Uranium is a unique element, used in research, medicine, space travel, and of course weapons.
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Documentary Dates:
US: PBS, July 28 & 29 @ 10pm ET / 9pm Central
France & Germany: ZDF/arte July 31 @ 10pm
Australia: SBS, August 6, 13, 20 @ 8:30pm EST
If you’re wondering where the title comes from…
“A number of ingenious experiments were devised to test the speed of the fission reaction, and the limit was pushed. But even so, I thought it would be very nice to go one step nearer to a real atomic explosion. Dick Feynman, who was present, started to chuckle and to say that this is just like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.”
Professor Otto R Frisch, January 1969 Physicist, the Manhattan Project.
Why do spikes form on ice cubes? Without them the world would be vastly different.
Awesome Jingle by Accent: http://bit.ly/AccentVe
Thanks to Prof. Stephen Morris from UofT: http://bit.ly/1GFANBE
Filmed in part by Martin Marek in Olomouc, Czech Republic
Time lapse of a growing ice spike by Lesley Hill, Russ Sampson and Edward Lozowski, with technical help by Kenny Lozowski.
Learned helplessness can prevent people from achieving their goals, something I’ve experienced first hand.
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
More walk and talk videos: http://bit.ly/2Veritasium
This problem has made the rounds on the internet but I felt it deserved a treatment like this.
Special thanks to Gary and the Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences at UCLA, to the students for participating, to Ivy for helping me coordinate everything and to Raquel for filming.
New research shows chameleons actively tune nano-crystals to change their color.
For a 10-day free trial, check out http://lynda.com/veritasium
Chameleon research in Nature Communications: http://bit.ly/1FacHO2
“Photonic Crystals Cause Active Colour Change in Chameleons”
This research was carried out by Jérémie Teyssier, Suzanne V. Saenko, Dirk van der Marel & Michel C. Milinkovitch at the University of Geneva Department of Quantum Matter Physics and the Laboratory of Artificial and Natural Evolution (LANE)
Additional details available at: http://www.lanevol.org/LANE/chameleon_colour_change.html
For correspondence: Michel C. Milinkovitch, Laboratory of Artificial & Natural Evolution (LANE), Dept. of Genetics & Evolution, University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Does quantum entanglement make faster-than-light communication possible?
What is NOT random? http://bit.ly/NOTrandoVe
First, I know this video is not easy to understand. Thank you for taking the time to attempt to understand it. I’ve been working on this for over six months over which time my understanding has improved. Quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance are still debated by professors of quantum physics (I know because I discussed this topic with two of them).
Does hidden information (called hidden variables by physicists) exist? If it does, the experiment violating Bell inequalities indicates that hidden variables must update faster than light – they would be considered ‘non-local’. On the other hand if you don’t consider the spins before you make the measurement then you could simply say hidden variables don’t exist and whenever you measure spins in the same direction you always get opposite results, which makes sense since angular momentum must be conserved in the universe.
Everyone agrees that quantum entanglement does not allow information to be transmitted faster that light. There is no action either detector operator could take to signal the other one – regardless of the choice of measurement direction, the measured spins are random with 50/50 probability of up/down.
Psychological literature shows that we are more sensitive to small losses and than small gains, with most people valuing a loss around 1.5-2.5 times as much as a gain. This means that we often turn down reasonable opportunities for fear of the loss. However over the course of our lives we will be exposed to many risks and opportunities and this invariably means that taking every small reasonable bet will leave us better off than saying no to all of them.
NOTE: The video is not saying to accept every bet, only those with reasonable odds (preferably in your favour), and those which if you lose would not cause significant financial or other damage. In those cases it is wise to be loss averse!
Who on Earth is exposed to the most ionizing radiation?
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
I’m filming a documentary for TV about how Uranium and radioactivity have shaped the modern world. It will be broadcast in mid-2015, details to come. The filming took me to the most radioactive places on Earth (and some places, which surprisingly aren’t as radioactive as you’d think). Chernobyl and Fukushima were incredible to see as they present post-apocalyptic landscapes. I also visited nuclear power plants, research reactors, Marie Curie’s institute, Einstein’s apartment, nuclear medicine areas of hospitals, uranium mines, nuclear bomb sites, and interviewed numerous experts.
Notes about measuring radiation:
Sieverts are a measure of ‘effective dose’ – that means they measure the biological impact of the energy transferred to tissues from radiation.
Obviously I owe a debt to the fantastic chart made by xkcd, which inspired my visual approach to this video. https://xkcd.com/radiation/
DOSES MAY VARY
The level of radiation varies widely around the world depending mainly on altitude and geology (excluding nuclear accidents).
Estimates of particular doses also vary. All numbers reported in this video should be taken as order of magnitude only.
