I love optical illusions and this one in Iceland (that I came across thanks to Richard Kaufman) seems to suggest a pedestrian crossing that is floating on air. But it is not just for fun. Such trompe l’oeil (“fools the eye”) illusions claim to have the benefit of causing drivers, puzzled by what they see ahead of them, to slow down when approaching them, increasing the safety of street crossers.
It turns out that if you microwave eggs, they will explode. Here is a video showing it.
There is something compelling about lightning, the sight of massive amounts of electrical energy surging through the sky and powering flux capacitors. Via David Pescovitz, I came across this compilation of lightning videos shot at 1,000 frames per second and set to music. The resulting film called Transient was made by Dustin Farrell who spent the summer traveling 20,000 miles within the US to capture all the strikes.
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Cricket is a game that is highly weather sensitive. Matches can be halted by even very light rain or poor light due to overcast skies, and fans are used to this. International games called Test matches between rival national sides last for five days, six hours per day, so there is plenty of time for weather to intervene. But this past week, a Test match between India and Sri Lanka was interrupted several times due to the heavy pollution that has blanketed New Delhi over the past month.
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In recent years, mercury has required a bad reputation as a toxic chemical that one should avoid. Back in the day when I was a schoolboy, mercury was the element that was the most fun. We would handle it with bare hands in science classes to measure atmospheric pressure and rejoice when a mercury thermometer broke and we could play with this fascinating liquid metal and its strange properties that would try to form itself into a sphere if possible and would slide over surfaces so easily.
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This year’s Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine was given to three scientists for their work in understanding the nature of circadian rhythms, the daily pattern of life that we all, animals and plants alike, follow that seems to be governed by the rate of the Earth’s rotation about its axis. This topic has been of interest as far back as the 18th century when astronomer Jean Jacques d’Ortous de Mairan found that the leaves of mimosa plants opened at the time of daybreak and closed at night, even when they were kept in the dark all the time, suggesting that there was an internal biological clock that was not triggered entirely by sunlight.
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Correspondent Allana Harkin from the show Full Frontal tries to persuade the highly religious inhabitants of Tangier Island in Virginia that the slow disappearance of their island is due to rising sea levels caused by climate change and not erosion as they assert.
This video, taken in a submarine on the ocean floor bed 750m underwater near the carcass of a dead whale, shows the ferocity of giant sharks as they attack each other and the submarine in order to get at the food.
Reader Jeff ‘Hyphenman’ Hess takes one for the team and reads the neoconservative rag National Review so we don’t have to, and flags my attention to a recent article that deviates from their usual warmongering to present arguments for the existence of god and a soul. They start by saying that science is what gives evidence for the existence of souls, so you know right off the bat that this is going to be a doozy, and it does not disappoint.
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