science of youtube

You may have seen circulating around the Web these cheesy, scaremongering PSA’s, which were on every TV in the nation in 1976. US health officials meant well--after an H1N1 outbreak at an Army Base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, they were worried about a pandemic potentially as dangerous as the 1918 flu outbreak--but in hindsight, the widespread, nationwide immunization program created plenty of problems of its own far outweighing the spread of the flu. Given today's news that the WHO has declared H1N1 a global pandemic, it's good to remember that in some ways, we've been through this before.

We’ve all been there: you bite into a hot pepper and then instantly regret it, clawing in vain at your tongue in the restaurant men’s room. (Wait, that was just me.) Ever wonder just what, chemically and physiologically, is going on during that agony? The latest Science of Youtube episode lets you get all the fun facts while watching someone else take the heat.

Daito Manabe sticks electrodes on his face and films the results. Last month we found out why -- now here's a look at how it works.

Are you a puppy!? Are you a cutest little puppernaut?! Are you a special one? Why are you so little? How did you get so cute and small? Why are you so cute? Why are you so cute!

No, seriously -- why?

After decades of work, the Large Hadron Collider went live 143 days ago and went down 139 days ago. Its being offline, however, has hardly put an end to speculation over what exactly will happen when the repairs are completed and the switch is flipped on the world's largest particle accelerator. Scientists from the Universities of Bologna and Alabama recently submitted a paper to Cornelll's arXiv.org exploring the possibility that those (harmless) microscopic black holes we'd heard so much about could stick around longer than previously believed. No matter that their conclusion was basically, still: "so what? Ain't gonna do nothin." News outlets,as SciAm notes, jumped over the story and the anti-LHC kook-contingent resurfaced.

So here's to you, naysayers and doomsdayers alike. After the jump, a very special episode of "Science of YouTube," wherein the LHC goes online and the Earth is destroyed. Enjoy!

John Pavlus and Christopher Mims, also known as Small Mammal, are here again with the latest episode of The Science of YouTube, the Popular Science video series that humanely anesthetizes YouTube videos, dissects them deftly, and labels their exposed organs for all to enjoy.

What happens when lightning strikes? A lot of bad language, for starters.

Way back in 1919 Sigmund Freud postulated his concept of the uncanny. In the (cleverly named) The Uncanny, Freud explored a problem of aesthetics—when something is both familiar and unknown the experience of viewing it can be strongly unsettling. Fifty years later, roboticist Masahiro Mori presented his own work on the uncanny. Drawing heavily on his predecessor's work, Mori developed his "uncanny valley" hypothesis.