polyploid_coded

I started a YouTube channel for about a year and most of the videos are 7-10 minutes on a niche science or history topic. I haven't been trying to make the video specifically that long, just that's how long the script is, and my most successful videos are around that long.

I have been researching two topics which could make sense as a 30-45 minute video, or split into 2-3 parts.

Pros for a series: more like my usual format, I can release them over a few weeks, make adjustments, respond to feedback, or make just two parts if the first video doesn't get many views.

Pros for a long video: core audience will watch the full video so more total hours; I heard from a popular travel channel that

I'm currently reading the Chernow biography of Mark Twain, and as I read a history book I look up things for background info. That's when I saw this: "While still a graduate student, Dr. Trombley made a groundbreaking discovery: the largest cache of Mark Twain letters ever found".

This led me to do some digging into online archives. In 1987 (page 7, pdf), Laura Skandera Trombley reported on how these letters came to the UC Berkeley Mark Twain Project. A retiree purchased a box of old letters from a hobby shop for stamp collecting, but was disappointed by their stamps. With the help of his wife, they ev

I recently read an article about growing crops in space, and following the rabbit hole, read this neat scientific paper from researchers at the University of North Dakota: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ac74c9

They studied how lettuce, radish, and chili pepper seeds would fare in a simulated asteroid regolith. To simulate the minimal gravity on an asteroid (or in a spacecraft orbiting nearby) they use a piece of lab equipment called a clinostat which keeps the plants rotating and preventing them from having a well defined 'up' and 'down'.

The regolith was manufactured at the