If you want to learn more about science but shudder at the thought of cracking open another text book, how does watching colourful animations about the length of a pop song sound? Better? Head over to YouTube channel Kurz Gesagt, which has beautiful educational videos in spades.
German for “in a nutshell”, the channel has nearly 700,000 subscribers. The videos are made by a team of designers, journalists, and animators based in Munich. They tackle a spread of science and tech topics like atom size, Ebola explained, and the Gulf Stream. There’s also more than one Pokémon reference.
Here’s a primer of exactly what fracking is and the pros and cons:
A mini-profile of Neptune’s big, weird moon, Triton, and how dwarf planets can get sucked into other solar systems:
A compilation of universal doomsday scenarios:
The Fermi Paradox. (Abridged version: If aliens probably exist, why haven’t we seen any yet?)
And a nice little pro/con series of nuclear power:
Only thing? I just wish there were more — I’ve already flown through most of the 32 uploads.