The WORST episodes of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Every episode of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell ever, ranked from worst to best by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The worst episodes of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell!
Kurzgesagt (German for «in a nutshell») is a Munich-based design studio, with a distinctive perspective on design and animation within the fields of education, science and commerce. Founded in 2012 by Philipp Dettmer & Stephan Rether, the studio engages in information design projects of all kinds. We love science, minimalism, colors and music. But most of all combining them to tell stories.
#1 - What if the World turned to Gold? - The Gold Apocalypse
Season 2021 - Episode 2 - Aired 3/9/2021
Let us explore the scientific mystery of what would happen to you, if Earth suddenly turned into gold! The “Midaspocalypse”, based on the ancient tale of King Midas who was cursed so everything he touched turned into gold.
#2 - Unlimited Resources From Space – Asteroid Mining
Season 2020 - Episode 11 - Aired 8/16/2020
Getting rare materials from the ground into your phone is ugly. The mining industry is responsible for air and water pollution and the destruction of entire landscapes. But what if we could replace the mining industry on Earth with a clean process that can’t harm anyone? Well, we can. All we need to do is look up.
#3 - The Warrior Kingdoms of the Weaver Ant
Season 2020 - Episode 12 - Aired 8/30/2020
Deep in tropical jungles lie floating kingdoms ruled by beautiful and deadly masters: They are sort of the high elves of the ant kingdoms: Talented architects that create castles and city states. But they are also fierce and expansionist warriors and their kingdoms are ensnared in a never ending war for survival. Oecophylla weaver ants.
#4 - The Largest Star in the Universe – Size Comparison
Season 2020 - Episode 13 - Aired 9/22/2020
What is the largest star in the Universe? And why is it that large? And what ARE stars anyway?
#5 - Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it's Complicated.
Season 2020 - Episode 14 - Aired 9/29/2020
Climate Change is just too much. There is never any good news. Only graphs that get more and more red and angry. Almost every year breaks some horrible record, from the harshest heat waves to the most rapid Glacier melt. It’s endless and relentless. We have known for decades that rapid Climate Change is being caused by the release of Greenhouse Gases. But instead of reducing them, in 2019 the world was emitting 50% more CO2 than in the year 2000. And emissions are still rising. Why is that? Why is it so hard to just stop emitting these gases?
#6 - When Time Became History - The Human Era
Season 2020 - Episode 15 - Aired 10/6/2020
For the fifth time, we present to you the Human Era Calendar for the year 12,021 – this time it is all about the journey of humanity, beginning tens of thousands of years ago, leading into the revolution of agriculture, to ancient high civilizations and the beginning of modern times, culminating in a vision for our future. You can get the limited Edition now until we sell out and then never again. As always the calendar features 12 illustrated pages printed on high quality paper in Europe and the US. And this year the cover is especially shiny. The calendar will look great on your wall and let you dream about a glorious future. We truly have come far as a species!
#7 - Geoengineering: A Horrible Idea We Might Have to Do
Season 2020 - Episode 16 - Aired 10/27/2020
By the end of the 21st century, humanity is becoming desperate. Decades of heatwaves and droughts have led to unusually poor harvests, while the warming oceans yield fewer fish each year. In the tropical zones, millions suffer from famine and resource wars have made millions more flee to the north. As things quickly get worse, in an act of desperation, the world's governments decide to enact an emergency plan... It is far from certain that a grim scenario like this will play out. But the failure of world leaders to effectively address climate change, makes it far from impossible. So in the near future it might become necessary to try something radical to slow down rapid climate change: Geoengineering. Interventions so massive in scale that they might undo centuries of human behavior. Or make everything much worse. What is geoengineering, is it really an option and what if it goes wrong?
#8 - How Large Can a Bacteria get? Life & Size 3
Season 2020 - Episode 17 - Aired 11/10/2020
In and out, in and out. Staying alive is about doing things. This very second, your cells are combusting glucose molecules with oxygen to make energy available, which keeps you alive for another precious moment. To get the oxygen to your cells you are breathing. Breathing is an answer to a very hard problem: How do you get the resources that your cells need to survive, from the outside, to the inside of your cells? Every living thing has to solve this problem and the solution is surprisingly different depending on one of the most important regulators of life: Size.
#9 - What If Earth got Kicked Out of the Solar System? Rogue Earth
Season 2020 - Episode 18 - Aired 12/1/2020
The night sky seems peaceful and orderly. But in reality, stars are careening through the galaxy at speeds of hundreds of thousands of kilometres per hour. Not bound by static formations but changing neighbourhoods constantly. Fortunately space is big, and so the stars of the Milky Way are very unlikely to hit us. Unfortunately, they don’t have to hit anything to make us have a really bad time on earth. And there are already stars starting to get very close.
#10 - Can You Upload Your Mind & Live Forever?
Season 2020 - Episode 19 - Aired 12/10/2020
The desire to be free from the limits of the human experience is as old as our first stories. We exist in an endless universe, only bound by the laws of physics and yet, our consciousness is trapped in mortal machines made of meat. With the breathtaking explosion of innovation and progress, for the first time the concept of leaving our flesh piles behind and uploading our minds into a digital utopia seems possible. Even like the logical next step on our evolutionary ladder.
#11 - What if We Nuke the Moon?
Season 2020 - Episode 20 - Aired 12/15/2020
What would happen if we were to detonate a very very powerful nuclear weapon on the moon? Would the explosion knock its orbit towards earth, causing tidal waves and misery? Could the moon be destroyed, showering the earth in a rain of meteoric death?
#12 - Worst Nuclear Accidents in History
Season 2021 - Episode 1 - Aired 2/2/2021
Nuclear energy creates an uneasy feeling of danger for many people: ancient and dangerous minerals are concentrated to awaken seemingly unnatural powers, creating toxic elements that, if they escape, can and have killed people in horrible ways. How many people has nuclear energy killed and how?
