Author: Chris Higgins

Chytrid fungus is one of the things killing frogs around the world. In California, the mountain yellow-legged frog is an endangered species (its population has declined 90%!), in part due to this wicked fungus.  The fungus affects a frog’s skin and soon it’s game over for the hapless amphibian.

But scientists at the San Francisco Zoo are using work from UC Santa Barbara to experiment with antifungal chemicals. It appears that by dosing the frogs with an antifungal, they fight off any current Chytrid fungal infection—and they develop a resistance to new ones! If this works out, it really might save these Californian frogs, as well as amphibians around the world. Have a look:

It’s a common refrain: “I’d rather watch paint dry” than sit through some boring event. Good news, everyone! YouTube is here to fulfill your watching-paint-dry needs, in any form you can imagine. Let’s take a tour.

PAINT DRYING SLOWLY

In this epic video, Glen Wilson brushes paint onto a wall, and we watch it dry. There’s really not much more to it than that. It’s impressive that the video is, for some reason, presented at 60 frames per second—presumably so you can really get a hyper-real sense of the drying as it happens—but the real action here involves zipping ahead. If you jump forward in the video, you can perceive the paint drying in a way that just isn’t obvious in real time.

PAINT DRYING IN TIMELAPSE

In this 30-second video, Matthew Bey shows us how quickly paint dries in the Texas sun. Bey writes:

If you’ve ever wanted to watch paint dry, you can now do it in half the time through the wonders of time lapse. I stumbled upon Space Squid contributor David Johnston as he was in the middle of an experiment in layering of patina. Because of the 94-degree Texas sun, it didn’t take all that long for the transformation to occur. Paint dries quick in Austin.

PAINT DRYING UNDER A MICROSCOPE

In this video, Sixty Symbols shows us paint drying under a microscope, explaining what’s happening as the paint dries. This one is both beautiful and educational!

If that’s not enough footage of paint drying, check out Why This Filmmaker Shot a 14-Hour Movie About Paint Drying.

Translators face plenty of challenges conveying meaning while moving across different languages. It’s not just a problem of finding equivalent words. Different languages often have structural differences indicating formality, plurality, and gender of the participants in a conversation. Translation is hard.

In this TED-Ed video, we dig into the problem of translating the word “you,” a pronoun loaded with complexity. Dig in, y’all:

For more from TED-Ed on this lesson, check out this page, featuring quizzes and discussion.