Glass eggs

Artistic glass egg sculptures and their cultural significance across civilizations.

Theory of Fluids Enters the 21st Century

Modern mathematical breakthroughs advancing theoretical understanding of fluid dynamics.

Everything You Believe About Taking a Full Course of Antibiotics and Bacterial Resistance Is Wrong

Antibiotic resistance myths debunked: completing courses doesn't prevent resistance development.

5,000 Classic Movie Posters Digitized & Put Online: Free to Browse & Download

Five thousand vintage movie posters freely available for browsing and download.

Using thunderquakes to X-ray Earth – a new study shows urban seismology in action

With the help of thunderstorms and everyday fiber-optic cables, these scientists are revealing a hidden world underground.

Why Americans Stopped Reading Books

The kids can’t read. Such has been the implication, even the declaration, made by a wave of articles in recent years. But the statement needs some qualification: the kids in questi

How Many Letters Are In The Answer?

The Remarkable Lives of 5-Year-Old Brain Organoids

The mini-brains are full of surprises The post The Remarkable Lives of 5-Year-Old Brain Organoids appeared first on Nautilus.

In praise of zealotry

Why zealotry and passionate conviction drive meaningful human progress.

Does Computer Science Need Computers?

The theoretical side of the field doesn’t require computing machines. But many questions would never have been posed without them. The post Does Computer Science Need Computers? fi

The Kitchen of the Realm: Even the Commoners Ate Well in Ancient Osaka

But their dental hygiene may leave something to be desired The post The Kitchen of the Realm: Even the Commoners Ate Well in Ancient Osaka appeared first on Nautilus.

In Hilbert Space, All Things Are Quantumly Possible

To explore quantum phenomena, we must leave the familiar world and enter the abstract realm of Hilbert space. The post In Hilbert Space, All Things Are Quantumly Possible first app

Grattan on Friday: Albanese to hit campaign trail – for a Security Council seat

The prime minister will be at the United Nations during leaders’ week in September. That’s an excellent opportunity for a PM with lobbying on his mind.

Governments shouldn’t rely on AI to decide who gets a social grant: inside a South African court case

Algorithmic bias in South African welfare distribution system raises legal concerns.

We Took $10,000 From @mkbhd's Locked iPhone

There's a flaw in some virtual wallets. We exploited this flaw to steal $10,000 from @mkbhd. Watch the full video to find out how we did it...

The Periodic Table of Endangered Elements: Visualizing the Chemical Elements That Could Vanish Before You Know It

The Periodic Table of Elements lists the 118 chemical elements that make up everything in our world. Some you’re familiar with—Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, etc. Others maybe less so

‘Huge Breakthrough’ in the Math of Imbalance

For the first time in 30 years, computer scientists have found a better way to allocate objects evenly between two groups. The post ‘Huge Breakthrough’ in the Math of Imbalance fir

The Ambitrope Coin

https://www.curiositybox.com/

What If Gravity Was 10% Stronger?

Just 10% more gravity doesn’t sound too bad. Until satellites fall from the sky, bridges collapse, planes struggle to fly and earthquakes shake the planet. On the bright side: more

Calculating Empires

Five hundred years of technology and power, drawn as one enormous map you scroll through.

Jason Arday press coverage: analysis of the volume and type of articles

New analysis of articles about Arday show the volume of coverage he faced in the final weeks of his life.

The Two Cultures Clash

Snow said the sciences and the humanities had stopped speaking. Leavis's reply was savage, and the argument never ended.

Anaïs Nin on How Reading Wakes Us Up

On monotony as an illness you can live a whole life inside without noticing, and reading as the cure.

Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Mindsets

The internal monologue that scores everything you do, and what changes when you catch it doing it.

How to Cut a Cake Fairly

Envy-free division for any number of people — a problem that stayed open for decades, in a kitchen.

Why Are Rivers So Mathematical?

One scaling law brings order to water, rock and sediment — and it keeps holding further than anyone expected.

How to Think for Yourself

Independent-mindedness treated as a habit you can practise, not a personality you were handed.

Build a Circuit

Wire it wrong and the bulb stays dark. Physics you can break as often as you like.

Life Expectancy

The chart that reframes the last two centuries — and every country's own line to pull out of it.

Anatomy of an AI System

One smart speaker, traced back through every mine, ship, warehouse and worker it took to answer you.

Visualizing Algorithms

Sampling, shuffling, maze-building — algorithms shown moving rather than written down.

Unravelling the JPEG

Pull an image apart coefficient by coefficient and watch the moment it stops being a picture.

Hidden Bias

A model learns to predict grades from the past — including the parts of the past nobody meant to teach it.

Measuring Fairness

Drag the threshold and watch one definition of a fair test break another. There is no setting that satisfies all of them.

Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

A car, a simulation, and a way of thinking that climbs between the single case and the whole system.

Explorable Explanations

The essay that invented reactive documents — reading as something you poke at, not something you finish.

Bartosz Ciechanowski

The index — every one of his interactive explainers, from gears to GPS, in one place.

Going Critical

Play with the tipping point where an idea, a disease or a fire stops fizzling and takes off.

Desmos Graphing Calculator

Type an equation, watch it draw, then drag it and watch the maths follow.

