Explainercast

In episode 29, Shane and Dave explain quicksand and non-Newtonian fluids, including the longest-running laboratory experiment.

In episode 28, Shane and Dave explain common powerful movements of air that you didn’t know existed: downbursts, microbursts, gust fronts, haboobs, and derechos.

In episode 27, Shane and Dave explain hurricanes! Why do they form? Where do they go? Why are they ONLY ever hitting North America? Find out in this episode!

In episode 26, Shane and Dave kick off a saga about the weather, starting with lightning! How does lightning work? What are the mechanisms that cause it?

In episode 25, Shane and Dave explain how humans perceive things visually: shapes, focus, spatial density, and much more.

In episode 24, Shane and Dave explain how researchers at UC Berkeley created a color that no human has ever experienced, until now. How did they do this? Is this even possible?

In episode 23, Shane and Dave explain how the human eye and brain perceive color. Fun fact: there is no yellow on your phone screen (or purple or brown or white or gray), and there might not be any yellow in your yellow shirt either!

In episode 22, Shane and Dave explain how a clever 15-year-old discovered a way to geolocate Signal users, despite Signal’s reputation for strong security. We’ll explain how he did it, and you’ll learn about content distribution networks on the internet.

In episode 21, Shane and Dave explain how things lose features when they get bigger and why. Why can full-sized helipcopters not fly upside down, but small RC helipcopters can?? And so much more!

In episode 20, Shane and Dave explain skiing! First principles: Types, materials, physics, techniques.

In episode 19, Shane and Dave explain high performance driving: How to drive at the performance limit The physics of racing Racing strategy

In episode 18, Shane and Dave explain how the internet inventors were able to cram billions of IP addreses into a much smaller space. And, this is how your home internet connection works too!

In episode 17, Shane and Dave explain the surprising science of rainbows. Can you touch one? Does everyone else see the same rainbow that you see?

In episode 16, Shane and Dave explain how GPTs work. GPTs are a type of large language model, and the most famous is ChatGPT.

In episode 15, Shane and Dave explain the Domain Name Service, which is how your web browser figures out the IP addresses to use for domain names like google.com

In episode 14, Shane and Dave explain how Alexa works. Alexa is the most popular household voice assistant. Find out how Alexa works on the inside!

In episode 13, Shane and Dave explain how the internet ensures that data is delivered between computers reliably and in order.

In episode 12, Shane and Dave continue explaining the saga of telecommunications. Computer networks! How the technologies work that power the internet.

In episode 11, Shane and Dave continue explaining computers. This is the 2nd part in a to-be-determined-length saga.

In episode 10, Shane and Dave start to explain how computers work, from the very bottom: transistors, digital logic, binary, math, and much more. This will be the first part of an awesome saga!

In episode 9, Shane and Dave correct some errors from episode 8 about eclipses, and add even more explaining!

What makes eclipses happen. Learn about the physics that causes the spectacular phenomena that turns day into night and the moon into blood.

Technology advanced from the telegraph, but how did it work? Did you know they tried using compasses? What about error correction? Did you know Thomas Edison figured out a way to transmit 4 independent telegraph conversations on a single wire? We promise you will be surprised to learn how the telephone evolved from the telegraph. In this episode: Serendipitous user interfaces Deep dive on the elec...

Onward to party lines! After the telephone was invented, the next thing people wanted to do was talk to their friends. But this was expensive! In this episode, we explain how the telephone gained mass market adoption, including the party line, and finally, the first digital (yes, ones and zeros) telephone transmission.

We promise you; you don’t know what the telegraph is. You think you know, but did you know the first telegraphs had no wires? Did you know they used 30-foot tall towers with people standing on top of them? Did you know that electrical telegraphs were originally discovered thanks to a frog leg?