splash with a bath tub… a motorized bath tub, perfect for driving around the...
View ArticleEvidence of evolution that you can find on your body
Signs of our evolutionary history can be found in the form of vestigial structures on the human body. Watch this Vox video to help identify the evidence of evolution in yours. Some background via...
View ArticleThe Science of Skin Color – TED Ed
When ultraviolet sunlight hits our skin, it affects each of us differently. Depending on skin color, it’ll take only minutes of exposure to turn one person beetroot-pink, while another requires hours...
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How To Make A Mini da Vinci Catapult
It’s true that you can buy da Vinci Catapult kits online, but how cool would it be to build one from scratch? Andy Elliott shares how he made a mini da Vinci Catapult from a wooden folding ruler,...
View ArticleSpace Rocks: Comets, asteroids, meteors, & meteorites
This claymation primer on comets, asteroids, meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites helps us learn about Space Rocks in a super adorable way. Made by Beakus for the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the...
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