Kurt Steiner set the world record for skipping stones by hurling a rock at the water and making it skip an astonishing 88 times. How is that even possible? WIRED‘s Robbie Gonzalez got coaching from Steiner to find out how he does it — and looked into fluid dynamics and physics to see whether we’ve reached the limit for skipping stones.
The hour record for cycling is very simple. It’s just one rider going as far as possible for one hour. WIRED’s Robbie Gonzalez explores the physical power needed to push for 60 minutes and the equipment and track choices that can make or break the record.
Destin of SmarterEveryDay teams up with a champion bullwhip artist and some ultra-slow motion cameras and reflective markers to study the physics of what’s happening when cracking a whip breaks the sound barrier.
Destin of SmarterEveryDay uses Schlieren imagery to get into the physics of faster-than-sound objects and the shock waves they produce.
Destin of SmarterEveryDay used Schlieren imagery to get amazing slo-mo footage of shockwaves.
Renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson gets into the physics behind auto racing.
YouTuber Sam O’Nella Academy why thorium is the BOMB – not literally, of course. You can’t even weaponize the stuff, which is why we started using uranium and plutonium in the first place.
Destin of SmarterEveryDay got himself invited to the John Pelham Artillery Competition, where cannon enthusiasts get to play with their expensive toys. Natch, he also got super-slow footage of cannon blasts and shockwaves.
Destin of SmarterEveryDay shows us how something we’ve probably never thought about works.
Destin of SmarterEveryDay spent four years chasing this problem and recreating it, then capturing it in slow motion, natch.
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World Without End
Ken Follett astonished the literary world with The Pillars of the Earth, a sweeping epic novel set in twelfth-century England centered on the building of a cathedral and many of the hundreds of lives it affected. Readers everywhere hoped for a sequel.
World Without End takes place in the same town of Kingsbridge, two centuries after the townspeople finished building the exquisite Gothic cathedral that was at the heart of The Pillars of the Earth. The cathedral and the priory are again at the center of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge, but this sequel stands on its own. This time the men and women of an extraordinary cast of characters find themselves at a crossroad of new ideas— about medicine, commerce, architecture, and justice. In a world where proponents of the old ways fiercely battle those with progressive minds, the intrigue and tension quickly reach a boiling point against the devastating backdrop of the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race—the Black Death.
Three years in the writing, and nearly eighteen years since its predecessor, World Without End breathes new life into this epic historical novel.
