Veritasium

Veritasium

The CIA's new tech doesn't make sense

A New York Post story claimed the CIA pulled off something out of a Tom Clancy novel. A downed American weapon system officer was hiding, injured, deep in Iranian mountains, and the agency supposedly found him by detecting the faint magnetic field of his beating heart from kilometers away with a device they nicknamed Ghost Murmur. Veritasium takes that claim apart bit by bit. The heart really does make a magnetic field, synthetic diamonds really can sense magnetic fields at room temperature, and the CIA really does use both deception and exotic sensors. But when you run the numbers, the distance kills it.

Veritasium

This Paradox Splits Smart People 50/50

You walk into a room. Two boxes. One is open with $1,000 you can see. The other is sealed. A supercomputer that has correctly predicted thousands of people before you has already decided what is inside the sealed box: $1 million if it predicted you would take only the sealed box, nothing if it predicted you would grab both. The boxes are set. The prediction is locked. Now choose. Take both, or take only the mystery box. This is Newcomb's paradox, and the unsettling thing is not that it is hard.

Veritasium

The Internet Was Weeks Away From Disaster and No One Knew

In late March 2024 the internet came within weeks of catastrophe, and almost nobody outside a small circle of engineers noticed. A patient attacker operating under the name Jia Tan spent more than two years grooming his way into a tiny, beloved data compression tool called XZ, then planted a backdoor so surgically engineered that it would have handed him a master key to OpenSSH, the lock on essentially every Linux server on Earth.

Veritasium

The asbestos problem is worse than we thought

Asbestos is a rock you can weave, and that single uncanny property is the whole story. Veritasium opens with researchers crawling over bright blue mineral outside Las Vegas, picking up something that looks like fluffy cotton but will not burn, then widens out into a 55 minute investigation of how a naturally fireproof mineral became the most useful and the most lethal building material of the twentieth century. The video does three things at once. It explains the chemistry, why a silica tetrahedron makes a rock and why a tiny mismatch between two mineral layers makes that rock curl into weavable fibers.