Immersive Linear Algebra

The first linear algebra book where every figure is one you can grab.

Complexity Explorables

Playable models of the systems that surprise us — epidemics, flocks, traffic.

Mathigon

Textbooks that refuse to sit still — every proof is something you do.

How to Use t-SNE Effectively

The same data, plotted a dozen ways, to show how easily a chart lies.

Growing Neural Cellular Automata

Teach a grid of cells to grow into a shape — and watch it heal when cut.

Submarine Cable Map

Every cable carrying the internet across the seabed, tracked and named.

Ancient Earth Globe

Spin the globe back 600 million years and find where you are standing.

Explorable Explanations

A hub of playable posts — the whole genre this library keeps borrowing from.

How To Remember Anything Forever-ish

A playable comic about why you forget, and the spacing trick that fixes it.

To Build a Better Ballot

Play with voting systems and watch each one fail in its own particular way.

Hexagonal Grids

The definitive guide to hex grids — every coordinate system, all interactive.

Principal Component Analysis, Visually

How to squash many dimensions into two without losing the plot.

Ordinary Least Squares, Visually

Drag the points and watch the best-fit line argue with them.

Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues, Visually

The one direction a transformation leaves alone, shown rather than derived.

Naval Architecture

Why ships float, lean and right themselves — with the hull in your hands.

Alpha Compositing

What actually happens when one transparent image is laid over another.

Moon

Move the Earth, Sun and Moon yourself until the phases finally make sense.

Bicycle

The geometry that keeps a bicycle upright, which is not what most people think.

Color Spaces

Rotate the colour solids and see why screens and eyes disagree about colour.

Airfoil

What a wing really does to the air around it, and why that lifts a plane.

Gears

Why gear teeth are that shape, shown by turning them yourself.

Internal Combustion Engine

Take an engine apart stroke by stroke and see what each part is actually for.

Curves and Surfaces

Drag the control points and watch how a few numbers bend a line into any shape.

Cell Size and Scale

Interactive visualization of cellular structures and their relative sizes.

Asterank: The Asteroid Economy

Database tracking asteroid properties and potential economic value of space mining.

Image Kernels, Visually

Visualize how image kernels transform pixels in digital processing.

NASA Eyes on the Solar System

Explore planets, moons, and spacecraft positions in real-time solar system visualization.

Introduction to the A* Algorithm

A* algorithm efficiently finds optimal paths through complex systems and spaces.

How GPS Actually Works

Understand satellite positioning through interactive visual demonstrations.

Sound, From First Principles

Deep dive into sound physics with interactive visual explanations.

Cameras and Lenses, Explained

How cameras capture light through lenses, visually explained.

Quantum Computing for the Curious

Quantum computing harnesses superposition and entanglement to solve previously intractable problems.

Nutshell: Expandable Explanations

Read explanations that expand and collapse as needed.

Stellarium: The Sky, Live

Real-time planetarium showing live night sky with searchable stars, constellations, and celestial objects.

How to Make 2D Light

Build a 2D lighting system from first principles.

The Scale of the Universe

Zoomable comparison of cosmic scales from subatomic particles to the observable universe.

Solar System Scope

Interactive 3D visualization of planets, moons, and spacecraft orbiting the solar system.

Markov Chains, Visually

Visualize how random events form patterns and predictions.

Let’s Learn About Waveforms

Explore waveforms, frequency, and sound wave behavior interactively.

Seeing Circles, Sines and Signals

Understand circles, trigonometry, and signal processing visually.

Lights and Shadows, Explained

Manipulate light sources to understand shadows and refraction.

How a Mechanical Watch Works

Interactive 3D exploration of gears, springs, and escapements.

LOOPY: Build a System, Watch It Loop

Build feedback loops and systems to see how they create unexpected consequences.

100,000 Stars

Explore 100,000 stars in an interactive 3D visualization of our universe.

Cortex: A Word a Day

Learn vocabulary through increasingly difficult word definitions and contextual clues daily.

Internet Artifacts

Curated collection of weird, forgotten, and beautiful things buried in the internet.

Seeing Theory: Probability, Visually

Interactive visualizations teaching probability, statistics, and distributions with animated examples.

The Encyclopedia of Human Knowledge, Abridged

Comprehensive overview of essential human knowledge condensed into readable form.

The Size of Space

Immersive visualization comparing cosmic distances from atoms to universe scale.

Prince Rupert's Drop at 130,000 fps

High-speed footage reveals why Prince Rupert's Drops shatter explosively when tapped.

The Bizarre Behaviour of Rotating Bodies

Counterintuitive physics of spinning objects defying expectation through demonstration.

First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge

Master knowledge by learning to think from fundamental principles.

How Does SciShow (and Science) Happen?

Behind-the-scenes look at how science communication and educational content gets made.

The Case for Curiosity as a Discipline

Cultivate curiosity as deliberate practice to expand your thinking.

How to Read a Book Properly

Active reading techniques enhance comprehension and retention of complex written material.

How Earth Moves

How Earth's movements through space affect our daily lives and perception.

Why Gravity Is Not a Force

Physicist explains why gravity curves spacetime rather than acting as force.