"Get some tea, make yourself comfortable, we'll get through." This is how Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim started her videos on the Youtube channel "maiLab". How dangerous is sleep deprivation? Are vegans saving the environment? The presenter and chemist explained the world to her viewers. The format was like a "program with the mouse" for young adults – affectionately called "friends of the sun" by Nguyen-Kim. And exactly this "Sendung mit der Maus" has now been broadcast for the last time.
Instead, Nguyen-Kim moves to ZDF, where she has hosted her own show for more than a year. So it's not gone, but it's leaving the format that made it big and famous. And with that, she certainly leaves a part of her audience. "This is the most difficult maiLab video ever," said Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim and reported how difficult it was to reconcile her work at ZDF, family and YouTube. When a long-standing employee had to leave, the decision was made to end maiLab.
In a world full of misinformation, maiLab brought order to debates, be it the dangers of microwaves or the effectiveness of homeopathy. Above all, Nguyen-Kim impresses with her calm and objective manner – and thus takes away the heat of many discussions. Her channel shed light on questions from the scientific side and brought millions of people closer to scientific ways of thinking. When is something really proven? How does a debate between scientists work?
She made nerdiness a trend
maiLab made nerdiness a trend and built a community that is unparalleled on Youtube. Every "friend of the sun" knows: Just because two things happen at the same time, they don't have to have anything to do with each other. Correlation is not the same as causation. Nguyen-Kim made sure that this became a truism. No one would have remembered such a sentence if it had been uttered in physics class. It is a feat to get so many young people to devote their free time to statistics and studies.
In the corona pandemic, this paid off. maiLab fans were not immune to either the illness or the lockdown, but they were able to understand the confused debate better. And this despite the fact that Nguyen-Kim was taking a maternity break at the time. As soon as she returned, she began to classify what was happening. She was one of the first to make the general public aware of how long a pandemic can last. And even if she drew some depressing lines under debates, she always did so with a good portion of humor.
maiLab had its ups and downs – longer breaks are punished by the YouTube algorithm. Nevertheless, maiLab kept a loyal base of supporters, who continued to discuss under the videos. However, particularly controversial posts also received a lot of hatred, which is why Nguyen-Kim campaigned intensively two years ago for a more pleasant culture of debate in her community. And here, too, she did not simply condemn the unobjective contributions, but explained psychological mechanisms. Nguyen-Kim pulled off a coup when she was allowed to broadcast her YouTube format into a television show. Since October 2021, she has been speaking on ZDFneo about time change, organic farming and artificial intelligence. With this step into another medium, the contributions on maiLab became rarer – and now it's over.
The "Friends of the Sun" will miss maiLab. The videos are very different from a TV show. Many cups of tea were drunk – accompanied by a wonderfully understandable explanation of complex topics. Therefore, big cookie recommendation: If you have never seen one of the videos, you should do so now.