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 questions are always the most fun.
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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 grab at it, why bending your knees on the catch is doing real work, and why the paint finish on a kendama changes how it plays.
Then Hannah and Michael take on your questions: what would actually happen if you flew into Jupiter and kept going, whether there is a mathematical way to swim faster, and which books they'd hand an adult who wants to get back into maths after school ruined it.
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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience
Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ."
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Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
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Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why Do We Like Staring Into Fire?
Saison 1 · Épisode 90
dimanche 27 septembre 2026 • Durée 59:02
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 cooperate? And what happens when we replace the quiet pull of a hearth with the endless pull of a phone?
From candle flames to early human history and the psychology of attention, this is the story of fire, the space it occupies in our history and lives.
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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 registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Fluid Dynamics of Fountain Pens
Saison 1 · Épisode 89
mercredi 23 septembre 2026 • Durée 01:05:13
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 aeroplane wings actually generate lift, and which moment in history would they most like to witness?
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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience
Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Dying In Space, Trapped Water, and What's Hidden In Pi?
Saison 1 · Épisode 88
dimanche 20 septembre 2026 • Durée 49:23
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 water into space? Can you really trap a monkey simply because it refuses to let go of something shiny? And are your phone number, your name and every other possible sequence of numbers really hidden somewhere inside the digits of pi?
From space exploration and the Soyuz 11 disaster to Earth's water, animal behaviour and one of mathematics' biggest unanswered questions, Hannah and Michael investigate what gets trapped, what escapes, and what might have been hiding in plain sight all along.
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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience
Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How Codes Were Used To Hack The Telegram Business
Saison 1 · Épisode 87
mercredi 16 septembre 2026 • Durée 56:59
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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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience
Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why Your Body Needs Gravity
Saison 1 · Épisode 86
dimanche 13 septembre 2026 • Durée 43:26
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?
In this episode, Hannah and Michael discover how deeply the human body depends on gravity. Along the way, they uncover why your head ages faster than your feet, what a 63 day cave experiment reveals about our sense of time, and whether future humans could ever truly adapt to life beyond Earth.
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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 registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What Is Collagen All About?
Saison 1 · Épisode 85
mercredi 9 septembre 2026 • Durée 41:50
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 registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Threshold of Human Sensation
Saison 1 · Épisode 84
dimanche 6 septembre 2026 • Durée 55:09
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?
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?
Darwin's The Expression Of The Emotions In Man And Animals.
Lisa Feldman Barrett - How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.
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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience
Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The Scale of the Universe
Saison 1 · Épisode 83
mercredi 2 septembre 2026 • Durée 49:01
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 the scale of the universe.
Along the way they ask whether the Planck length could be the universe's smallest pixel, whether reality might be a computer simulation and just how empty space really is.
Plus, your questions: why our best ideas arrive in the shower, Wikipedia's strangest rabbit holes and Hannah corrects the record on whether Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas believed curiosity was a sin.
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You can find the Reddit thread for scale of the universe here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRestIsScience/comments/1uycf3l/i_visualized_michael_scale_comparison_from_the
And The Power Of 10 documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
See some of Hannah & Michael's favourite Wikipedia pages here:
- Osama Bin Laden The Elephant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden_(elephant)
- Death From Laughter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter
- Order Of Magnitude - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude
- Amedeo Avogadro - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro
- Guy Standing (Economist) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_(economist)
-Guy Standing (Actor) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Standing_(actor)
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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 registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Why Loud Chewing Makes You Angry
Saison 1 · Épisode 82
dimanche 30 août 2026 • Durée 49:35
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 brain to stop hating a sound, or is the person chewing next to you simply beyond forgiveness?
Are the sounds themselves the trigger? Or is the structure of the human ear to blame? Perhaps, instead, the answer lies in a surprising connection between our brains and our jaws.
To find out, Hannah and Michael trial a surprising trick that could offer genuine relief, and discover how changing what you see can completely transform your response to what you hear.
Along the way, they investigate nails on blackboards, the frequencies used in acoustic weapons, the device designed to drive teenagers out of public spaces and the curious connection between misophonia, ASMR and the mukbang world itself.
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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 registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.
-------------------
Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by clicking here.
-------------------
Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack Meek
Animator: Sam Benson
Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell
Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe
Producer: Simona Rata
Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter
Chief Digital Officer: Samuel Oakley
Exec Producer: Neil Fearn
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices