Boredom makes you more creative, altruistic, introspective, and helps with autobiographical planning.
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I feel like this video might come across as condescending but the person I’m really talking to is myself. Despite the fact that I know how useful it can be to be bored, I still find myself trying to fill every last moment with stimulus. Boredom is unpleasant – the open, unstructured thinking that can take place can also feel pointless. But now I’m made this video to remind myself how important boredom is so hopefully I’ll make more time to be bored.
UV at ground level is non-ionizing but it damages DNA and causes photoaging – how?
Also, it turns out glass doesn’t block all UV (specifically UVA passes through). This is something I learned filming with the UV camera inside.
Ultraviolet light causes damage to DNA, leads to cancer and photoaging: age spots and wrinkles. I was curious about this because UV is technically non-ionizing. A photon of UV doesn’t have enough energy to strip an electron off atoms or molecules. However it does have enough energy to trigger photo-chemical reactions. For example, it causes pyrimidine dimers – the unauthorized covalent bonding of adjacent thymine or cytosine bases in our DNA. If these spots are not properly repaired, they may lead to mutations and cancer. Photoaging is typically the result of degradation of collagen and elastin fibers – scaffolding that supports the skin. This leads to wrinkles and saggy-looking skin.
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Vitamins are 13 molecules essential for life that our bodies can’t make themselves.
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Vitamania is a Genepool Productions feature documentary for SBS Australia, CuriosityStream, and ARTE France. Principal production investment from Screen Australia, in association with Film Victoria.
In summary, ultraviolet light interacts differently with matter for a number of reasons:
1. Some pigments selectively absorb UV so they may appear white in the visible but dark in the UV. The pigments usually dissipate the UV energy as heat, though the breaking of bonds can also occur.
2. Fluorescent molecules absorb UV light and re-radiate that energy as visible light. This makes them look dark in the UV but glowing under black light.
3. Ultraviolet light scatters more than visible light because the wavelength is shorter and Raleigh scattering is proportional to the reciprocal of wavelength to the power of four.
Special thanks to HHMI BioInteractive for their awesome animations of melanocytes and how the melanin in melanosomes protect your DNA. To see the full video explaining how we get our skin color, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC0TL_lYLm8
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Donal Botkin, Michael Krugman, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen, Yildiz Kabaran, Terrance Snow, Stan Presolski
Arctic animals are photographed in the UV to increase visibility and get an accurate count:
Lavigne, D. (1976). Counting Harp Seals with ultra-violet photography. Polar Record, 18(114), 269-277. doi:10.1017/S0032247400000310
“The spectroscopy of human melanin pigmentation,” by N. Kollias. In: Melanin: Its Role in Human Photoprotection, pp. 31 – 38. Valdenmar Publishing Co. (1995).
“Optical properties of human sclera, and their consequences for transscleral laser applications,” by A. Vogel, C. Dlugos, and R. Nuffer, Lasers in Surgery and Medicine 11(4), pp. 331 – 340 (1991).
“The incidence and time-course of latanoprost-induced iridial pigmentation as a function of eye color,” by P. Wistrand, J. Stjernschantz, and K. Olsson, Survey of Ophthalmology 41(S2), pp. S129 – S138 (1997).
The truth, with photons.
I hope I’ve articulated everything clearly in this video. If not, I’ll clarify in comments. Thanks to everyone who appears in this video and thanks to everyone who watches this video!
Veritasium is of course a combination of the latin ‘veritas’ meaning truth, and the common element ending ‘ium’. I guess this is my version of the ‘draw my life’ craze that rolled through YouTube many years ago. Except I wanted to tell my story with the actual moments, the photons, the stored magnetic states. There’s something about that which is so important to me (because I think the alternative involves fooling yourself) which is why I’m so fascinated by film and video.
One of my inspirations for the name Veritasium came from the end of the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, in which he writes:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
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Tony Fadell, Donal Botkin, Michael Krugman, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen, Yildiz Kabaran,
Terrance Snow, Stan Presolski
Music from http://epidemicsound.com
Magnified X1 – Gunnar Johnsen
Fluorescent Lights – Martin Gauffin
Dissolving Patterns – Ebb & Flod
Luna – Ebb & Flod
These are the molecular machines inside your body that make cell division possible. Animation by Drew Berry at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. http://wehi.tv
Special thanks to Patreon supporters:
Joshua Abenir, Tony Fadell, Donal Botkin, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen
Every day in an adult human roughly 50-70 billion of your cells die. They may be damaged, stressed, or just plain old – this is normal, in fact it’s called programmed cell death.
To make up for that loss, right now, inside your body, billions of cells are dividing, creating new cells.
And cell division, also called mitosis, requires an army of tiny molecular machines.DNA is a good place to start – the double helix molecule that we always talk about.
This is a scientifically accurate depiction of DNA. If you unwind the two strands you can see that each has a sugar phosphate backbone connected to the sequence of nucleic acid base pairs, known by the letters A,T,G, and C.
Now the strands run in opposite directions, which is important when you go to copy DNA. Copying DNA is one of the first steps in cell division. Here the two strands of DNA are being unwound and separated by the tiny blue molecular machine called helicase.
It literally spins as fast as a jet engine! The strand of DNA on the right has its complimentary strand assembled continuously but the other strand is more complicated because it runs in the opposite direction.
So it must be looped out with its compliment strand assembled in reverse, section by section. At the end of this process you have two identical DNA molecules, each one a few centimeters long but just a couple nanometers wide.
To prevent the DNA from becoming a tangled mess, it is wrapped around proteins called a histones, forming a nucleosome.
These nucleosomes are bundled together into a fiber known as chromatin, which is further looped and coiled to form a chromosome, one of the largest molecular structures in your body.
