Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
And this week I am
in San Francisco. I just flew in a couple
of days ago, so I've been busy traveling,
but new episodes of
regular shows like IMG! and DONG are
coming soon. But in the meantime rather than
post nothing I figured I would share
things that have been on my mind.
For instance, go back to the Golden Gate
Bridge
footage. There. Her. 
That's the girl I sat next to on the flight.
Turns out she's an immunology researcher
at a university in Italy.
She's studying these parasitic worms in
Africa that that infect people,
but then leave those people immune
to things like diabetes
and allergies. In fact, if you cure these
people of the worm infection
they once again become susceptible to
things like diabetes and allergies.
It's really incredible, so, I guess,
good luck girl on the plane to solving that
because it sounds
awesome. On the flight I also did a bunch
of reading. I read this entire book.
The history of Britain in really tiny
little bite-sized chunks.
Now, the thing that really blew my mind
was about Ireland
and the potato famine in the 1840s.
So many people
died or left the country because at
that famine
that to this day the population of Ireland is still
lower than it was a hundred and fifty
years ago
before the famine.
Speaking of things like people and birth rates,
Breathingearth[.net] is an amazing website.
You can just sit there
and let the site visually show you,
based on recent statistics, where people are
being born
and dying and how frequently.
A blue Sun represents a birth
and a black dot represents a death.
This is a picture of Anne Hathaway.
So is
this.
Except this Anne Hathaway is much, much older
and she's also quite famous.
This Anne Hathaway was the wife
of William Shakespeare.
Now, we don't have a photograph of her because
photography as we know it today wasn't even
invented until two hundred years after
that Anne Hathaway died.
This is the first
permanent photograph ever taken by
mankind. It's a view from a window in
France taken in
1836.
Two years later,
in 1838, this photograph was taken.
And what's significant about it is that
it's the first photograph
ever taken that had people people in it.
If you look down here, for instance, you can see a man
at a water pump.
Modern colorization of the image have
also claimed to have discovered
other people in the picture.
Now, none of them are very clear,
which is why we should talk about Robert Cornelius.
I actually hid this portrait in the
beginning of
the most recent IMG!
And the reason it's significant is that this
picture is the first portrait ever taken.
It's the first capturing of light
reflected off a human's face.
Think of it this way: there is no other photograph
of anybody older than this.
This is the oldest human
we have a photographic record of.
Finally,
here's a picture that IMG!
would be proud of. A photo
of a musical parody group
called "The Horrible CERN Girls,"
formed out of employees at CERN.
The initials of their name in French are C, E,
R, N.
But why should we care about this picture?
Well, in 1992, Tim Berners-Lee
uploaded this photo to a website, making
this image the very first photographic image
ever on the Internet.
But here
is something that has never happened.
Along the border of
China and Bhutan is a mountain called
Gangkhar Puensum.
At 24,800 feet high it is the
tallest mountain in the world
that mankind has yet to reach the top of.
The local government prohibits not
nearing in the region, which means it
might be left unconquered for quite some
time, making it one of just
many things on Earth
that we have yet to explore.
In a couple of days we'll have a new episode of
DONG, so be sure to subscribe to Vsauce.
And as always,
thanks for watching.
