Hannah surprises Michael with a mammoth bone from Doggerland, the lost Ice Age land that once joined Britain to mainland Europe, and now lies beneath the North Sea. Who lived there, what roamed it, and how did an entire landscape disappear under the waves?
Then it's your questions: where did "cool" come from as a word for style, and how did it stick around for so long? What on earth is "skank face"? And what are Hannah and Michael reading right now?
-------------------
For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience
Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why do we turn on innocent people? A convincing story, a suspicious glance and suddenly everyone’s an armchair detective. But what happens when the crowd gets it completely wrong?

Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore the psychology of false accusations, witch hunts and mob mentality, starting with Richard Jewell, the security guard hailed as a hero after the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing before becoming the target of a media storm.

From the Salem witch trials and the Satanic Panic to internet detectives and social media pile-ons, they investigate how a hunch snowballs into certainty. Along the way: confirmation bias, beliefs that refuse to budge, and the famous Asch conformity experiments that show how easily we join the crowd, even when the crowd is obviously wrong.

Plus, Michael tackles accusations that Vsauce’s Mind Field was faked, Hannah shares her own brush with conspiracy theories, and they ask why we’re so convinced we can spot a liar when the evidence suggests we’re barely better than a coin toss.

It’s a journey through outrage, misinformation and our very human enthusiasm for pointing the finger. Because once people think you’re guilty, even defending yourself can look suspicious.

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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek

Animator: Sam Benson

Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell

Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe

Producer: Simona Rata

Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter

Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley

Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Michael hands Hannah a kendama, the Japanese cup-and-ball toy, and asks her to land a single catch. Then he brings out one built for him by Adam Savage of MythBusters and explains why a heavier kendama is a completely different physics problem.

A kendama looks like a children's toy. It is really a pendulum, a lesson in angular momentum and a catching problem borrowed from spacecraft docking. Michael and Hannah get into why the swing timing barely changes when the ball gets heavier, why the trick is to match the ball's velocity rather than grab at it, why bending your knees on the catch is doing real work, and why the paint finish on a kendama changes how it plays.

Then Hannah and Michael take on your questions: what would actually happen if you flew into Jupiter and kept going, whether there is a mathematical way to swim faster, and which books they'd hand an adult who wants to get back into maths after school ruined it.

-------------------

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ."

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek

Animator: Sam Benson

Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell

Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe

Producer: Simona Rata

Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter

Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley

Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What is fire, and why does watching it hold our attention in a different way from scrolling on your phone?

Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens start with the science of a flame: why it glows, what its different colours reveal, and why fire is a series of chemical reactions rather than a single substance.

Then they travel back to a time before wildfires could burn on Earth, and ask how early humans learned to use and make it.

Could keeping a fire alive have helped our ancestors learn to plan and cooperate? And what happens when we replace the quiet pull of a hearth with the endless pull of a phone?

From candle flames to early human history and the psychology of attention, this is the story of fire, the space it occupies in our history and lives.

-------------------

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek

Animator: Sam Benson

Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell

Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe

Producer: Simona Rata

Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter

Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley

Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The wait is finally over: Hannah Fry introduces Michael Stevens to her beloved fountain pen collection and the beautiful physics behind how fountain pens work.

From a £20 Lamy Safari to vintage Waterman and Montblanc pens, Hannah explains how capillary action, surface tension, air pressure and carefully engineered feeds control the flow of fountain pen ink. Michael tests the collection, chooses his favourite and discovers why the most expensive pen is not necessarily the nicest to write with.

Then Hannah and Michael answer your questions: which words are terrible at their jobs, how do aeroplane wings actually generate lift, and which moment in history would they most like to witness?

-------------------

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Almost every human who has ever lived has one thing in common: they were born and died on Earth. Except for three people.

Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens uncover the extraordinary story of Soyuz 11, the Soviet cosmonauts who became the only humans ever to die in outer space, and what their deaths meant for the future of human spaceflight.
But that raises a bigger question: what exactly is trapped on Earth, and what can escape?

Is the water left inside discarded plastic bottles being locked away forever? Is Earth itself slowly leaking water into space? Can you really trap a monkey simply because it refuses to let go of something shiny? And are your phone number, your name and every other possible sequence of numbers really hidden somewhere inside the digits of pi?

