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.

Illustration

Tabletop Whale (Website) — Eleanor Lutz's science illustration blog: 42 infographics, dataviz projects, and illustrations on viruses, anatomy, animals, and planets, many of them animated.

• An Atlas of Space (Infographic) — ten maps of planets, moons, and outer space built from NASA and USGS data, from Mars geology to everything in the solar system bigger than 10 km, each released with its open-source Python code and a tutorial.
• A visual compendium of glowing creatures (Infographic) — the blog’s first post, diagramming the best-studied bioluminescent organisms; she read a 468-page textbook and 200 other sources to make it.
• Flight videos deconstructed (Infographic) — the wingbeats of a bat, a goose, a hummingbird, a moth, and an insect, traced point by point from slow-motion footage into curved patterns.

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.