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The Best Episodes of Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell

Every episode of Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell ranked from best to worst. Let's dive into the Best Episodes of Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell!

The Best 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,...

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  1. 9.1/10(8 votes)

    #1 - How to Win an Interstellar War

    S11:E16

    Could aliens destroy us from light years away? Another day at Kurzgesagt Labs, where we answer the most important questions with science. Today: how might civilizations wage war across light years? What kind of devastating weapons could they use and what would they look like?

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  2. 8.6/10(17 votes)

    #2 - The Most Dangerous Weapon Is NOT Nuclear

    S11:E8

    A breathtaking scientific revolution is taking place – biotechnology has been progressing at stunning speed, giving us the tools to eventually gain control over biology. On the one hand solving the deadliest diseases while also creating viruses more dangerous than nuclear bombs, able to devastate humanity. What is going on?

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  3. 8.6/10(9 votes)

    #3 - The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?

    S11:E18

    In 2022 nearly half of Americans expected a civil war in the next few years, one in five now believes political violence is justified. And it is not just the US but around the world. People increasingly see themselves as part of opposing teams. There are many different reasons for this, but one gets blamed a lot: social media. Social media divides us, makes us more extreme and less empathetic, it riles us up or sucks us into doom scrolling, making us stressed and depressed. It feels like we need to touch grass and escape to the real world. New research shows that we might have largely misinterpreted why this is the case. It turns out that the social media internet may uniquely undermine the way our brains work but not in the way you think.

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  4. 8.5/10(34 votes)

    #4 - The Coronavirus Explained & What You Should Do

    S8:E4

    A huge thanks to the experts who helped us on short notice with the video. Especially “Our World in Data”, the online publication for research and data on the world’s largest problems – and how to make progress solving them. Check out their site. It also includes a constantly updated page on the Corona Pandemic. In December 2019 the Chinese authorities notified the world that a virus was spreading through their communities. In the following months it spread to other countries, with cases doubling within days. This virus is the “Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2”, that causes the disease called COVID19, and that everyone simply calls Coronavirus. What actually happens when it infects a human and what should we all do?

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  5. 8.5/10(34 votes)

    #5 - What Do Alien Civilizations Look Like? The Kardashev Scale

    S8:E10

    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.

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  6. 8.5/10(29 votes)

    #6 - The Day the Dinosaurs Died – Minute by Minute

    S9:E7

    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.

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  8. 8.5/10(26 votes)

    #7 - What Dinosaurs ACTUALLY Looked Like?

    S9:E13

    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.

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  9. 8.5/10(11 votes)

    #8 - Ancient Life as Old as the Universe

    S11:E14

    Life has existed on one planet for about 4 billion years, for all we know. But it might have started right after the Big Bang, when the universe was much stranger and more fantastic than today. A universe that might have allowed life to develop absolutely anywhere. The cosmos might be full of the seeds of life, sleeping in a dead desert, waiting for a few drops of rain to explosively bloom and grow. Tiny and not so tiny aliens might be everywhere.

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  10. 8.4/10(24 votes)

    #9 - What Happened Before History? Human Origins

    S4:E8

    Humans. We have been around for a while now. When we think about our past we think about ancient civilizations, the pyramids, stuff like that. But this is only a tiny, tiny part of our history.

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  11. 8.4/10(29 votes)

    #10 - What Is Intelligence? Where Does it Begin?

    S8:E9

    Humans are proud of a lot of things, from particle accelerators, to poetry to pokemon. All of them made possible because of something humans value extremely highly: intelligence.

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  12. 8.4/10(31 votes)

    #11 - TRUE Limits Of Humanity – The Final Border We Will Never Cross

    S9:E5

    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?

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  13. 8.3/10(23 votes)

    #12 - The Most Gruesome Parasites — Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs)

    S4:E14

    There are a group of parasites extremely disgusting and mean. Humanity declared war on them.

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  14. 8.3/10(30 votes)

    #13 - Why Are You Alive – Life, Energy & ATP

    S8:E5

    At this very second, you are on a narrow ledge between life and death. You probably don’t feel it, but there is an incredible amount of activity going on inside you. And this activity can never stop. Picture yourself as a slinky falling down an escalator moving upwards – the falling part represents the self replicating processes of your cells, the escalator represents the laws of physics, driving you forwards. To be alive is to be in motion but never arriving anywhere. If you reach the top of the escalator there is no more falling possible and you are dead forever. Somewhat unsettlingly, the universe wants you to reach the top. How do you avoid that and why are you alive?