From space exploration and the Soyuz 11 disaster to Earth's water, animal behaviour and one of mathematics' biggest unanswered questions, Hannah and Michael investigate what gets trapped, what escapes, and what might have been hiding in plain sight all along.

-------------------

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if a single strange word could save you a fortune?

In this episode Michael opens up a Victorian telegram code book and explores how users compressed long messages into brief coded words to outwit the per word charge of the telegraph system.

Coded language turned everyday phrases about everyday events into something that looked like nonsense to outsiders, and why that secrecy was often a side effect of economy rather than espionage, and how operators learned to live inside this clipped new dialect of distance and delay.

-------------------

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek

Animator: Sam Benson

Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell

Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe

Producer: Simona Rata

Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter

Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley

Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Does space travel make astronauts younger?

Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens explore Einstein’s twin paradox, time dilation and NASA’s famous Twins Study with astronauts Scott and Mark Kelly.

After Scott Kelly spent 340 days aboard the International Space Station, he returned milliseconds younger than his identical twin. But microgravity had also affected his eyesight, bones, blood, gut microbiome, body temperature, genes and telomeres.

So what exactly happens to the human body in space, and which changes remain after astronauts return to Earth?

In this episode, Hannah and Michael discover how deeply the human body depends on gravity. Along the way, they uncover why your head ages faster than your feet, what a 63 day cave experiment reveals about our sense of time, and whether future humans could ever truly adapt to life beyond Earth.

-------------------

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell 

Animator: Sam Benson

Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell

Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe

Producer: Simona Rata

Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter

Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley

Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do collagen pills live up to their promises for skin and joints and healthy ageing?

In this episode, Hannah and Michael examine what collagen actually is and how the body makes and uses it, before looking closely at whether collagen supplements survive digestion and reach the skin in any meaningful form.

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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek

Animator: Sam Benson

Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell

Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe

Producer: Simona Rata

Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter

Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley

Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

⁠What is the smallest thing you can possibly feel? ⁠

⁠

Michael Stevens and Professor Hannah Fry journey through varying levels of perception, from the faintest touch on skin to the faintest trace of flavour and odour, and on to the remarkable question of whether the eye can register a single particle of light. ⁠

⁠

This is an exploration of human senses at their most sensitive, blending physics and neuroscience with everyday experience to reveal where our biology draws the line between nothing and something, and what about emotion... how do we feel those?⁠

⁠What is the smallest thing you can possibly feel? ⁠

⁠

Michael Stevens and Professor Hannah Fry journey through varying levels of perception, from the faintest touch on skin to the faintest trace of flavour and odour, and on to the remarkable question of whether the eye can register a single particle of light. ⁠

This is an exploration of human senses at their most sensitive, blending physics and neuroscience with everyday experience to reveal where our biology draws the line between nothing and something, and what about emotion... how do we feel those?⁠

Darwin's The Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals.

Lisa Feldman Barrett - How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.

-------------------

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The scale of the universe stretches from the Planck length, the smallest scale physics can describe, to the observable universe, the largest thing we can see.

Travel inward from one and outward from the other by powers of ten and they meet at something astonishingly familiar: the size of a human egg cell.

Michael Stevens (VSauce) takes Professor Hannah Fry on a journey through powers of ten, from quarks and protons and DNA to bananas and pyramids and on to planets and galaxies, to explore where we sit in the scale of the universe.

Along the way they ask whether the Planck length could be the universe's smallest pixel, whether reality might be a computer simulation and just how empty space really is.

Plus, your questions: why our best ideas arrive in the shower, Wikipedia's strangest rabbit holes and Hannah corrects the record on whether Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas believed curiosity was a sin.

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You can find the Reddit thread for scale of the universe here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRestIsScience/comments/1uycf3l/i_visualized_michael_scale_comparison_from_the

And The Power Of 10 documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

See some of Hannah & Michael's favourite Wikipedia pages here:

- Osama Bin Laden The Elephant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden_(elephant)

- Death From Laughter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter

- Order Of Magnitude - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude

- Amedeo Avogadro - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro

- Guy Standing (Economist) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_(economist)

-Guy Standing (Actor) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_(actor)

-------------------

For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science

Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.

-------------------

Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠

-------------------

Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek

Animator: Sam Benson

Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell

Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe

Producer: Simona Rata

Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter

Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley

Exec Producer: Neil Fearn

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices