Key aspects of pyramid construction from quarry to completion.
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
Live show in Alabama: http://bit.ly/VeRAOI

The most common misconception about the pyramids is that they were built by slaves. Recent archeological evidence suggests they were instead constructed by paid workers. Some may have performed this work as a form of tax payment for several months of the year. Skilled engineers would have planned and orchestrated the building. An estimated 10,000-20,000 people would have been working on a pyramid at any one point in time. They were well fed and provided with shelter near the pyramids. Plus their burial sites close by indicate they were respected and were not slaves.

Much of the limestone was quarried from the Giza plateau itself, meaning the stones did not need to be transported far. The granite casing of Menkaure’s pyramid, on the other hand, was transported from Aswan, around 600 miles, or 1000 km up the Nile.

Editing assistance by Dustin Chow

Music by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com “Desert City” and “Ibn Al-Noor”

The physics behind Kelvin’s Thunderstorm explained. No, it is not a practical way of generating electricity, which is why we use turbines at hydro stations.

This video goes into more detail about the phenomenon demonstrated in this Hunger Games collab video: http://youtu.be/Rwa26CXG1fc

Panem finds power in the radiance of the sun, and the water which rains down upon us! District 5’s Chief Energy Researcher Derek Muller takes CapitolTV on a tour of our nation’s cutting edge renewable technologies, and demonstrates one of the largest ‘Kelvin’s Thunderstorm’ experiments ever built to date… all for a brighter and more efficient Panem.

Sanctioned by the Capitol Ministry of Information, DISTRICT VOICES was made with friends from Google – http://artcopycode.com/campaign/lionsgate

For more of Panem’s finest programming, and to register for updates, visit http://CapitolTV.pn
#CapitolTV – #DistrictVoices

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 – In theaters November 21
http://TheHungerGamesExplorer.com
#Mockingjay

Have your voice heard at the UN Climate Summit in NYC, September 23: http://bit.ly/WhyNotVe

Interview filming by Chris Cassella: http://bit.ly/ScienceAlertVe

Explanations for http://youtu.be/1Xp_imnO6WE
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or Instagram: http://bit.ly/VeInsta
or Facebook: http://bit.ly/FBVeritasium
For more on deflecting polar streams with electric fields, see:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed077p1520

I’m in Hobart for a live show on Friday at UTAS followed by gigs in Sydney and Canberra next weekend.

How much information is there in Spanish vs English, you vs the world? Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
Huge thanks to all the amazing people who made this possible:
Christina Ochoa – Spanish https://twitter.com/christina_ochoa
Vanessa Hill – Filming https://www.youtube.com/braincraftvideo
Henry Reich – Filming, cameo http://youtube.com/minutephysics
Cara Santa Maria – Set design http://carasantamaria.com
Michael Stevens – cameo http://youtube.com/vsauce
Crystal Dilworth – consultation https://twitter.com/PolycrystalhD

Thanks also to MinutePhysics for wardrobe and lending the use of the amazing “Things to do when it’s really cold outside” video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3Gs6tyiNX4

More on this theme to come in the main collaboration with Vsauce.

Standing waves of fire!
Check out Audible: http://bit.ly/AudibleVe
Fysikshow: http://bit.ly/Fysikshow – I’m hosting Michio Kaku in Melbourne ONLY: http://bit.ly/VeKakuTickets

Rubens’ Tube is an awesome demo and here we take it to the next level with a two-dimensional ‘Pyro Board’. This shows unique standing wave patters of sound in the box.

The pressure variations due to the sound waves affect the flow rate of flammable gas from the holes in the Pyro Board and therefore affect the height and colour of flames. This is interesting for visualizing standing wave patterns and simply awesome to watch when put to music. Thank you to Sune Nielsen and everyone at Aarhus for sharing this demonstration with me! And thanks for having me at your conference.

Music by Kevin MacLeod, http://www.Incompetech.com “Ice Flow”

Explanation of gyro precession: http://bit.ly/U4e8HQ
More: http://bit.ly/GyroMORE
Less Than: http://bit.ly/GyroLESS
Equal To: http://bit.ly/GyroEQUAL

Huge thanks to A/Prof Emeritus Rod Cross, Helen Georgiou for filming, Alex Yeung, and Chris Stewart, the University of Sydney Mechanical Engineering shop, Duncan and co. Ralph and the School of Physics.

In this video I attempt to lift a 19kg (42 lbs) wheel over my head one-handed while it’s spinning at a few thousand RPM. This replicates an earlier experiment by Professor Eric Laithwaite. He claimed the wheel was ‘light as a feather’ and could not be explained by Newton’s Laws. I wanted to find out for myself what I really felt like.

Music By Kevin MacLeod http://www.Incompetech.com “Tempting Secrets”

Can you figure out the rule?
Did you see the exponents pattern? http://youtu.be/AVB8vRC6HIY
Why do you make people look stupid? http://bit.ly/12Fmlpl

How do you investigate hypotheses? Do you seek to confirm your theory – looking for white swans? Or do you try to find black swans? I was startled at how hard it was for people to investigate number sets that didn’t follow their hypotheses, even when their method wasn’t getting them anywhere.

In the video I say “when people came to Australia…” by which I meant, “when Europeans who believed all swans were white came to Australia…” I did not mean any offence to Indigenous Australians who were already in Australia at that time. Please accept my apologies for the poor phrasing if you were offended by it.

This video was inspired by The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb and filmed by my mum. Thanks mum!

Partly my motivation came from responses to my Facebook videos – social media marketers saying ‘Facebook ads have worked for me so there can’t be fake likes.’ Just because you have only seen white swans, doesn’t mean there are no black ones. And in fact marketers are only looking for white swans. They think it was invalid of me to make the fake Virtual Cat page: ‘well of course if it’s a low quality page you’re going to get low quality likes.’ But my point is this is black swan bait, something they would never make because their theory is confident in the exclusive existence of white swans.

*Watch with headphones on!
Is 45 minutes really the longest anyone can stay in a perfectly silent, pitch-black room?
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Want to watch the whole hour of silence? http://youtu.be/jr1UMFC9DV0

Many stories have circulated claiming the longest anyone has stayed in an ultra-quiet anechoic chamber is 45 minutes, the reason being any longer would drive you insane. To me this sounded like unsubstantiated rubbish, like the claim the Great Wall is the only manmade structure visible from space. So I put my own psyche on the line, subjecting myself to over an hour of the most intense quiet on Earth. No, this was not THE quietest room on Earth (-9dB) but it is one of the quietest, and the truth is once you put a person inside, they are by far the loudest thing in there so the sound rating of the room is irrelevant.

I was not surprised to find that I could stay in there for as long as I liked and feel perfectly fine. What was surprising is that my heartbeat was audible. You can hear it on the sound recording. Now I wasn’t consciously aware of the sound of my heart while in the room, but I was more aware of the feeling of it beating.

Huge thank you to everyone at BYU: Duane Merrell, Spencer Perry, Cameron Vongsawad, Jazz Myers, Ann Clawson, and Robert Willes.