This article provides a first statistical analysis of the typologies and characteristics of popular science web videos on YouTube. An analysis of 190 videos from 95 online video channels was conducted. Several factors such as narrative strategies, video editing techniques, and design tendencies with regard to cinematography, the number of shots, the kind of montage used, and even the use of sound design and special FX point to a notable professionalism among science communicators independent of institutional or personal commitments. This analysis represents an important step in understanding the essence of current popular science web videos and provides an evidence-based description of their distinctive features.

Science, research and emerging technologies often play a key role in many modern action movies. In this contribution we suggest to use genre analysis of folk narratives as an innovative and useful tool for understanding science and technology in action movies. In this contribution we outline our approach using illustrative examples and detail how understanding action movies as modern fairy tales can benefit the study of science, research and technology in popular culture.

While the use of scientific visualisations (such as brain scans) in popular science communication has been extensively studied, we argue for the importance of popular images (as demonstrated in various talks at #POPSCI2015), including pictures of everyday scenes of social life or references to pictures widely circulating in popular cultural contexts. We suggest that these images can be characterised in terms of a rhetorical theory of argumentation as working towards the production of evidentiality on the one hand, and as aiming to link science to familiar visualities on the other; our example is da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man".