Short animated videos that take complicated things apart.https://explodedthings.com/https://explodedthings.com/watch/how-an-x-ray-sees-through-you/https://explodedthings.com/watch/how-an-x-ray-sees-through-you/Inside the tube, 60,000 volts hurl electrons from a white-hot tungsten filament at nearly half the speed of light into a spinning tungsten target, where some of their lost energy leaves as X-rays. Soft tissue lets many of those X-rays through; dense, calcium-rich bone stops far more. The screen shows what the detector measured the way old film did, more X-rays meaning darker, so the white on your X-ray is a shadow where most X-rays never reached the detector. A typical hand X-ray's dose is comparable to less than three hours of natural background radiation.Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:27:51 GMThttps://explodedthings.com/watch/how-a-capacitive-touchscreen-works/https://explodedthings.com/watch/how-a-capacitive-touchscreen-works/Your phone's screen is a solid sheet of glass, and under it sits a grid of see-through electrodes: rows on one layer, columns on another. A tiny controller chip pulses one row at a time, and its electric field arcs up through the glass into each column; your fingertip conducts and steals some of that field, so a few crossings dip. Weighing those dips, the chip finds their center, finer than the grid itself, and because every crossing is read on its own, it can track several fingers at once. The grid never feels you press, so a thick glove fails: it keeps your finger too far away to steal the field.Sun, 18 Oct 2026 23:57:45 GMThttps://explodedthings.com/watch/the-green-star/https://explodedthings.com/watch/the-green-star/Ordinary stars pour out green light, but every other color comes too, so they look red, white or blue, never green. WD J1330+6435, a white dwarf about 280 light-years away, has a helium atmosphere squeezed up to the density of water, and rocky rubble from its old planets rains into it. Jostled by that dense helium, sodium swallows yellow, orange and red, calcium bites off the violet, and what's left peaks in green. It's far too faint to see by eye, so astronomers ran its measured spectrum through a model of human color vision, and the verdict is the most vivid green star yet.Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:00:39 GMThttps://explodedthings.com/watch/how-a-cochlear-implant-works/https://explodedthings.com/watch/how-a-cochlear-implant-works/A hearing aid makes sound louder, but a cochlear implant takes a completely different approach: it bypasses the damaged hair cells and fires electrical pulses straight into the fibers of the auditory nerve. We take one apart and follow a voice from the microphone, into digital code, through the skin by radio and into the cochlea, where 12 to 22 electrodes stand in for about 3,500 inner hair cells. It doesn't restore natural hearing. It gives the brain a new kind of input, and the brain learns to hear it as sound.Sat, 17 Oct 2026 00:16:35 GMThttps://explodedthings.com/watch/how-an-mri-scanner-works/https://explodedthings.com/watch/how-an-mri-scanner-works/We cut an MRI scanner open: a superconducting magnet chilled by liquid helium to −269 °C, with gradient coils and a radio coil nested inside. A radio pulse at the protons' own wobble rate, 64 million times a second in a 1.5-tesla scanner, tips the hydrogen in your body over, and as it relaxes it induces a faint signal in the coil. Fat relaxes faster than water, so if you time it right, fat shines while water stays dark. Gradient coils give every spot its own rate (switching them is the loud banging), and a computer turns the frequencies into a slice of you.Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:52:17 GMThttps://explodedthings.com/watch/what-if-the-moon-disappeared/https://explodedthings.com/watch/what-if-the-moon-disappeared/If the Moon vanished, its last light would keep reaching you for a little over a second, and Earth would keep almost exactly the same path around the Sun. The tides would shrink to the Sun's share, about half as strong. Every night would be as dark as a new moon, and corals that use moonlight to time their spawning would lose that cue. Over millions of years, Earth's tilt could swing much wider without the Moon to steady it, and scientists still debate how far.Thu, 15 Oct 2026 03:12:57 GMT