The Kid Should See This

This mind-bending and water bending viral video is another experiment from Brusspup (featured previously on this site). Here’s the zig zag DIY:

Run the rubber hose down past the speaker so that the hose touches the speaker. Leave about 1 or 2 inches of the hose hanging past the bottom of the speaker. Secure the hose to the speaker with tape or whatever works best for you. The goal is to make sure the hose is touching the actual speaker so that when the speaker produces sound (vibrates) it will vibrate the hose.

Set up your camera and switch it to 24 fps. The higher the shutter speed the better the results. But also keep in the mind that the higher your shutter speed, the more light you need. Run an audio cable from your computer to the speaker. Set your tone generating software to 24hz and hit play. Turn on the water. Now look through the camera and watch the magic begin. If you want the water to look like it’s moving backward set the frequency to 23hz. If you want to look like it’s moving forward in slow motion set it to 25hz.

And if you want to see it with your eyes and no camera, a strobe light, set to 24hz in a light-controlled environment should do the trick.

We love illusions and experiments. Another great video on tricking the eye at the right frame rate: Pixar’s Zoetrope and how animation works.

via Colossal.

Eddie the Sea Otter lives at the Oregon Zoo where he practices playing basketball in the pool to help relieve the arthritis in his elbows.

via Viral Viral Videos.

What does it look like underneath a lake covered with Antarctic ice? McGill University doctoral student and scientific diver Michael Becker shares the view in this New York Times video under Lake Untersee, Antarctica.

In the blog post, he also explains the prep behind keeping the dive safe — note that yellow tether that keeps divers in communication with their team and leads them back to safety — and what they are looking for in the lake sediment: precisely described data and carefully collected samples that help illuminate the history of the lake and its organisms. Brrrrr.

from Scientist at Work.

From the BBC’s The Secret Life of Ice, an experiment for the DIY files:

Dr Gabrielle Walker and Dr Andrea Sella investigate the molecular make up of ice crystals. They use supercooled water to create a mass of ice crystals instantly and discover why water expands as it freezes into ice.

Watch more BBC videos in the archives.

Because doing physics in space can produce some rarely-seen results, NASA astronaut Don Pettit conducted experiments on video while aboard the International Space Station in 2011/12. In this Science Off the Sphere video, he pops balloons in microgravity. Space Balloonacy!

So here’s the test — think about what you think will happen in this scenario. Will the water stay exactly where it was pre-pop, or will it move? If you think it will move, why would it move?

There are Science Off the Sphere videos galore at PhysicsCentral.com.

via Mental Floss.