weather

Showing 20 posts tagged weather

And now it’s time for 3+ minutes of jazz and tiny hailstones. From Aatish Bhatia at Empirical Zeal, “The Universal laws behind growth patterns, or what Tetris can teach us about coffee stains.”

As I watched this miniature world self-assemble on my windshield like an alien landscape, I wondered about the physics behind these patterns. I learned later that these patterns of ice are related to a rich and very active current area of research in math and physics known as universality. The key mathematical principles that belie these intricate patterns lead us to some unexpected places…

Observe this quiet, growing collection of ice particles on its own, or read on for a much deeper discussion of universality that includes diagrams, videos, and animated gifs.

Related quiet particle observation: Dust particles dance to a Radiohead cover. 

Revolution is an animated short by photographer Chris Turner, paper engineer Helen Friel and animator Jess Deacon that explores the life cycle of a single drop of water through the pages of an elaborate pop-up book. The book contains nine scenes that were animated using 1,000 photographic stills shot over the course of a year.

From the archives: another water cycle animation set to boogie woogie. 

via This Is Colossal.

How do you make a cloud? On her show, Head Rush, Mythbuster’s Kari Byron demonstrates how clouds are formed by making one in a bottle.

For this experiment, you can use a bicycle pump with a rubber stopper attachment, rubbing alcohol and a clear 1 liter bottle. Don’t forget goggles and some adult supervision! Steve Spangler’s Science has more:

The reason the rubbing alcohol forms a more visible cloud is because alcohol evaporates more quickly than water. Alcohol molecules have weaker bonds than water molecules, so they let go of each other more easily. Since there are more evaporated alcohol molecules in the bottle, there are also more molecules able to condense. This is why you can see the alcohol cloud more clearly than the water cloud.

Clouds on Earth form when warm air rises and its pressure is reduced. The air expands and cools, and clouds form as the temperature drops below the dew point. Invisible particles in the air in the form of pollution, smoke, dust or even tiny particles of dirt help form a nucleus on which the water molecules can attach.

From the archives: clouds and experiments.

Update: Here’s an even more simple version of the experiment! Thanks, @nicolasdickner. 

Sesame Street explains the hurricane to kids in an episode originally created for Hurricane Katrina and set to air again this weekend in the aftermath of Sandy.

Sesame Street - Hurricane Part 1, via explore-blog. To watch the rest of the episode visit, SesameStreet.org.

If you or your kids would like to help people who are still feeling the effects of Hurricane Sandy (or for any reason), there are many things you can do:

Hold a bake sale, wash cars and bikes, offer to rake the neighbors’ leaves, make holiday cards and sell them, or collect sponsors to pledge money for a walk/run/bike/skate/bowl/sled/etc-a-thon. Any of these activities are great ways to raise money for The Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, the Humane Society, City Harvest, or Citymeals-on-Wheels, an organization that prepares and delivers meals to elderly New Yorkers. Donors Choose also has a special page to help teachers and classrooms effected by the hurricane: donorschoose.org/hurricane-sandy.

If you’re in the New York City/New Jersey area and would like to volunteer, visit NYCService.org, or search Volunteer Match for opportunities to help a wide variety of causes all across the country.