If you’re anything like we Geekosystem editors, you probably imagine the terrible lengths each and every single one of your emails must go through to get to its recipient; the little guy traveling through muddy ditches, through dark, isolated forests filled with dangerous wild beasts, killing any and all other rogue emails that cross its path. Just so you can reply to that office memo with a smiley emoticon. Google Green is here to tell us that no emails are harmed in the sending of an email, and have explained the whole process with the above cutesy animation.

Not too long ago, we got word that Doctor Who will, par for the course, get a new companion in the upcoming season to replace Amy Pond and Rory Williams: Jenna-Louise Coleman. As you might notice, she’s quite pretty, which might also lead you think about the past companions, all of which (from the 2005 reboot series) are attractive, most of which are empirically gorgeous. With the whole hullabaloo that seems widespread on the Internet regarding the Doctor someday being played by a female, one might also run into people speculating or complaining about how most of his companions are, by and large, young, attractive females. Showrunner Steven Moffat has a pretty simple answer regarding that, and it sure makes sense.

Or in this case, multiple frequencies. Touché, from Disney Research in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a project that explores what they’re calling “a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique” that would allow objects to sense multiple different touch gestures. By objects, they mean humans, liquids, sofas and just about anything else you can touch. Hello, Minority Report.

Ever wondered how Google actually works? You aren’t the only one. The ins and outs of Google’s search algorithm are valuable knowledge for websites everywhere, interested users, other search engines, and even spammers. As a result, Google keeps a big part of its algorithm — specifically its hundreds of pagerank indicators — under its hat. The general gist of the process, however, isn’t secret at all, and is incredibly interesting. There is an unimaginably large amount of webpages out there to be indexed in real-time. How could you possible come close to doing that? Allow us to allow Google software engineer Matt Cutts of Google Webmaster Central to explain.

Nowadays “Ye Olde” is pretty much just a ham-fisted way to make something sound old(e) and quaint. As it turns out, however, there’s a pretty good reason for how this actually came about and it has to do with, more than anything else, printing. This video from MinutePhysics — taking a day off to be MinuteLinguistics — straightens the whole issue out. It’s more interesting than you might think.

One of our favorite YouTube channels that basically acts a public education service in the modern time of ridiculously short attention spans, MinutePhysics, is back and addressing how we use time as a measurement of physical distance. “But one second isn’t a measurement of distance!” you might exclaim, already logging into your Disqus account to let the world know. Luckily for the world, MinutePhysics is here to explain, and not take up much of your time in the process.

This one is for all you men out there. Have you ever wanted to know more about beards? Of course you have; beards are awesome. While I might not be the best person to be asking, having facial hair better fit for a 15-year-old, I can point you to a genuinely fascinating beardographic from Online PhD that delves into the science, history, and behavioral cause and effect of beard-acquisition and beard-ownership. The downside is that, as you might expect, beards can be kind of a turn-off for the ladies. The upside? They are beards. Beards are awesome.

A recent analysis of Apple’s new iPad revealed something strange about how the device charges its battery. Apparently, the iPad’s battery is not fully charged when the device says it is topped off at 100%. Now, before you stampede back to the Apple store waving the tablet over your head and demanding a refund, it turns out that Apple’s new device is operating exactly as it should, and these weird charging behaviors are actually intentional.

Did you know physics didn’t work until Einstein came along and jury rigged it? Whether or not that is true (it obviously is), Einstein certainly affected the way we think about physics in such a profound way, that someone who understands physics better than us explains above in under two minutes with cute illustrations. If not for MinutePhysics, I wouldn’t know anything about physics.

In our modern world a lot of words get thrown around without people really knowing what they mean. For instance, do you really know what a nanosecond is? If you’ve got a handle on your prefixes, you know it’s a billionth of a second — but what does that really mean? Thankfully, the celebrated computer scientist and decorated naval officer Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is here to explain. In the video, Hopper presents a nanosecond as 11.8 inches — that is, the distance that light can cover in space in a nanosecond. I think we can trust her on this one. After all, she wrote the first compiler and has both a supercomputer and a warship named after her. Though the video is old — Hopper died in 1992, so it has to be over a decade old — it is nonetheless fascinating.