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PODCAST

The Rest Is Science

Join mathematician Professor Hannah Fry and science creator Michael Stevens (Vsauce) as they dig into the weird scientific questions that often go unexplored. Welcome to The Rest Is Science, a show that sits in the fascinating space between what we think we know, and what we actually know. Why do we assume we understand things like time, randomness, or even gravity? Once you start questioning these familiar ideas, reality becomes astonishingly strange and completely fragile. Whether you"re a

science physics

All Episodes

51:08

Why Do We Turn on Innocent People?

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/10/04

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

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40:58

Hacking The Kendama With Physics

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/30

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

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59:02

Why Do We Like Staring Into Fire?

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/27

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

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65:13

The Fluid Dynamics of Fountain Pens

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/23

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

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49:23

Dying In Space, Trapped Water, and What's Hidden In Pi?

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/20

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

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56:59

How Codes Were Used To Hack The Telegram Business

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/16

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 thetelegraph 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

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43:26

Why Your Body Needs Gravity

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/13

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

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41:50

What Is Collagen All About?

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/09

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 whethercollagen supplements survive digestion and reach the skin in any meaningful form. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit

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55:09

The Threshold of Human Sensation

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/06

⁠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

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49:01

The Scale of the Universe

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/09/02

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

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49:35

Why Loud Chewing Makes You Angry

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/30

The mukbang phenomenon is comfort viewing for millions, yet for others the sound of chewing, slurping and everyday mouth noises is enough to trigger instant anger, disgust and distress. Why do the sounds soothe one person and enrage another? In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) explore misophonia, the misunderstood sound sensitivity that can turn everyday mouth sounds into powerful emotional triggers. 1 in 5 people in a UK study have reported a hatred of mouth

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46:11

How Does Language Change What You Smell?

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/26

In this episode of Field Notes, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) begin with a Persian word for a smell Hannah cannot detect on a freshly washed plate. From the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Russian words for blue to emotions and identity, Hannah and Michael investigate how language may shape our experience of the world. Then, your questions. How fast would you need to throw a rock for it to escape Earth? What is the planet's escape velocity? Could it survive the atmosphere, or would

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65:46

Space Elevators, Skyhooks, and Space Fountains

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/23

What is the fastest, cheapest and possibly worst way to get into space? Could a nuclear explosion launch a manhole cover beyond the Earth’s atmosphere? And could space elevators, skyhooks or launch loops one day replace rockets? In this episode, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (VSauce) explore where space really begins, why orbit means falling forever, and how Newton’s cannon explains the motion of the International Space Station. They also interrogate the physics of the

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54:12

Hannah Ranks Michael's Bizarre Watches

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/19

Michael Stevens keeps a small museum of unusual timepieces on his desk: a clock that runs backwards, a watch built to be read in complete darkness, and one whose entire face simply says "now." Each is a miniature experiment in the psychology of time, and each reveals something surprising about how our perception of time shapes the way we understand uncertainty and the world around us. The conversation then turns to logic and reasoning: how we make judgements, why we get things wrong, and

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46:38

Why Your Brain Thinks You're Full (Even When You're Not)

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/16

How did the Gila monster, a desert lizard that eats just five times a year, help unlock the science behind Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro?In this episode of The Rest Is Science, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) trace the strange journey from a molecule found in lizard venom to medicines reshaping diabetes and weight-loss treatment, exploring how GLP-1 helps regulate blood sugar, appetite and the hum of ‘food noise’.Early evidence suggests their effects may extend far beyond food,

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47:03

The Lake At The North Pole That Stops Europe From...

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/12

When you picture the North Pole, you probably imagine a vast, frozen expanse of floating sea ice. But hidden deep beneath the surface of the Arctic lies something incredible: a massive, churning reservoir of nearly freshwater, suspended right in the middle of a saltwater ocean.In this episode of The Rest Is Science, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (VSauce) explore the hidden hydrodynamics of the Arctic. Fresh off a real-world scientific expedition to the sprawling ice sheets of

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60:02

The Science of Putting Sunglasses on The Sun

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/09

Why does the cartoon Sun always wear sunglasses? And how big would a real pair need to be?Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens investigate space mirrors, Reflect Orbital and solar eclipses to find out. Starting with a pencil held at arm’s length, they use the Sun’s angular diameter to calculate how big a pair of solar sunglasses would need to be for one eye, two eyes, everyone in London and eventually the entire planet. Their hypothetical answer is a strange structure more than a million

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47:09

Why Is It A Colour Wheel & Not A Line?

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/05

Colour wheel or colour line? Light itself runs in a straight line from red to violet, yet every colour theory chart bends that spectrum into a circle and the reason has nothing to do with physics. Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (VSauce) dig into why human vision refuses to see colour the way light actually behaves, tracing the visible light spectrum from one end to the other and asking where all the "missing" colours, like magenta and purple, actually come from if they don't exist on

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54:29

Why Lithium Batteries SUCK

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/08/02

Can Hannah convince Michael that the lithium-ion battery is one of our most overrated inventions to ever happen?Hannah makes her case using a surprising energy source hidden in your fridge, a bell in Oxford that's been ringing since 1840, and a metal that is useful… but prone to bursting into flame from the inside out. Tracing the battery's strange history, from a twitching dead frog to the executed man who helped inspire Frankenstein. But the real point runs deeper: we don't have an energy

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45:35

What Happens Inside Earth's Forbidden Zones?

The Rest Is Science ·

2026/07/29

What grows in the spaces humans are forced to abandon?Hannah brings Michael an actual piece of barbed wire from the Korean Demilitarised Zone, one of the most heavily fortified and forbidden borders on Earth, and it sends them somewhere unexpected.From deserted no man's land and radioactive exclusion zones to remote islands that most of humankind has quietly agreed to leave well alone, they explore the surprising ways life adapts to the damage we leave behind.Plus your questions: the scientific

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94 results

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