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  15. 8.3/10(26 votes)

    #14 - What If Earth got Kicked Out of the Solar System? Rogue Earth

    S8:E18

    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.

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  16. 8.3/10(27 votes)

    #15 - How Many People Did Nuclear Energy Kill? Nuclear Death Toll

    S9:E1

    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?

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  17. 8.3/10(24 votes)

    #16 - The Largest Black Hole in the Universe - Size Comparison

    S9:E9

    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?

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  18. 8.3/10(21 votes)

    #17 - How The Immune System ACTUALLY Works – IMMUNE

    S9:E10

    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?

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  19. 8.3/10(25 votes)

    #18 - Why We Should NOT Look For Aliens - The Dark Forest

    S9:E17

    The Universe is incredibly big and seems full of potential for life, with billions of habitable planets. If an advanced civilization had the technology to travel between the stars, at just 0.1% of the speed of light, It could colonize our galaxy in roughly 100 million years. Which is not that long given the billions of years the milky way has existed – so in principle any spacefaring civilization should be able to spread rapidly over huge sectors of the galaxy. And yet we see nothing, hear nothing, the universe seems empty. Devoid of others. This is the Fermi Paradox, which we have discussed in more detail in other videos. Confronted with the seemingly empty universe, humanity faces a dilemma. We desperately want to know if we are alone in the Milky Way. We want to call out and reveal ourselves to anyone watching but that could be the last thing we ever do. Because maybe the universe is not empty. Maybe it’s full of civilizations but they are hiding from each other. [...]

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  20. 8.3/10(15 votes)

    #19 - The (Second) Most Deadliest Virus on Earth

    S11:E9

    Few of the monsters that evolution created have been so successful at hurting us as the variola virus, responsible for smallpox. The carnage it caused was so terrible and merciless that it compelled humankind, for the first time, to act truly globally. It was one of the greatest wins of our species over the ancient powers of nature, all made possible by… cows.

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  21. 8.2/10(36 votes)

    #20 - The History and Future of Everything — Time

    S1:E6

    How much time do you have left?

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  22. 8.2/10(28 votes)

    #21 - Death From Space — Gamma-Ray Bursts Explained

    S4:E9

    There are cosmic snipers firing at random into the unvierse. What are they and what happens if they hit us?

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  23. 8.2/10(25 votes)

    #22 - Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever — CRISPR

    S4:E10

    Designer babies, the end of diseases, genetically modified humans that never age. Outrageous things that used to be science fiction are suddenly becoming reality. The only thing we know for sure is that things will change irreversibly.

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  24. 8.2/10(22 votes)

    #23 - Genetic Engineering and Diseases — Gene Drive & Malaria

    S4:E11

    We have the choice to attack one of our oldest enemies with genetic engineering. But should we do it?

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  25. 8.2/10(33 votes)

    #24 - The Past We Can Never Return To – The Anthropocene Reviewed

    S8:E6

    In September of 1940, an 18-year-old mechanic named Marcel Ravidat was walking his dog, Robot, in the countryside of Southwestern France when the dog disappeared down a hole. Robot eventually returned but the next day, Ravidat went to the spot with three friends to explore the hole. And after quite a bit of digging, they discovered a cave with walls covered with paintings, including over 900 paintings of animals, horses, stags, bison and also species that are now extinct, including a wooly rhinoceros. The paintings were astonishingly detailed and vivid with red, yellow and black paint made from pulverized mineral pigments that were usually blown through a narrow tube, possibly a hollowed bone, onto the walls of the cave. It would eventually be established that these artworks were at least 17,000 years old.

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  26. 8.2/10(25 votes)

    #25 - Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change?

    S9:E3

    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.

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Best Episodes Summary

"How to Win an Interstellar War" is the best rated episode of "Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell". It scored 9.1/10 based on 8 votes. Directed by N/A and written by N/A, it aired on 10/15/2023. This episode scored 0.5 points higher than the second highest rated, "The Most Dangerous Weapon Is NOT Nuclear".