Loading...I’ve been doing Channel Showcases for a while now, and have featured many educational channels such as Crash Course, Smarter Every Day, Vsauce, and more. All of these channels are great, but I surprisingly still haven’t featured one of my very favorite educational channels: Veritasium. Run and hosted by Derek Muller, Veritasium is an amazing science YouTube channel with 2.8 million subscribers and 209 million views. The second video I ever featured on this site was from Veritasium, and I have featured 6 more since then, although I could have featured many more as they are all very interesting and educational. Derek Muller does a great job of explaining the sometimes very complex science in his videos, and as he should be, too; he has a PhD in Science Communication, and to be honest, it does show. All of his videos are clear and understandable, mostly because uses a variety of techniques to allow us commoners to better understand the science he is teaching. I’ll talk more about that later.
But before I go on to give a couple of examples of great Veritasium videos, I have to explain the name. The name is a play on the saying “an element of truth”, which is exactly what he wants to bring to the world with his videos. The name is a combination of “veritas”, which is latin for truth, and “ium” which is a common suffix among elements. (i.e., Palladium, Zirconium, Uranium, Plutonium, Helium, etc.) Ok, since that’s out of the way, I would like to direct you to the video above, which is a video Derek made a while back called “The Most Radioactive Place On Earth”.
The video is pretty self-explanatory. In the video, Derek teaches you about radioactivity by going to some of the most radioactive places in the world, most notably the nuclear disaster site at Chernobyl. Radiation is something that most people don’t know much about, besides for the fact that you want to stay as far away as possible from it. But as Derek explains in the video, the only type of radiation that you should be afraid of is ionizing radiation, and that is much rarer than normal radiation. (obviously, as light is just another form of radiation) He uses a device called a Geiger Counter to track how much radiation per hour he is receiving, which is measured in sieverts. The cool part of Derek’s explanation of radiation is that he uses bananas, which naturally have 0.1 sieverts of radiation, to explain how much radiation certain things give off. For instance, the average natural background radiation globally is around 1-2 bananas per hour, a number so small it isn’t significant. I mentioned some techniques Derek uses to explain complex scientific things, and this video is a great example of that.
Altogether, Veritasium is a perfect channel for anyone who likes science and wants to learn more about the world around them. Derek makes a variety of types of videos, from videos on a certain topic like the video above, to videos answering common questions such as “Do Cell Phones Cause Brain Tumors?“, to experiment based videos where he proves some physics question by actually going and testing it. All of his videos are very interesting, well explained, and a perfect way to learn your daily intake of fun science.
By the way, I can’t help but mention that the video above is a clip taken from a fantastic Neil DeGrasse Tyson style documentary Derek made on Uranium for PBS that aired a couple weeks ago. I highly recommend it, so if you would like to watch it you can stream it on PBS’ website HERE. Really, watch the documentary. If you thought you learned a lot when you watched the video above, and enjoyed it, watch the documentary.