"Here at SciShow, we hate not knowing things."
— Hank Green
SciShow is one of the Web Video Edutainment Shows hosted and created by Hank Green, known for being the younger half of the Vlogbrothers.
The show is divided up into different sections. "Infusion" talks about such popular topics as solar energy and climate change in great detail. "Dose" is a section of quick videos of obscure topics, such as Tardigrades and Foldit gamers. "News" is a weekly section devoted to quick news stories that have happened recently. "Breaking" is devoted to one breaking news story. It's spawned three spinoff channels: SciShow Space, SciShow Kids, and SciShow Psych.
- The SciShow original channel can be found here
. - The SciShow Space channel can be found here. Rotating hosts Hank Green, Reid Reimers, and Caitlin Hoffmeister focus on astronomy and other space-related information and news updates. The channel stopped uploading new content on January 31, 2023note .
- The SciShow Kids channel can be found here. It launched as part of YouTube Kids with host Jessi Knudsen-Castañeda (of Animal Wonders fame) and features various kid-friendly topics with a particular focus on life science.
- The SciShow Psych channel can be found here. Rotating hosts Hank Green and Brit Garner explain aspects of psychology throughout history and the present. The channel was put on indefinite hiatus on December 23, 2021note .
- There is also a spin-off podcast, SciShow Tangents, described as a "lightly competitive knowledge showcase" which features several of the makers of SciShow sharing interesting science facts on a different topic each week. It includes a poem to introduce the topic, a Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me style section choosing which of three "facts" is true, a "fact-off" where two players try to present a fact to the others which will "blow their minds", and a post-credits "But fact". Discussion often wanders off-topic, hence the show's title.
This show provides examples of:
- April Fools' Day: 2013 gave us "The Retro-Proto-Turbo-Encabulator", in which Hanks speaks almost entirely in Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and Techno Babble. Lots and lots of technobabble.
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Some pseudo-scientists, authors, and TV people want to convince everyone that on Dec. 21, 2012, "the earth is going to split in two, or the poles are going to shift, or house cats are going to rise up against us and make us poop in boxes of sand!"
- Blatant Lies: Nano scientists are tiny, tiny scientists.
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: In this video, Hank's tips to avoid viruses are "But you can avoid most of them as long as you don't open sketchy emails, download weird files, or try to create a nuclear enrichment program."
- Breakout Character: Jessi Knudsen-Castañeda of Animal Wonders, who got her own full-fledged YouTube show produced by Hank.
- Catchphrase: "We hope you learned something."
- Evil Laugh: In the episode on lying, Hank ended with an assurance that he was a terrible liar... or was he? Mwuhahahahaha!
- A Good Name for a Rock Band: Vinyl Alcohol, talking about Sagittarius B2, a molecular cloud containing it.
- Helium Speech: In the episode on helium.
- Mad Lib Thriller Title: In a SciShow Talk Show about Project MINERVA, Hank lampshades that "The Minerva Project" would have probably sounded too much like the title of a new X-Men movie.
- Porn Names: Apparently, Hank's stripper name is "Tharsis Bulge".
- A Rare Sentence:Hank Green: [Chlorine trifluoride is] much more dangerous to handle than even fluorine gas, which as anyone with a degree in chemistry can tell you… is not a sentence you get to say very often.
- Shout-Out:
- The World Is Just Awesome: SciShow focuses on science news and ideas which Hank Green finds cool. Part of what makes it work is Hank's obvious enthusiasm.
- You Keep Using That Word: They now have a segment devoted to this subject in terms of scientific terms. It is called "I Don't Think That Means What You Think It Means", based on a line from The Princess Bride. One of the terms is Schrödinger's Cat.
