Science

Science

Places that explain science clearly and make it stick.

Interactive

Complexity Explorables (Website) — Dirk Brockmann's collection of interactive explorable explanations of complex systems, spanning biology, physics, mathematics, epidemiology, ecology, network and social science — filed by field and by mechanism (agent-based models, cellular automata, synchronization, self-organization).
  • Berlin 8:00 a.m. (Interactive) — an agent-based traffic model showing why phantom jams appear and travel backwards through the flow, and that the culprit is variability in speed: if 90% of cars aim for 120 km/h and 10% for 150, everyone ends up averaging 80.
  • Horde of the Flies (Interactive) — the 1995 Vicsek model of flocking, where synchronized movement doesn’t fade in gradually but snaps into existence once the density of the group crosses a critical point.
  • Echo Chambers (Interactive) — a Holme–Newman variant in which nodes either convert their neighbours or cut the link and rewire elsewhere, and uniform opinion clusters crystallize out of an initially random network.

Channels

  • Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell (Channel) — beautifully animated explainers of big questions in science, space, and philosophy, “explaining things with optimistic nihilism.”
  • Vsauce (Channel) — Michael Stevens chasing one deceptively simple question at a time (“What is the speed of dark?”) down into science, maths, and philosophy.
  • Veritasium (Channel) — Derek Muller’s “element of truth” channel, chasing counterintuitive physics and engineering questions with real-world experiments.

Videos

  • The easiest way to make the world smarter (Video) — Rabbit Hole on how a poisonous element and a shiny rock became an accidental public-health miracle: the strange history of water fluoridation, and the question of whether it will last.
  • Why does every mammal get 1 billion heartbeats in their life? (Video) — Veritasium on metabolic scaling: from how much LSD you’d give an elephant, through the surface law and Kleiber’s law, to why the fraction ¼ keeps surfacing all over biology — and whether cities scale by the same rule that animals do.