The Economist

The Economist

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An element of truth - videos about science, education, and anything else we find interesting.

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How This Miracle Drug Disappeared Over Night
33:25
The Economist The Economist

How This Miracle Drug Disappeared Over Night

In 1998, the HIV drug ritonavir mysteriously failed production when capsules developed insoluble needle-like crystals, revealing the phenomenon of polymorphism—where identical molecules can spontaneously rearrange into different crystal structures with vastly different properties, threatening any pharmaceutical's viability.

10 days ago · 9 points
Why It's Almost Impossible To Store Antimatter
58:54
The Economist The Economist

Why It's Almost Impossible To Store Antimatter

CERN produces antimatter—the universe's most expensive substance at $1 billion per gram—to solve why matter dominates our universe when the Big Bang should have created equal parts matter and antimatter, requiring physicists to find subtle violations of fundamental symmetries without breaking the Standard Model.

about 1 month ago · 8 points
How One Rock Poisoned (Almost) The Entire Planet
54:46
The Economist The Economist

How One Rock Poisoned (Almost) The Entire Planet

Asbestos, a fireproof mineral once celebrated for saving lives from urban fires, has become a global health crisis causing millions of deaths from lung disease and cancer due to decades of industrial suppression and weak regulations.

3 months ago · 9 points
How The Fridge Destroyed One of the World’s Largest Monopolies
30:17
The Economist The Economist

How The Fridge Destroyed One of the World’s Largest Monopolies

This video traces how Boston merchant Frederic Tudor built a global billion-dollar monopoly shipping natural ice from New England to tropical climates using ancient Persian preservation techniques, transforming American cities and food distribution through the "cold chain"—while Dr. John Gorrie's quest to cure yellow fever patients sparked the mechanical refrigeration that would ultimately destroy Tudor's empire.

3 months ago · 10 points
We still don't understand magnetism
35:53
The Economist The Economist

We still don't understand magnetism

While classical physics treats force fields as fundamental and potentials as mere mathematical tools, quantum experiments from the 1950s reveal that particles are affected by electromagnetic potentials even in regions with zero fields, suggesting potentials are the more fundamental physical reality.

3 months ago · 9 points
Filming Light at 1 Trillion FPS
30:09
The Economist The Economist

Filming Light at 1 Trillion FPS

This video explores the evolution of ultra-high-speed photography from Harold Edgerton's 1930s stroboscopic technique that froze bullets in flight to modern single-pixel cameras that visualize light moving at one trillion frames per second by trading spatial resolution for temporal precision.

4 months ago · 7 points