Our editors wade through thousands of videos and articles every day to curate the five best things to learn in our app and on our site. Below, they share some of the most fascinating facts they stumbled upon this week.
The poop of blue whales is bright orange. This makes us wonder: why don’t more creatures discharge excrement in a color complementary to their skin? Learn all about blue whales via BBC Earth
Yawning and stretching at the same time? There’s a word for that: it’s “pandiculation.” Get more stimulating facts about sleep in this video from Earth Unplugged.
Did you know it’s possible for a tooth to grow inside your nose? It is. It is also possible to have that tooth removed (thank goodness). GeoBeats has the photos.
Since raising a $6M Series A round of funding in November 2014,
Curiosity.com has grown to 20 employees and an international audience of millions. Today we build on our mission to inspire people to learn something new every day by launching our first app for iPhone:
A key part of the app experience is the Daily Curiosity Digest. Every day our editors comb through the site’s collection of hundreds of thousands of videos, playlists, and courses to find the top five things to learn. They distill these topics down into a series of thought-provoking facts, insightful quotes, and illuminating visuals that feeds your fascination. The digest ignites curiosity, while associated videos and reference sources provide a resource to dig deeper for more info.
Our goal is to take the work out of lifelong learning by curating the web’s best learning experiences in an environment designed specifically for knowledge exchange. This applies whether you’re on mobile or desktop, so we’ve powered our app on the same technology that drives Curiosity.com. The relevance engine behind both mobile app and desktop goes well beyond contextual relevance to create adjacent and even surprisingly relevant associations. As a result, users can get lost in dynamic learning paths tailored to their individual interests. They’ll often find themselves fascinated by things they didn’t even know they wanted to learn about!
With millions of people learning from Curiosity’s smart memes and ever-expanding collection of videos, our model is proving effective. Every day our growing audience seizes the opportunity to follow topics they love and discover things they never knew. By developing a dedicated mobile app, we’ve put this experience in your pocket so that it can inspire you to learn something new every day.
At Curiosity, making learning fun and easy is not just our business, it’s our passion. So it’s always a pleasure when we meet someone who teaches us something new.
That’s what happened when we met Paul Hletko, the founder of FEW Spirits, a Whisky Advocate-recognized craft distiller and fellow Chicago-area startup. Paul taught us that Evanstonian (and famed pioneer of the temperance movement) Frances Willard is the only woman memorialized in the National Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. He also taught us that the Ferris wheel debuted at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and featured cars as big as modern city buses.
Naturally, we were rapt. Over a few cocktails, and several rounds of “did you know?”, it became clear that Curiosity and FEW, while different business, have something big in common: an insatiable thirst for knowledge. We saw a fun opportunity.
So, leveraging Paul’s impressive knowledge of Chicago, Curiosity’s unparalleled platform for learning, and the video team from Stone Rolling, we set out to create videos that would be educational and enjoyable, especially for Chicagoans.
Check the out the first two below, and let us know what you think in the comments!
Sources show that prior to the 18th amendment, the average per capita consumption of whisky was 15 gallons per year. Find out whether Prohibition was effective in decreasing consumption.
The first Ferris wheel debuted at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. It was meant to outdo the Eiffel Tower, which had been the main attraction at the previous World’s Fair. Learn how it was received by attendees, which represented about one third of the U.S. population at the time.
There are countless factors that contribute to the eventual success or failure of a young business. We could all rattle off the usual suspects when it comes to the key ingredients required to create a successful company: technology, people, brand, marketing, partners, etc.
In my mind, there is one factor that trumps all others and that’s culture. Especially for a startup that is effectively finding its way, culture may be the single most important factor that contributes to the alchemy of success. In a simple sense, I view culture as the manifestation of values that a company operates under.
At Curiosity, we celebrate creativity and work hard to create an open, transparent, and collaborative environment where everyone is dependent on each other’s best work. For such an environment to be an effective place for people to thrive, there has to be a shared sense of respect, trust, and belief in our mission. From the top down, our company culture encourages and reinforces those characteristics. For example, there are no sacred cows when it comes to discussing our product: everyone has ample opportunity to voice their opinion, and we’re all driven by a shared desire to inspire people to want to learn.
It’s great to offer creature comforts in working environments, and the Curiosity team certainly enjoys its rooftop patio, Wednesday team lunches, well-stocked fridge, and regular slate of social gatherings. That said, we don’t confuse fringe benefits with true culture, which is more of a belief system that is shared and respected by an entire organization.
