Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell Season 7, Episode 12: The World War of the Ants — The Army Ant

1

Is Organic Really Better? Healthy Food or Trendy Scam?

Organic food is a huge trend: it promises a healthier and better life. But can Organic food really live up to the expectations or is it just baloney?

9 min

2

Building a Mars Base Is a Horrible Idea: Let’s Do It!

Humans love to explore. Strangely enough even horrible places – like Mars. Let’s see how building a Mars base could work and how insanely nerve-wracking exactly it would be.

10 min

3

Loneliness

Everybody feels lonely sometimes. But only few of us are aware how important this feeling was for our ancestors - and that our modern world can turn it into something that really hurts us. Why do we feel this way and what can we do about it?

13 min

4

The Origin of Consciousness — How Unaware Things Became Aware

Consciousness is perhaps the biggest riddle in nature. In the first part of this three part video series, we explore the origins of consciousness and take a closer look on how unaware things became aware.

10 min

5

What If We Detonated All Nuclear Bombs at Once?

What happens if make a huge pile from all 15,000 nuclear bombs and pull the trigger? And what happens if we make an even bigger pile?

8 min

6

The Most Dangerous Stuff in the Universe — Strange Stars Explained

Inside neutron stars we can find the weirdest and most dangerous substance in the universe: Strange matter. What is strange matter, how dangerous is it and what can it tell us about the origin of the universe?

9 min

7

The Side Effects of Vaccines — How High Is the Risk?

Vaccines are one of our best tools to prevent dangerous diseases, but they come with side effects. So would it be safer not to vaccinate?

11 min

8

Is the EU Democratic? Does Your Vote Matter?

Being a citizen of the European Union means that many aspects of our lives are regulated by a weird entity. It feels like a huge bureaucracy is making decisions over our heads. How democratic is the EU really and does your vote actually affect anything?

8 min

9

Is Meat Bad for You? Is Meat Unhealthy?

Over the last few years eating meat has increasingly been associated with health risks, like heart disease, cancer and an early death. How unhealthy is meat really?

10 min

10

Could Your Phone Hurt You? Electromagnetic Pollution

Electricity is all around us, all the time. It makes our lives easier, safer, more fun and most of us never think about it. But is there such a thing as too much electricity? Electronic devices emit an electromagnetic field, which is suspected to cause cancer. We read countless sources on this topic to summarize the results of the latest research for you.

8 min

11

Tiny Bombs in Your Blood — The Complement System

One of the key players of our immune system is the complement system. An army of millions and trillions of tiny bombs, which work together in a complex and elegant dance to stop intruders in your body.

9 min

12

The World War of the Ants — The Army Ant

Every day billions of soldiers fight a merciless war on thousands of fronts, that has been going on for over one hundred million years: the world war of the ants.

9 min

13

The Egg — A Short Story

The Egg, a story by Andy Weir, animated by Kurzgesagt. This video was more than 2 years in the making and is a little bit different than the others on this channel. We hope you like it.

8 min

14

What’s Hiding at the Most Solitary Place on Earth? The Deep Sea

Sometimes the world feels boring. All the remote islands are visited, the arctic conquered, the dense jungles discovered. Except, there is still a place to explore: A wet deadly desert where mysterious creatures live in total darkness: The deep sea. Let us dive down.

12 min

15

The Billion Ant Mega Colony and the Biggest War on Earth

In nearly every corner of the Earth, ants wage war against each other. Their weapons are what nature gave them. Some have strong armour, deadly stingers or sharp mandibles. And then there is this tiny, and not very impressive ant. But it rules the biggest empire any ant has ever built. A colony spanning continents and fighting wars that leave millions of casualties. Let’s take a look at this unlikely warrioress: Linepithema humile, the Argentine ant.

10 min

16

What If We Nuke a City?

As you may have noticed, we like to blow stuff up on this channel. So when the International Red Cross approached us to collaborate on a video about nuclear weapons, we were more than excited. Until we did the research. It turned out we were a bit oblivious off the real impact of nuclear weapons in the real world, on a real city. And especially, how helpless even the most developed nations on earth would be if an attack occurred today. So hopefully this video demonstrates how extremely non fun a real world nuclear attack would be, without being to gruesome. This collaboration was a blast (no pun intended) and we want to say a huge thank you to the International Red Cross!

9 min

17

Neutron Stars — The Most Extreme Things That Are Not Black Holes

Neutron stars are one of the most extreme and violent things in the universe. Giant atomic nuclei, only a few kilometers in diameter but as massive as stars. And they owe their existence to the death of something majestic.

9 min

18

1,000 km Cable to the Stars — The Skyhook

Getting to space is incredibly hard, expensive and needs a lot of resources. A more efficient way to get there is a Skyhook (or Spacetether), an ever rotating cable with a counter weight, that catapults spaceships from earth orbit into the depths of space.

8 min

19

An Antidote to Dissatisfaction

Everybody is familiar with the feeling that things are not as they should be. That you are not successful enough, your relationships not satisfying enough. That you don’t have the things you crave. In this video we want to talk about one of the strongest predictors of how happy people are, how easily they make friends and how good they are at dealing with hardship. An antidote against dissatisfaction so to speak: Gratitude.

10 min

20

Overpopulation & Africa

For most of our history, the human population grew slowly. Until new discoveries brought us more food and made us live longer. In just a hundred years the human population quadrupled. This led to apocalyptic visions of an overcrowded earth. But the population growth rate actually peaked in the 1960s. Since then, fertility rates have crashed as countries industrialize and develop. World population is now expected to balance out at around 11 billion by the end of the century. But the big picture conceals the details.

8 min

21

How to Move the Sun: Stellar Engines

Nothing in the Universe is static. In the milky way, billions of stars orbit the galactic center. Some, like our sun, are pretty consistent, keeping a distance of around 30,000 light years from the galactic center, completing an orbit every 230 million years. This dance is not an orderly ballet - more like a skating rink filled with drunk toddlers. This chaos makes the galaxy dangerous. Our solar neighbourhood is constantly changing, with stars moving hundreds of kilometers every second. Only the vast distances between objects protect us from the dangers out there. But we might get unlucky in the future. At some point we could encounter a star going supernova. Or a massive object passing by and showering earth with asteroids. If something like this were to happen we would likely know thousands, if not millions of years in advance. But we still couldn’t do much about it. Unless… we move our whole solar system out of the way.

9 min