The movie get out was one of the most tense horror flicks in the past decade. Most horror movies build tension by putting watchers in unfamiliar situations––think Alien––or by creating over-the-top creepiness. But Get Out didn’t do any of those things. Instead, it put watchers in a familiar situation with just enough unfamiliarity to drive up tension. This Lessons from the Screenplay analyzes how Get Out used just hints of the unfamiliar in an otherwise very familiar setting to build tension. 

Nowadays, if you hear that people play Dungeons and Dragons you probably think one of two things. Either: “Neerrrrddd!” or “Awesome, can I play? Can I be DM?” But that wasn’t always the case, as most of our adult readers will remember. For awhile, people feared that Dungeons and Dragons was actually the work of the devil and playing the game was a form of satanic worship. This New York Times Retro Report explains that weird time.

There’s an old wives tale that says talking to plants helps them grow. Is there any science to that? This SciShow episode investigates. Here are the spoilers: basically, it doesn’t seem to make a huge difference, and you should probably just use fertilizer. But if you enjoy talking to your plant and you notice some differences, there might be some reasons why the plant grows. It could be, for example, the CO2 from your breath!

Since you’re using the internet to read this text, you’re probably familiar with trolling. Trolls intentionally rile people up just to waste time or to entertain themselves. Politicians seemed to have learned to use the techniques of the internet troll, as evidenced with the so-called “bombshell memo.” That thing was a total waste of time, but politicians puffed it up. Why? To distract cable news networks from focusing on the real issues in the country. 

Scientists and space fans alike love to look for and celebrate the discovery of exoplanets––that is, planets that exist outside our solar system. But what about the reverse. If aliens exist on other planets, can they see us? This video explores the known technologies to find exoplanets and then explains how easy (or rather, hard) it would be to find our planet. Bad news everyone: the odds of seeing earth are pretty darn slim.

The verdict appears to be in: football definitely causes traumatic brain injuries. At the very least, about ten percent of pros in the NFL wind up with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), which is a degenerative brain disease that causes dementia, suicidal tendencies, and more. Some people have suggested that the link between football and CTE might spell the end of football. That seems unlikely, but it’s clear there needs to be a change. This video explores the ways that athletes and doctors alike are working together to make the game safer.

Most people watch movies passively. That means they watch without asking themselves questions, thinking through deeper meanings of the movie, or wondering why filmmakers make the choices they made. This video will walk you through the finer points of film criticism through Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece Apocalypse Now, based loosely on the classic book The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Using the tools you get in this video, you’ll be able to more thoroughly enjoy movies.

Planes are notoriously safer than cars, as the oft-cited statistic that more people die in car crashes than plane crashes tells us. So when planes do crash, what causes it? There are a few factors that cause air disasters. The number one is pilot error, but mechanical problems and weather play a big role as well. This video explains the various things that can go wrong with planes and why planes are getting safer and safer as the years pass. 

World War Two proved that war truly is hell. But out of the horrors of that war came a very surprising miracle: Nutella. The history of Nutella technically begins way before that, during the Napoleonic Wars. To spread thinning chocolate supplies, makers added hazelnuts to their cocoa. But after the chocolate supply returned to normal, everyone forgot about the hazelnut mix. The combo survived, but barely, until WWII. Here’s the history of your favorite chocolate spread.

You’ve sen the Moiré Effect before, even if you don’t know what it is. Basically, it’s the result of overlapping sets of parallel lines. The Moiré Effect creates patterns that sometime appear to move when you move or that can appear very confusing to the eye. If you exploit the effect just right, though, you can make some very helpful shapes. This lighthouse uses the Moiré Effect to create arrows that point ships straight towards the lighthouse no matter where the ships are.

Puns often invoke eye rolls and groans, and they get categorized under “dad jokes.” But puns get a bad rap. Exploiting ambiguity in language has been a key part of good writing since Shakespeare, and we still use them for that purpose today. Take “Arrested Development” for example. Most of that joke consists of puns in the form of foreshadowing or callbacks, and sometimes just for the fun of playing with language. Hopefully this video will rescue puns from the bottom of the humor barrel. 

Antartica may not have the nicest weather on the planet, but it’s a scientist’s dream. There is so much to learn in Antartica that multiple countries have outposts there for research. But they can’t exactly raise cows and grow potatoes for obvious reasons. So what kind of labor does it take to live in Antartica? This video explains all the logistics of living in Antartica. Spoiler alert: it takes a lot of work.