And it should be noted, culture isn’t something that can be instituted by management. Everyone in an organization has to contribute to culture and it’s that individual contribution that defines who fits well and who may be better suited to working elsewhere. The way our team works together is empowering our company to achieve great things as we develop a product and experience that will inspire more people to never stop learning. To weather the inevitable storms in the journey towards success, a startup needs to align around shared beliefs—in short, culture is king.
Never stop learning. -Gabe Vehovsky, founder of Curiosity.com
Before Vlogbrothers Hank and John Green cover a topic on SciShow or Crash Course, the script goes through Blake de Pastino: Chief Editor and science journalist. De Pastino makes it his top priority to showcase awe-inspiring subjects without watering down the specifics of how they work. Making full use of his reporting background, he fields pitches from writers and hones their stories so they’re ready for millions of YouTube subscribers. We asked him if he would step into our Partner Spotlight for June—then we asked him a few more questions.
CURIOSITY:When you’re taking an idea from pitch to video on SciShow, how do you feel out the balance between the complex and the accessible?
BLAKE DE PASTINO: When we’re brainstorming topics, and I’m talking to a writer or the editor, we usually boil it down into principles. So instead of talking about a certain topic, we’re using it as an opportunity to explore the scientific principles by which it operates.
I wouldn’t accept a pitch from a writer that was, “What about sloths?” Well, what about them? If you want to talk about sloths, let’s talk about how there were certain kinds of sloths that don’t exist anymore, that used to be the size of a school bus. Or how they poop once a week. Or how they’re the only mammal that can turn its head around almost all the way. All those things are adapted to arboreal life. So really, we’d be using a sloth as a way of talking about evolutionary adaptations.
Another thing that I encourage people to think about is, what is counterintuitive about the content? There’s a lot about how sloths look and behave that is not intuitive, from a mammal’s perspective.
C: Can you name one episode of SciShow that holds a special place in your heart?
BP: One that I’m particularly proud of—I edited it, Jesslyn Shields wrote it—is our piece on Schrodinger’s Cat. We explained it in under five minutes, but I think it’s the best explanation of that whole thought exercise.
It’s one of those things that people don’t fully understand, or sometimes were just mis-taught. It’s cheaper, faster, and easier to teach people the short, hand-wavy version than the actual version. I and the people I work with make it our mission in life to to disabuse people of those things.
C:Whether through Subbable or Patreon, your channels have always counted on fans for support. What has it been like to have and interact with that community?
BP: Really gratifying. We know how to talk to them, and they know that no one else out there speaks to them the way we speak to them, literally and figuratively.
Last week or the week before, we published an ad looking for a freelance writer to help with SciShow News. I thought I was going to get a couple dozen responses, but I’ve gotten probably thousands. It’s going to take me a long time to go through them! But I think that’s an interesting measure of not only how smart and well-equipped our viewers are, but also how deeply they’re engaged in what we’re doing. They understand that we’re all trying to do this together.
For SciShow Kids, which we started this year, we put at the end of the script: ‘If you have a question, let us know.’ Now, the bulk of the scripts that we’re working on for SciShow Kids are answering kids’ questions. We have entire classes of elementary school students who are sending us questions now. The level of engagement is something I’ve never encountered before, and I feel privileged to be a part of it.
C: You used to be an editor and reporter for National Geographic News. Do any stories stick out in your mind as especially memorable?
BP: We did a series on the Suwannee River in Florida, where I had never been before, and I went down there for a week or so. I swam with manatees and did a story about manatee biology. I went to an uninhabited island that was completely run over by cottonmouth snakes, and I found out why those snakes lived there and what they were living on. Things like that, that people in cubicle jobs don’t have the opportunity to do.
C:Right now, you’re also managing Western Digs, “a science news site that investigates the archaeology, anthropology, and paleontology of the American West.” What excites you about these fields?
BP: That goes back to National Geographic. I just gravitated to those topics, especially archaeology. It was me and two or three other writers, and the people I worked with tended to focus on animals or space. I found myself writing about Maya mortuary vases, or human remains eroding out of a cut bank in New Mexico.
I was really interested in using science to understand history. In the case of archaeology, you’re using science to understand history through the artifacts and the features that people left behind. With paleontology, you’re using science to understand natural history. All of this is fascinating to me. It’s like you’re cheating death by covering this research. You’re explicating the lives of animals that don’t exist anymore, or [the stories] of people who have passed on. Using science to craft those narratives is really powerful.