You can actually see chromosomes under a microscope in dividing cells – only then do they take on their characteristic shape.
The process of dividing the cell takes around an hour in mammals. This footage is from a time lapse. You can see how the chromosomes line up on the equator of the cell. When everything is right they are pulled apart into the two new daughter cells, each one containing an identical copy of DNA.
As simple as it looks, this process is incredibly complicated and requires even more fascinating molecular machines to accomplish it. Let’s look at a single chromosome. One chromosome consists of two sausage-shaped chromatids – containing the identical copies of DNA made earlier. Each chromatid is attached to microtubule fibers, which guide and help align them in the correct position. The microtubules are connected to the chromatid at the kinetochore, here colored red.
The kinetochore consists of hundreds of proteins working together to achieve multiple objectives – it’s one of the most sophisticated molecular mechanisms inside your body. The kinetochore is central to the successful separation of the chromatids. It creates a dynamic connection between the chromosome and the microtubules. For a reason no one’s yet been able to figure out, the microtubules are constantly being built at one end and deconstructed at the other.
While the chromosome is still getting ready, the kinetochore sends out a chemical stop signal to the rest of the cell, shown here by the red molecules, basically saying this chromosome is not yet ready to divide
The kinetochore also mechanically senses tension. When the tension is just right and the position and attachment are correct all the proteins get ready, shown here by turning green.
At this point the stop signal broadcasting system is not switched off. Instead it is literally carried away from the kinetochore down the microtubules by a dynein motor. This is really what it looks like. It has long ‘legs’ so it can avoid obstacles and step over the kinesins, molecular motors walking the other direction.
The merging of two neutron stars was detected by gravitational waves and then by telescopes in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is a historic detection as it demonstrates:
– the first gravitational waves detected from inspiraling neutron stars
– the first joint observation by gravitational wave and electromagnetic wave astronomy
– identification of a gamma ray burst in conjunction with merging neutron stars
– how gravitational waves and gamma rays can be used together to locate their source
All evidence so far indicates that the data support General Relativity.
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Tony Fadell, Donal Botkin, Curational, Jeff Straathof, Zach Mueller, Ron Neal, Nathan Hansen, Corvi
Graphics from:
Jets and Debris from a Neutron Star Collision
This animation captures phenomena observed over the course of nine days following the neutron star merger known as GW170817. They include gravitational waves (pale arcs); a near-light-speed jet that produced gamma rays (magenta); expanding debris from a “kilonova” that produced ultraviolet (violet), optical and infrared (blue-white to red) emission; and, once the jet directed toward us expanded into our view from Earth, X-rays (blue).
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab
Virgo Helps Localize Gravitational-Wave Signals
Sky localizations of gravitational-wave signals detected by LIGO beginning in 2015 (GW150914, LVT151012, GW151226, GW170104), and, more recently, by the LIGO-Virgo network (GW170814, GW170817). After Virgo came online in August 2017, scientists were better able to localize the gravitational-wave signals. The background is an optical image of the Milky Way. The localizations of GW150914, LVT151012, and GW170104 wrap around the celestial sphere, so the sky map is shown with a translucent dome.
Credit: LIGO/Virgo/NASA/Leo Singer (Milky Way image: Axel Mellinger)
Variety of Gravitational Waves and a Chirp
The signal measured by LIGO and Virgo from the neutron star merger GW170817 is compared here to previously detected binary black hole mergers. All signals are shown starting at 30 Hertz, and the progression of GW170817 is shown in real time, accompanied by its conversion to audio heard at the end of the movie. GW170817 was observable for more than 30 times longer than any previous gravitational-wave signal.
Credit: LIGO/University of Oregon/Ben Farr
LIGO is funded by the NSF, and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived of LIGO and led the Initial and Advanced LIGO projects. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by the NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council) making significant commitments and contributions to the project.
More than 1,200 scientists and some 100 institutions from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian collaboration OzGrav. Additional partners are listed at http://ligo.org/partners.php
The Virgo collaboration consists of more than 280 physicists and engineers belonging to 20 different European research groups: six from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; eight from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; two in the Netherlands with Nikhef; the MTA Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; Spain with the University of Valencia; and the European Gravitational Observatory, EGO, the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy, funded by CNRS, INFN, and Nikhef.
The total solar eclipse from Madras, Oregon on August 21, 2017. As the moon passed in front of the sun turning day to night and revealing the sun’s corona, apparently all I could think to say was ‘Oh my goodness!’
This awe-inspiring phenomenon returned to the US on April 8, 2024, when total solar eclipse crossed North America, passing over Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
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Everyone says not to photograph your first solar eclipse and I think they might be right. I was focused on getting the exposure right for Bailey’s beads and the diamond ring, plus making sure to get the corona and solar flares. This was a bit stressful but I’m delighted with the results.
This video originally included more info but since I’m uploading from Madras where the internet is sluggish, I cut out three minutes so the upload would happen before I had to leave for my flight.
Special thanks also to Dr. Teagan Wall for sharing this experience with me and Raquel Nuno for inspiring me to come to Oregon.
In 2018 the kg will be defined by Planck’s constant, not a hunk of metal.
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Special thanks to the staff at NIST who made this possible: Darine Haddad, Jon Pratt, Stephan Schlamminger, and Ben Stein.
Additional footage and animations by Sean Kelley, Jennifer Lauren Lee, and Frank Seifert.
I have been obsessed with measurement for a long time and I’m not sure quite how it happened. The world’s roundest object played a role in this. I guess I’m just fascinated by how difficult it is to pin down a quantity like a kilogram. A physical object seemed like a good idea until the mass of the international prototype kilogram wasn’t as constant as expected. These methods of the Kibble balance and silicon sphere have shown better precision than 20 parts per billion, making them superior to the old method. The agreement between Avogadro approaches
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