Short and Informative Videos

I love science stuff and learning in general, especially if the knowledge is packaged in a nice, fun video. So here are my top picks for shorter but often very well researched and informative videos, mostly around the topics of biology and engineering, that don't really fit the description of video essay.

-Benji

Biology & more

Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong

I'm really into dinosaurs and this channel is by far my favorite on the topic. Steven Bellettini is obviously very passionate about the topic and does a great job giving an overview about the anatomy of different dinosaurs of varying fame. The premise of the show is that he critiques badly made dinosaur toys, a gimmick that lends itself very well to dispelling commonly held outdated beliefs about a certain species. The video I have linked here is the first one I ever saw from the channel and it is a great watch as it uses how workers conceptualize Iguanodon to dive into the history of Paleontology itself. Big recommend!

ZeFrank

A pretty popular channel by a former Buzzfeed president of all people, making short and funny biology videos. The channel started of as more of a parody of nature documentaries but quickly morphed into presenting actual facts about all kinds of different animals interspersed with jokes. I really love the content and it is genuinely informative while still staying very entertaining. The video I have linked here is probably my favorite on the channel, about mimickry and other ways animals try to escape notice in the rain forest, but I can't help but also recommend this one about marine life, where he added his own voice lines into a livestream of actual scientists commenting over footage of a remotely piloted submarine. Hilarious!

The Octopus Lady

I have to admit, I am stretching the definition of "short" with some of these, but in the current youtube landscape you don't really qualify as a video essay if the video isn't at least 4 hours long... right? Anyway, these videos aren't really essays anyway, they are much closer to a scientific paper if anything. That might just be because the host has actually studied marine biology and uses her show "Alien Ocean" to share some of her knowledge about the coolest marine animals out there. It's great stuff and still very comprehensible to the layman (which I am), so go check her out!

Clint's Reptiles

To be honest, I mostly watch this channel for its dinosaur content, but there are lots of other great videos about reptiles and all kinds of animals on here, which I sometimes like to watch as well. Probably because I really like listening to people talk about their passions, and boy is this guy passionate about reptiles. He also does more fun stuff like in the video I have linked here, where he looks at funny inaccurate books about which animal would win in a hypothetical fight.

Engineering & stuff

William Osman

This trained engineer does really dumb stuff and you can watch him (almost) get hurt every time he builds a new useless invention. Very funny guy who posts occasionally, more often on his second channel though. Thank you caretaker for keeping him safe all these years. Bless.

ElectroBOOM

I feel like electrical engineering still fits in this category, so here comes this really fun channel about all things electricity, a topic I really enjoyed in fifth grade and have since forgotten everything about. But I still enjoy this channel a lot, even if I don't understand a lot of what's going on. If we apply Dan Olsons theory about cooking videos here, I would say this channel falls in the "expertise + personality" category, because Mehdi sure is a personality. I like the Latity episodes the most because memes.

Stuff Made Here

Another very popular engineering youtube channel (all of the ones I have listed here are), but this time the guy has an actual workshop with heavy machinery he can use, so his projects turn out actually useful and working right in the end. The stuff he comes up with is truly impressive. And just like William Osman he also features his unimpressed wife in his videos, which must be a thing with engineers.

Micheal Reeves

Another very popular channel of the variety "science guy gets hurt entirely by his own fault", which really never gets old. He doesn't upload too often anymore, but his videos are always pretty funny (and actually short).

Miscellaneous

Captain Disillusion

Probably my favorite channel from this category (right next to YDAW), this is a years-long running show by a visual effects artist debunking viral hoax videos and showing how they were faked. Each video takes months to produce and it shows, the quality on these is really high. I also like the persona of the Captain, this really arrogant guy who can't help but show off by explaining everything in detail (this comes across best in the episodes featuring Holly, a stand in for a God figure that critiques the people who fall for these hoaxes so easily). I rewatch the entire series at least once a year, which is actually possible because these videos are usually under 10 minutes. Definitely give this one a try this guy deserves more subscribers!

Next Slide Please

This is a very small channel I found through Sophie from Mars and it's just three friends making PowerPoint presentations about topics they are interested in and sharing them with the audience. They feature a variety of topics, so it might be best to just scroll through their uploads to see if you find anything that interests you. Unfortunately they haven't uploaded in two years and I don't know if they have stopped making videos completely, but there is still a sizeable backlog of videos to go through if you like the format.

Sam O'Nella Academy

This is another "random topic I am currently interested in" type of educational channel, often about weird historical facts that are very interesting to learn about. The episodes can sometimes get a bit gross because I guess that's just the kind of stories he likes to talk about, so keep an eye out for that (the video I linked here is about weird things people did to some dead bodies). Sometime when I wasn't looking the channel became super popular with videos now getting over 10 million views, so you might have aready heard of this one, but I still wanted to mention it here because I like it.