I also love the West as a region. I thought using science to understand this particular region, the American West, would allow me to cover archaeology from as recent as the 1980s, and then telescope back to the Cambrian explosion.
C: If you could resurrect any extinct animal, which would you choose?
BP: I think I’d pick a Columbian mammoth, just because I find it hard to believe that such enormous animals trod the Earth. I did a story once about how mammoth remains were found in an artichoke field in California … they found mammoth remains that still had the hair intact! And it’s ginger, it’s red hair. I would give an eyetooth to see one of those things walking around.
C:People keep talking about bringing them back!
BP: It’s more complicated than it sounds! It wouldn’t be 100% what it was before, I think, but it’s probably feasible. It might happen within our lifetimes.
C:How do you stay curious?
BP: Well, having two children helps! It also helps to have a mind full of childlike curiosity, which I’m afflicted with.
People use childlike as an insult, but I think if you walk through life with a sense of wonder and awe, trying to look behind things, and beyond things … I think that’s a pretty natural stance for people to adopt, and we just forget to do it as we grow up.
[But] you could find yourself, if you play your cards right, being 45 years old and thinking, ‘Why doesn’t the Earth have rings? And why does no one else ask me that?’
We’re looking for devops engineers that have the desire and proven ability to solve complex and interesting problems.
We’re a startup already reaching scale to millions of users all over the world. We’re developing a next-generation learning platform with a focus on discovering, analyzing, curating, and presenting to our rapidly growing user base the best learning content the web has to offer.
Executing on our mission will require ideas from just about every area of computer science, including information retrieval, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, distributed computing, large-scale system design, networking, security, data compression, user interface design, etc.
We are a small, passionate team of A-players. Engineers at Curiosity.com work on many projects and are expected to own many problems at once. Do you have what it takes to be a part of our team?
Below are some examples of the diverse projects you might work on.
Responsibilities:
Build our platforms, systems and networking infrastructure using your strong background in distributed systems, network design and large scale storage systems.
Maintain full-stack development environments in Docker and AWS to support active development and testing across our engineering team.
Build and maintain a continuous integration environment for building, testing and deploying releases of our entire software stack.
Design and build out enhanced metric collection and monitoring services to continuously monitor the health of our production systems.
Help design, plan for and implement scale-out of all our services to handle increased traffic load.
Participate in security and design reviews of our software to insure high availability, scalability and reliability of all our production code.
Occasionally contribute to application code as needed to move the business forward.
Minimum qualifications
BS in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
3+ years of relevant work experience, including large systems software design and development experience, with strong knowledge of Unix/Linux.
Experience with automation/configuration management using either Salt, Puppet, Chef or an equivalent.
Experience with Git and demonstrated knowledge of best practices in code maintenance.
Experience building and supporting continuous integration (CI) systems such as Jenkins, Circle CI or Bamboo.
Experience in Python and related technologies.
Strong foundational knowledge of cloud computing and experience in Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Strong foundational knowledge and experience with databases, both SQL and No-SQL.
Demonstrated knowledge of best practices and IT operations in an always-up, always-available service.
Preferred qualifications
Strong background in networking with experience in building and maintaining office networks and virtual private networks (VPN)s.
Experience with Docker.
Practical work experience with MongoDB.
Practical work experience with PostGres.
Practical work experience with ElasticSearch.
Experience with Storm, Hadoop and other distributed systems.
Experience and/or interest in writing in Clojure.
Experience developing full-stack solutions, with the ability to write solid web front-end Javascript code and/or mobile application code (iOS or Java for Android).
Background in artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.
Email jobs@curiosity.com attn: Mike Russell if you’re interested!
Given her resume (undergrad at MIT, research fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, software engineer at GE), you might expect Dianna Cowern to be the quiet, bookish type. But through her vlog Physics Girl, Cowern proves she’s equally comfortable dealing with heady physics concepts and crowd-pleasing slapstick humor. It’s Cowern’s ability to take topics such as Einstein’s twin paradox and make them not only relatable, but entertaining, that’s put her in our partner spotlight for May.
Curiosity:Where you grew up in Kauai there weren’t many opportunities to explore the sciences outside the classroom. Do you remember when you first got excited about science?
