TED-Ed Takes A Look At How Disappointing Super Powers Would Be In Real Life

TED-Ed has offered short, entertaining takes on a wide variety of actual science in its brief existence, and we’ve been consistently delighted by the program’s cartoon explanations of everything from the Big Bang to dinosaur feathers. Over the weekend, though, TED-Ed expanded its purview and blew our minds with seven great videos exploring how common comic book superpowers — real classics like flight, super speed, and super strength — would operate in the real world. The disappointing answer? Not very well, as the offering on super strength demonstrates here.

While the physics lesson on super strength may be no huge revelation to seasoned comic book nerds — most of whom will recognize it as “pretty much exactly how Gwen Stacy died” — the whole series is pretty excellent, and will make you feel a lot better about the fact that you don’t have superpowers. After all, you’d probably just accidentally kill a loved one with them. You can take a look at our sibling site’s favorite example of the series over at The Mary Sue and watch all seven episodes on the TED-Ed YouTube channel. Now here’s hoping we can get TED-Ed to take a look at the physics of Star Trek next.

(via TED-Ed)

Meanwhile in related links

• The evolution of feathers is pretty amazing
• The science behind the zombie apocalypse is, no doubt, pretty grim
• Without TED-Ed, we would never have known of the ancient Japanese art of fish printing