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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Our friend Flippycat has done it again… this time with a cascade of 60,000 dominoes (a personal record). It’s built from 60 walls of 990 dominoes each (plus a bit extra) — making a 14 foot long piece in over 8 days of work. And of course there were quite a few accidents making it, which every kid should see.
via BoingBoing.
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]!
Melvin the Traveling Mini Machine is two suitcases filled with a wonderfully detailed Rube Goldberg Machine, all to put a stamp on a postcard.
Besides doing what Rube Goldbergs do best – performing a simple task as inefficiently as possible, often in the form of a chain reaction – Melvin has an online identity as well, which he uses to connect to and interact with his audience. Melvin the Mini Machine uses a smartphone and bespoke code and software to determine its location, write messages and recognize the people around him…
Once a picture is uploaded after it’s been processed, the data and the picture are published to Facebook and Twitter… Melvin’s travels page runs the Google Maps API with a custom layout… In short, this new Melvin is a Rube Goldberg machine specifically built to travel the world… Information on how the new Melvin works, its different parts and how to contact us can be found here.
My guess is that after it’s traveled for a while, we’ll have a whole map of photos taken by the machine that show happy audiences watching Melvin as intensely as this.
via This Is Colossal.
Penguins can’t fly, but they can jump! Seriously. They can jump over 9 feet (or up to 3 meters), depending on their species. How? They wrap their bodies in a cloak of air bubbles that come from their feathers — swimming quickly to the surface, they burst out of the water and leap to their destination.
These are Gentoo Penguins and they’re demonstrating both the ease and difficulty of their jumping skills. Pretty phenomenal. (And it sounds like the tourists filming this video think so, too.)
Be sure to check out the BBC video in this post that shows the “coat of air bubbles” underwater.
via Science Dump.
We love this video of Euler’s (sounds like Oiler’s) Spinning Disk, not only because of the physics behind how long it spins on the slightly concave mirror base, but also because of the intense, hypnotic sound it makes, especially toward the end.
Euler’s Disc was invented by Joseph Bendik in the 1980s, while he was working for an aerospace firm in California, and spinning coins on the cafeteria table. He named it after Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician and physicist who lived from 1707 to 1783, and who did some of the pioneering work on spinning and rolling objects.
Want to watch it again? You can enjoy Euler’s Spinning Disk demonstrations both in French and with a British accent, too.
After a friend tweeted about a research page full of passive motion robotics videos by Andy Ruina, Professor of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell and of bicycle physics paper fame (SciFri video), I happened upon this 2008 video of Andy introducing his 22-pound, four-legged bi-ped robot named Ranger.
“The basic way this thing walks is that it falls down over and over again… this is walking as falling and catching yourself over and over again.” In 2011, Ranger did this for 40.5 miles — that’s 307.75 laps on a running track or 65km (watch the video) — unassisted over almost 31 hours before it needed a battery recharge.
I love how not-human this bot looks. The kid should see this!
h/t @themexican.
The moon is 1.3 light seconds away. The sun is 8 light minutes away. The store is 10 bike minutes from the house. And Sydney is 7 humpback whale months from LA. Wow! How Far is a Second? by Minute Physics.
Japanese performance artist Kenichi Kanazawa taps a rubber mallet on a steel table to make sound vibrations that create beautiful transforming sand patterns. Using a scientific sound-visualizing process called Cymatics, he is able to manipulate the complex sand shapes by making frequencies visible through these vibrations: the higher the frequency, the more complex the design.
Previously: More Chladni patterns and some Oobleck, just for kicks.
via Laughing Squid.
“James Cameron and his team pull together a new CGI of how they believe the Titanic sank and reached the ocean floor…” which completely fascinated the kid. We get National Geographic magazine (which featured the Titanic for the April 15th, 100th anniversary of its sinking) and to see their still images turned into this animation was a treat for him. It was a treat for me to see him paying attention to the physics of it — how it sunk and broke in half from the stress, its size and weight, falling and hitting bottom in water. Also: bada bing, bada boom.
via Devour.
