The James Webb Space Telescope is still winging its way to its permanent home at the L2 point¹ about 930,000 miles from Earth — it's due to arrive in about 4 days. It's a massive and fascinating project and for his YouTube series Smarter Every Day, Destin Sandlin talked to Nobel laureate John Mather, the senior project scientist for the JWST, about how the telescope works.

Also worth a watch is Real Engineering's The Insane Engineering of James Webb Telescope:

It really is a marvel of modern science & engineering — I can't wait to see what the telescope sees once it's fully operational.

1. You can read about Lagrange points here or here...they are interesting!↩

• astronomy
• Destin Sandlin
• James Webb Space Telescope
• John Mather
• NASA
• physics
• science
• space

Do you think you could ride a bicycle that steers backwards...aka it turns left when you turn right and vice versa? It sounds easy but years of normal bike riding experience makes it almost impossible. Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday taught himself how to ride the backwards-steering bike; it took months. Then he tried riding a normal bicycle again...

Loved this video...great stuff. (via ★interesting)

• cycling
• Destin Sandlin
• science
• video