The Kid Should See This.

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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...

But we don't underestimate kids around here.

Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her three four year old co-curator.

Tip Jar: Curating this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.

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ZeroN, a project by Jinha Lee, Rehmi Post, and Hiroshi Ishii at MIT’s Media Lab: 

What if materials could defy gravity, so that we could leave them suspended in mid-air? ZeroN is a physical and digital interaction element that floats and moves in space by computer-controlled magnetic levitation. 

From It’s Okay to Be Smart: 

By using computer-controlled magnetic field manipulations, a metal sphere is suspended in mid-air. Even more, it can be made to follow complex paths, “remembering” and repeating actions. If that somehow isn’t enough, just wait until he lights it up like an orbiting planet, and demonstrates Kepler’s Laws [of planetary motion]!

It looks like it’s alive, perhaps like a spider or a slug, but this is a ferrofluid! Ferrofluids are a magnetized liquid that gets pulled this way and that by nearby magnetic fields. 

Here a ferrofluid has been submerged in a clear alcohol-based solution in a shallow dish while a permanent magnet is used to perturb the liquid. Instead of forming its distinctive spikes due to the normal-field instability, the fluid forms ribbons and mazes due to the shifting magnetic field and the surrounding fluid.

via ahem, f—-yeahfluiddynamics.

Neodymium magnet + copper pipe = magnetic damping:

When a magnetic field moves through a conductor a current called an Eddy current is induced in the conductor due to the magnetic field’s movement. The flow of electrons in the conductor creates an opposing magnetic field to the magnet which results in damping of the magnet and causes heating inside of the conductor similar to heat buildup inside of power cords. The loss of energy used to heat up the conductor is equal to the loss of kinetic energy by the magnet.

One note of caution if you decide to try this, these magnets are not for unsupervised children. In fact, everyone should be careful: 

Neodymium magnets larger than a half inch are very strong and should be handled with extreme care since they can be dangerous… It is best to stick with neodymium magnets of quarter inch diameter or less.

via Stellar.io. 

Flying Frogs! Sort of… The short answer is that living things — even humans — can levitate when a ridiculously strong/large magnet is used to repel the frog’s atoms’ magnetic fields. 

Here’s a more in-depth explanation, edited down here: 

…all matter in the universe consists of small particles called atoms and each atom contains electrons that circle around a nucleus. This is how the world is made. If one places an atom (or a large piece of a matter containing billions and billions of atoms) in a magnetic field, electrons doing their circles inside do not like this very much. They alter their motion in such a way as to oppose this external influence.

As you probably saw many times when playing with magnets, magnets push each other away if you try to bring together their like poles, for example, two north or two south poles… 

In this field, all the atoms inside the frog act as very small magnets… One may say that the frog is now built up of these tiny magnets all of which are repelled by the large magnet. The force, which is directed upwards, appears to be strong enough to compensate the force of gravity (directed downwards) that also acts on every single atom of the frog.

So, the frog’s atoms do not feel any force at all and the frog floats as if it were in a spacecraft.

More levitating things: a grasshopper and a strawberry.

Thanks, DJ!

Quantum levitation. “Superconductivity locked in space,” a phenomenon known as quantum trapping. You can see more details in this video. Mind. Blown. 

Via BoingBoing. 

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