NTV Music Videos

Every so often Bill Nye the Science Guy throws out its normal format and just goes for it. In this special episode, Bill hands the studio over to NTV, a spoof music channel, and counts down eleven parody science songs, each set to the tune of a real hit and packed with facts about circulation, weather, forces, memory, plankton, recycling and the water cycle.

In this episode you will discover:

• How parody songs can turn a science lesson into something you actually remember
• Why eleven, not ten, thanks to Bill’s soft spot for prime numbers
• How wildly different topics, from bloodstreams to buildings, share the same underlying physics of energy and force
• Which real chart hits the show borrowed melodies from, and what science each one carries
• How music works as a genuine mnemonic in classrooms all over the world
• Why the water cycle, at number one, sits underneath almost every other topic in the countdown

How a science parody song does its work

A good parody piggybacks on a melody a viewer already knows, then slots the science into rhythms the ear is expecting. The result sticks. Bill and the writers use each song to pack in a genuine curriculum point: chambers of the heart, compression and tension in a structure, momentum, climate zones, memory, the parts of the eye, friction, plankton at the base of the food web, the three Rs of waste, and the water cycle itself. It is why the songs turn up in classrooms decades after the show first aired.

Bill Nye’s demonstrations

Bill hosts the show as an NTV veejay, cuts between eleven songs and a handful of short lab beats: a cardboard box vortex ring generator that blows perfect smoke rings across the studio, a moment where Bill sticks to a metal pole in freezing air, and a dry ice smash to introduce plankton. The special guests are the Seattle band Mudhoney, who set the tone at the start, and the joke throughout is that this is a countdown so of course they have to save the biggest topic, the water cycle, for number one.

The Top 11 songs

Number 11: “Bloodstream” by AB Positive. Set to the tune of “Love Shack” by The B-52’s. The song walks through the four chambered heart pumping blood along arteries and back through veins, carrying red and white cells around the body, and reminds the viewer that this is a very strong muscle that responds to exercise.

Number 10: “Let’s Talk About Stress.” Set to the tune of “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt N Pepa. The stress here is engineering stress, the compression and tension inside buildings, bridges, teeth and eggshells, and the punchline is that structures stay standing because the people who built them understood how those forces balance.

Number 9: “The Faster You Push Me” by Momentisey. Set to the tune of “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get” by Morrissey. A song about momentum: push harder and an object goes further, and weight (mass) is a central part of how much momentum something has. A small ball rolls a fair way, a full car rolls much further.

Number 8: “Whether the Weather.” Set to the tune of “Better Days” by Citizen King. A quick tour of the world’s climates: hot and dry deserts, warm and wet tropical rainforests near the equator, cold and dry tundras near the poles, and the cool and wet temperate forests in between, and how each one shapes the plants and animals that live in it.

Number 7: “Whatta Brain.” Set to the tune of “Whatta Man” by Salt N Pepa. A love song to the human brain, running through the four main kinds of memory, long term, short term, ancestral and eidetic, and reminding the viewer that storing all that information is a serious job.

Number 6: “She Sends a Letter.” Set to the tune of “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her” by Mary Chapin Carpenter. A song about communication in all its forms: letters, phone calls, computers, books and Shakespeare plays for humans, and colour changing squids, howling gorillas and scent marking dogs for everything else.

Number 5: “Eyeballs.” Set to the tune of “Two Princes” by the Spin Doctors. Eyeballs regulate the light entering the head, two of them together give humans stereoscopic depth perception, and the song even squeezes in the word ophthalmology and a reminder to get your eyes tested every year.

Number 4: “Friction.” A tribute to the force that lets you grip a pole, brake a bicycle, and turn kinetic energy into heat. The song makes the point that friction is not a nuisance to be eliminated but a fundamental force that both slows things down and generates the warmth you feel when you rub your hands together.

Number 3: “Power to the Plankton.” A short, loud track making the case that the invisible drifting organisms at the top of the ocean are the base of the entire marine food web, feeding sperm whales and starfish alike, and that a single piece of plankton is nothing but all of them together weigh a great deal.

Number 2: “Recycle.” Set to the tune of “Respect” by Aretha Franklin. A straightforward call to reduce, reuse and recycle your daily rubbish, plus compost the food waste, because trash is not going to disappear by itself if it just sits on a shelf.

Number 1: “Rain, Rain.” Set to the tune of “Jump” by Kris Kross. The water cycle in about two minutes: the sun heats the ocean, molecules speed up and evaporate as water vapour, they rise, cool and condense into clouds, then fall as precipitation, and the whole thing starts over. It is at number one because almost every other topic in the countdown depends on it.