Dianna Cowern: I remember we had a tiny science museum on the island, and my sister and I used to love going there. Specifically, we loved playing with the virtual-reality toy, which today would look like Photobooth on a Mac. It was this screen you could stand in front of and it would put you underwater or in some other place. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
When it came time to take a physics class, physics took all this math that I loved and applied it to questions I had about the world. In high school, I loved shooting the ball and measuring the parabola to see where it would land.
C: You’ve studied dark matter and low-metallicity stars. If you could solve one mystery of the universe, or make some landmark discovery, what would it be?
DC: I would love to figure out what black holes are. It’s way beyond my level of comprehension and study, but I’d love to figure out the math and what will happen to them in the future. I just want to demystify them.
C: What do you think is the most underrated scientific discovery?
DC: I think laser cooling is a pretty underrated scientific discovery. It’s an interesting, unintuitive phenomenon that most people have probably never heard of.
C: Your videos incorporate a lot of physical humor. Do you have any comedic heroes? Anyone you’d like to guest-star in one of your videos?
DC: If I could have anyone in my videos, it would be Ellen Degeneres. She likes science sometimes, I think.
I’ve never considered myself funny per se, but I’m very silly and very goofy … Sure, I can go off and think very intensely about something, but I have a goofy sense of humor that definitely resonates with other nerds and with a wider audience.
C: As an advocate for women in the sciences, why do you think gender diversity is so important? How can parents and educators encourage young girls?
DC: The main reason it’s important to have more women in the “hard” sciences, like chemistry and physics, is that they’re underrepresented now. We’re missing out on a huge portion of the population that could be contributing to research and engineering.
One thing parents and educators can do is introduce their daughters or female students to science when they’re young. I have six nephews and one niece. When I’m looking for gifts for them, I’m always looking for science things. I want to get [science] gifts for the girl as well, but it’s hard because the boxes always have pictures of boys.
C: How do you stay curious?
DC: I’m always asking questions about the world. Even as a little kid, I was asking thousands of questions of my parents, often about how the world worked.That’s what kids do when they’re little. Sometimes I wonder why some people stop asking questions and other people continue asking questions—those people become scientists.
This month we debuted a revamped design and experience on the Curiosity homepage.
The centerpiece is the new daily Curiosity digest. Every day our editors unearth fascinating facts and insightful quotes across a variety of categories—nature, technology, why your dog’s germs may actually be good for you…you name it. If there’s an unbelievable animal species, awe-inspiring image of space, or thought-provoking theory behind our own human behavior, our editors will find it, research it, and share it in the digest.
The result is a bundle of informative, snackable content that you can feast on over your morning coffee, during your evening commute, or anywhere in between. Each meme is connected to a path of relevant learning videos, so if a topic inspires you, there’s ample opportunity to dig in and learn more.
The daily Curiosity digest will also be a central feature of our new mobile app, launching later this month!
Our mission with all of this is to inspire you to learn every day. This mission is so important to us, it’s featured in our new masthead, which rotates through different images of our awesome planet.
At Curiosity, we are constantly curious about what sparks your curiosity. Through analyzing the performance of our social posts and featured videos, we try to be better informed about what makes a topic interesting to learn about. Each month, we will share a few insights that are hopefully not only interesting, but also highlight how and what you are learning.
Recently we deployed a new major way for mobile users to learn on Curiosity: Mobile Paths. This follows the path experience that we deployed for desktop. We saw a similar positive reaction to the mobile paths as we did for the desktop version. Engagement and usage increased significantly. Here are some bits of the data. (Normalized to the previous performance to a benchmark of 1.0)
Mobile Paths:
Time interacting with the page:
Before- /video/: 1.00
After- /path/: 1.25
On the previous version of our mobile pages, the interaction was focused around a single video with collapsed buckets of videos below. The new path page integrates the “learning path” style with relevant content in a streamlined order.
Number of Pages Visited Per Session:
Before- /video/: 1.00
After- /path/: 0.99
Because no page navigation is needed to watch multiple videos about a topic, we would expect to see a slightly lower number of page views per session. The decrease was negligible.
Percentage of Sessions Over 30 minutes
Before- /video/: 1.00
After- /path/: 1.31
Similar to the desktop results, the metric we really liked to see was the sharp jump in amount of long-term sessions. Half hour mobile sessions are impressive by themselves. The proportion of people who stayed for over a half hour on mobile increased by over 30% with the deployment of the new path pages.
We have an app coming soon that will push our mobile experience much further, first to iOS and then to android. If you are interested, be sure to sign up for the beta to be one of the first to try it out here: http://goo.gl/forms/PudRGRkIYP
