Just A Minute: Volume 5

Hello and welcome back!
This is MinuteEarth’s guide to the best science content from our studio and beyond. Every edition includes stuff we’re working on, along with other cool new science-related stories we want you to know about - plus some original games just for subscribers! Make sure to subscribe below so you never miss a minute 🙂.

We’re currently making a video about why poisonous animals don’t poison themselves, and I think this early storyboard of one of the scenes really illustrates how fun and complicated it is to tell the kind of science stories we want to tell. We need to be able to show what’s happening on multiple levels, introduce viewers to the “characters” we create, and then use visual metaphors to tie everything together. (Plus, Kirby reference!)

Here are some videos our team has released on our various channels over the last few weeks!

MinuteEarth

The Species That Broke Evolution
We humans have changed a ton over the last 100 million years (at that time, we were basically tree shrews). But horseshoe crabs look almost exactly the same as they did back then. In this video, I dive into the riddle of why some organisms seem to evolve faster than others - and why do other organisms seem to not evolve at all.

MinuteFood

WTF is American cheese?
Over at MinuteFood, Kate gets a little bit cheesy as she explains why some cheese melts way way better than others, and what you can do to make sure that your next grilled cheese pulls apart in a super-satisfying fashion. Plus, you’ll learn - and never forget - the meaning of NaCHO.

xkcd’s What If?

Could you survive a nanosecond on the Sun?
Randall and the xkcd crew tackle your burning questions (get it?) in their newest video about heat and time. Also, make sure to head to the comments for a quality Yelp joke and an etymological discussion about what we should call a blink in reverse.

• For our Instagram, Lizah made a comic about a wasp with a bad reputation:

• MinuteLab’s Jasper was the technical reviewer for The Coding Train’s awesome new book The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with JavaScript.

• Cameron headed out to VidSummit to meet up with a bunch of our favorite creators, including Sabrina from Answer in Progress.

1. Every Frame a Painting just released a new video. It's beautiful. It's not about science or science communication, but it will definitely change the way you think about how movies are shot. 

2. Here's an article that about how researchers have found an old dinosaur highway - only, thanks to plate tectonics, half of it is now in Brazil and the other half is in Cameroon. 

3. A few months ago, we made a video about how ocean conditions likely mean that the wreck of the Titanic won’t last long. New photos show it’s dissolving even faster than we thought.

by Matthew Goldenberg

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