#13 - What Do Alien Civilizations Look Like? The Kardashev Scale
Season 2020 - Episode 10 - Aired 8/2/2020
The observable universe is a big place that has been around for more than 13 billion years. Up to two trillion galaxies made up of something like 20,000 billion billion stars surround our home galaxy. In the milky way alone scientists assume there are some 40 billion earth like planets in the habitable zone of their stars. When we look at these numbers it is hard to imagine that there is nobody else out there.
#14 - Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?
Season 2021 - Episode 3 - Aired 4/13/2021
Do we need nuclear energy to stop climate change? More and more voices from science, environmental activists and the press have been saying so in recent years – but this comes as a shock to those who are fighting against nuclear energy and the problems that come with it. So who is right? Well - it is complicated.
#15 - What If You Fall into a Black Hole?
Season 2021 - Episode 4 - Aired 4/27/2021
Black holes are the most powerful and extreme things in the universe and they are wildly weird and complicated. What would happen if you fell inside one and what are they really?
#16 - TRUE Limits Of Humanity – The Final Border We Will Never Cross
Season 2021 - Episode 5 - Aired 5/11/2021
Is there a border we will never cross? Are there places we will never reach, no matter how hard we try? It turns out, there are. Even with sci-fi technology, we are trapped in a limited pocket of the Universe and the finite stuff within it. How much universe is there for us and how far can we go?
#17 - What Are You Doing With Your Life? The Tail End
Season 2021 - Episode 6 - Aired 5/25/2021
Wrapping your mind around your life is pretty hard, because you are up to your neck in it. It's like trying to understand the ocean while learning how to swim. On most days you are busy just keeping your head above water. So it is not easy to figure out what to do with your life and how to spend your time. There are a million distractions. Your family, friends and romantic partners, boring work, and exciting projects. Video games to play and books to read. And then there is your couch that somebody needs to lie on. It’s easy to get lost. So let us take a step back and take a look at your life from the outside.
#18 - The Day the Dinosaurs Died – Minute by Minute
Season 2021 - Episode 7 - Aired 6/15/2021
66 million years ago, maybe on a Tuesday afternoon, life was the same as it had been the day before or a thousand years before or pretty much a million years before. Things were good for our feathered dinosaur buddies. Until a tiny, tiny detail in the sky changed.
#19 - How To Terraform Venus (Quickly)
Season 2021 - Episode 8 - Aired 7/6/2021
Leaving earth to find new homes in space is an old dream of humanity and will sooner or later be necessary for our survival. The planet that gets the most attention is Mars, a small, toxic and energy poor planet that just about seems good enough for a colony of depressed humans huddled in underground cities. But what if we think bigger? What if we take Venus, one of the most hostile and deadly places in the solar system and turn it into a colony? Not by building lofty cloud cities, but by creating a proper second earth? It might be easier than you think.
#20 - The Largest Black Hole in the Universe - Size Comparison
Season 2021 - Episode 9 - Aired 8/3/2021
The largest things in the universe are black holes. In contrast to things like planets or stars they have no physical size limit, and can literally grow endlessly. Although in reality specific things need to happen to create different kinds of black holes, from really tiny ones to the largest single things in the universe. So how do black holes grow and how large is the largest of them all?
#21 - How The Immune System ACTUALLY Works – IMMUNE
Season 2021 - Episode 10 - Aired 8/10/2021
The human immune system is the most complex biological system we know, after the human brain, and yet, most of us never learn how it works. Or what it is. Your immune System consists of hundreds of tiny and two large organs, it has its own transport network spread throughout your body. Every day it makes hundreds of billions of fresh cells. It is not some sort of abstract entity. Your immune system is YOU. Your biology protecting you from the billions of microorganisms that want to consume you and from your own perverted cells that turn into cancer. It's so manifold that it is impossible to cover in one video, so we’ll make a series looking at different aspects of it. Today, what happens when your body is invaded and your first lines of defenses are engaged in a fight for life and death?
#22 - This Virus Shouldn't Exist (But it Does)
Season 2021 - Episode 11 - Aired 8/31/2021
Hidden in the microverse all around you, there is a merciless war being fought by the true rulers of this planet, microorganisms. Amoebae, protists, bacteria, archaea and fungi compete for resources and space. And then there are the strange horrors that are viruses, hunting everyone else. Not even being alive, they are the tiniest, most abundant and deadliest beings on earth, killing trillions every day. Not interested in resources, only in living things to take over. Or so we thought. It turns out that there are giant viruses that blur the line between life and death – and other viruses hunting them.
#23 - Can YOU Fix Climate Change?
Season 2021 - Episode 12 - Aired 9/22/2021
Never before in human history have we been richer, more advanced or powerful. And yet we feel overwhelmed in the face of rapid climate change. It seems simple on the surface. Greenhouse gases trap energy from the Sun and transfer it to our atmosphere. This leads to warmer winters, harsher summers. Dry places become drier and wet places wetter. Countless ecosystems will die while the rising oceans swallow coasts and the cities we build on them. So why don’t we just like… prevent all of that? Well, it’s complicated.
#24 - What Dinosaurs ACTUALLY Looked Like?
Season 2021 - Episode 13 - Aired 10/12/2021
The past is a vast and mysterious land that begins at the big bang and ends in the present, expanding with each passing moment. It is the home of everything that came before, the key to understanding our present. Here we find the most amazing creatures to ever roam our planet, hundreds of millions of species so diverse that our imagination cannot do them justice. Unfortunately the past carefully guards its secrets.
#25 - An Antidote to Dissatisfaction
Season 2019 - Episode 19 - Aired 12/8/2019
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.