The Rest Is Science
byGoalhanger
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 lifelong science fan or just naturally curious, The Rest Is Science will change your perception of reality, and prove that the biggest...
Episodes(40 episodes)
Season 1 - Episode 97
What Happened When We Stopped Squatting?
In many parts of the world, people rest in a deep squat every day. In others, most adults can barely get down there. So what’s going on? Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens dig into the history of squatting and why the ability to squat differs so much between cultures.Plus, your questions: What happens to the air pressure inside a car when it goes round a bend? Why do some burps come out higher than others? And why do tautologies sound like wisdom?-------------------For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and ho...
Published: Oct 21, 2026Duration: 37m 34s
Season 1 - Episode 96
Mathematicians Are The Canary Down The AI Coal Mine
OpenAI claims a swarm of AI agents has solved the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the hardest unsolved questions in mathematics, with a $1 million prize attached. Then it released more than 700 more mathematical manuscripts, including claims touching the Riemann hypothesis, faster than anyone can check them. Mathematicians are not happy, and the reason goes far beyond the money.
In this episode of The Rest of Science, mathematician and fluid dynamicist Hannah Fry takes Michael Stevens through the equations that describe everything that flows, from the blood in your veins to a rocket leaving the atmosphere. Then she...
Published: Oct 18, 2026Duration: 1h 7m 24s
Season 1 - Episode 95
The Right Way To Open A Shaken Soda Can
A can of fizzy drink has been violently shaken. The pressure is building, the bubbles are ready to erupt, and Michael Stevens is about to open it. But Hannah Fry has a trick up her sleeve. Can a few taps really prevent an explosion?This week on The Rest Is Science, Hannah and Michael begin with the surprisingly complicated physics of carbonation before tackling a much bigger question: can we really trust science?From the replication crisis and scientific studies that fail to stand up to scrutiny, to the strange incentives that shape what gets published, they...
Published: Oct 14, 2026Duration: 38m 28s
Season 1 - Episode 94
Something Weird Is Going On With Placebos
For the past few decades, something strange has been happening in clinical trials. Painkillers aren't getting worse, but the placebos they're tested against appear to be getting better.
In one landmark study, the advantage of pain medication over placebo shrank from 27.3% in 1996 to just 8.9% in 2013.
Even stranger? This trend was found almost entirely in American trials.In this episode of The Rest Is Science, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (Vsauce) investigate the extraordinary science of the placebo effect;
how our expectations influence pain, why belief can change the way...
Published: Oct 11, 2026Duration: 49m 36s
Season 1 - Episode 93
What Was A Mammoth Doing At The Bottom Of The Sea?
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...
Published: Oct 7, 2026Duration: 42m 13s
Why Do We Turn on Innocent People?
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...
Published: Oct 4, 2026Duration: 51m 8s
Season 1 - Episode 94
Hacking The Kendama With Physics
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...
Published: Sep 30, 2026Duration: 40m 58s
Season 1 - Episode 90
Why Do We Like Staring Into Fire?
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...
Published: Sep 27, 2026Duration: 59m 2s
Season 1 - Episode 89
The Fluid Dynamics of Fountain Pens
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 a...
Published: Sep 23, 2026Duration: 1h 5m 13s
Season 1 - Episode 88
Dying In Space, Trapped Water, and What's Hidden In Pi?
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...
Published: Sep 20, 2026Duration: 49m 23s
Season 1 - Episode 87
How Codes Were Used To Hack The Telegram Business
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.
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Published: Sep 16, 2026Duration: 56m 59s
Season 1 - Episode 86
Why Your Body Needs Gravity
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?
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Published: Sep 13, 2026Duration: 43m 26s
Season 1 - Episode 85
What Is Collagen All About?
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 r...
Published: Sep 9, 2026Duration: 41m 50s
Season 1 - Episode 84
The Threshold of Human Sensation
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?
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Published: Sep 6, 2026Duration: 55m 9s
Season 1 - Episode 83
The Scale of the Universe
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...
Published: Sep 2, 2026Duration: 49m 1s
Season 1 - Episode 82
Why Loud Chewing Makes You Angry
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 sounds, but where does the problem lie, and can you train your...
Published: Aug 30, 2026Duration: 49m 35s
Season 1 - Episode 81
How Does Language Change What You Smell?
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 it take something the size of the Chicxulub asteroid to...
Published: Aug 26, 2026Duration: 46m 11s
Season 1 - Episode 80
Space Elevators, Skyhooks, and Space Fountains
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 Kármán...
Published: Aug 23, 2026Duration: 1h 5m 46s
Season 1 - Episode 79
Bizarre Watches and How They Work
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 whether thinking more carefully can...
Published: Aug 19, 2026Duration: 54m 12s
Season 1 - Episode 78
Why Your Brain Thinks You're Full (Even When You're Not)
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, quieting cravings for alcohol and cigarettes, and even the urge to gamble. What might this reve...
Published: Aug 16, 2026Duration: 46m 38s