The Curiosity Box by VSauce Subscription Box Review – Winter 2018

1 comment
Hello Subscription independently researches and reviews the best subscriptions and products. Things you buy through our links may earn us a commission.
Go to commentsNotification

The Curiosity Box is a quarterly subscription box to satisfy your thirst for knowledge. Each box comes with 6-9 items that will not only entertain, but also educate you and your family. The subscription is $49.90 per quarter and a portion of all proceeds are donated to fund Alzheimer’s research.

This is their box # 10! The box is filled with stuff that will feed your mind.

There’s no extra packaging, just a box filled with awesome items!

The Curiosity Box has a separate information card – it’s great for quick reference and for when someone steals your Curiosity Quarterly for bathroom reading. It contains a list of all the goodies this quarter! And as always, INQ the octopus is our guide through the box.

Each box comes with the Curiosity Quarterly by VSauce.

The quarterly is loaded with interesting, short articles for the curious-minded!

The articles are truly geeky, in a good way. The musings draw from math, science, history, and culture to create fun articles with an inquisitive edge. They also encourage to show your INQ by submitting your own artwork.

For this edition, they included a fun article about TITIN, the longest protein molecule ever discovered! They have a knack for making articles about things or concepts we always use but usually ignore. We never know when these little facts and trivia can be handy in the future.

It’s like an error on a computer screen, and I wonder “will it ever end”?

Oh my! It consisted of 15 pages! Whew! I love that remarks after, though.

They also included an article about the misconception of the Negative Reinforcement.

Have you ever wondered why popcorn pops? There’s a feature about that!

Everything in the box!

First, this shirt promised to take us to somewhere positively interstellar.

Kraken Mare T-Shirt. Disney Parks? Nah. This cool shirt features the Kraken Mare Lunar Park, located at Saturn’s moon, the Titan.

Titan is the largest moon in Saturn, and the only moon that is known to have a dense atmosphere, and the only object in space, other than Earth, that has clear evidence of having a liquid surface, so you can definitely swim in there!

Next up is one that I find most interesting in this box, and it’s a picture book!

It’s sealed as an Official Selection from the Curiosity Box!

Earth + Space: Photographs From The Archive Of NASA ($27.19)

Take a tour of the universe with this breathtaking collection of photographs from the archives of NASA. Astonishing images of Earth from above, the phenomena of our solar system, and the celestial bodies of deep space will captivate readers and photography lovers with an interest in science, astronomy, and the great beyond. Each extraordinary photograph from the legendary space agency is paired with explanatory text that contextualizes its place in the cosmic ballet of planets, stars, dust, and matter—from Earth’s limb to solar flares, the Jellyfish Nebula to Pandora’s Cluster. Featuring a preface by Bill Nye, this engaging volume offers up-close views of our remarkable cosmos, and sparks wonder at the marvels of Earth and space.

You can take a tour of the Universe just by sitting at home and looking through the pages of this book.

The pictures are high quality, and they’re all awe-inspiring!

Here’s a closer look of the Solar Eclipse, you can actually see the burning sun!

Here’s NGC 21, known as the Pacman Nebula. It is a bright emission nebula and a part of an H II region in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia, which is shown at the other page.

There’s also the beautiful Tarantula Nebula, an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Pictured in this one is the SagDIG, or Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy, a dwarf galaxy in the Sagittarius constellation that lies at about 3.4 million light years away, and it should not be mistaken for the elliptical galaxy on the Milky Way which is the SagDEG.

If you’re not yet done with wrapping gifts, here’s an interesting set that will make the presents more special! (FYI, this box arrived early November, it came in plenty of time to make an awesomely geeky gift)

Earth’s Layers Gift Wrap. The gift wrap set consists of the 5 layers of Earth, from the planet’s crust to its core!

The first layer looks like a world map to me! The wraps are of the standard size just perfect to fit most gifts! I definitely love the Upper Mantle one!

The box also includes a Steam game, Qube!

Steam Game: Q.U.B.E. Director’s Cut.

Q.U.B.E: Director’s Cut is the definitive version of the brain-twisting first-person puzzler. Using special high-tech gloves to manipulate cubes in the environment, the player solves an array of conundrums – from physics-based challenges; to 3D jigsaws; to platform-based trials.

If you love puzzles, this is the game for you as you can do Physics-based challenges, 3D jigsaws, and platform-based trials. One more thing, it’s also available on Mac, so yeah!

Mandelbrot Poster. The poster is rolled and neatly packed in a beautiful box.

Revealing the poster, it shows a vintage style map.

The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers for which the function does not diverge when iterated from, i.e., for which the sequence, etc., remains bounded in absolute value. Its definition and name are due to Adrien Douady, in tribute to the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

The map actually looked like a pirate map, and I love this kind of vintage-styled art.

You can learn more about the Mandelbrot set with all the useful information they included in the map. It can easily be displayed and let the kids explore it!

These pages show and explain the beauty that is a plasma orb/globe!

INQ’s Plasma Orb. The orb also comes in a cute box. Here, we can see INQ holding the orb!

Plasma orbs create brilliant filaments of light by sending electrons through the atoms of gas inside. This flow causes the atoms to release photons of light…

Here’s the orb, ready to be touched. It was invented by Nikola Tesla during his study of the high-voltage phenomena.

First, we dimmed the light and turned on the orb. It’s not yet that bright.

But when you touch the orb, the body provides a lower-resistance discharge path for the electrons so more current flows, and the orb becomes brighter!

Here’s what I mean, as you touch the orb using most of your fingers, it becomes more bright!

This is really beautiful, especially during night time.

We also got a carefully-constructed mystery wooden box!

INQ’s IEN Mystery Box. It’s a puzzle that we need to solve to find out the surprise that is awaiting!

After emptying out the box of the 4 wooden pieces in it, we can finally figure out the significance of the three cryptic letters printed on its base. Sounds exciting!

It looks like a simple cube at first!

But you can actually pull out the pieces from inside the box.

It contains four wooden pieces of alternating colors of light and dark brown.

There are three cryptic letters printed at the bottom of the box: I, E, and N.

We’re guessing, these wooden pieces are letters! And when arranged, it will spell a word that means

A systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.

Have you guessed it right?

Lastly, there’s another beautiful artwork. It’s inspired by the works of Erik Wernquist!

Postcard: “Wanderers” by Erik Wernquist. This is the perfect artwork for this box, as it shows the beauty of digital art, and how the maker shows the wonders of the outer space through his craft. This postcard shows a bit of his short film masterpiece, Wanderers, which depicts actual locations in the Solar System being investigated by human explorers, aided by hypothetical-but-not-absurd potential space technology.

The back of the postcard also has a brief explanation of the art. There are also some spaces for personal notes and messages.

This month’s curation of Science stuff is definitely impressive! I love the space-themed items like the picture book and the postcard. It also gave me an idea of what sci-fi masterpiece I can watch later with my whole family. Erik Wernquist’s short film looks really interesting! And the photo book also lets us explore the outer space in the comforts of our home, the beautiful and high-quality pictures really took us there! Also, the games and activities included in this box are awesome, the wooden puzzle mystery box is great, so as the plasma orb that the kids really loved experimenting with! We’re ready and excited for more scientific discoveries, just bring them on!

What do you think of this quarter’s box?

Visit The Curiosity Box to subscribe or find out more

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Mike Smith
    01.19.19

    Too bad the poster was a cheap ripoff of the much nicer Mandelmap by Bill Tavis