At the White House Science Fair, 8th grader Joey demonstrated his homebuilt air cannon for President Obama by launching a marshmallow across the State Dining Room. As the student pumped air into the cannon, the president joked “the Secret Service isn’t happy about this.” Then the president took a turn pumping air into the cannon.

via Gizmodo

photo via Reuters

The non-profit educational sanctuary in Tampa, Florida, Big Cat Rescue, has put together Do Big Cats Purr?, a video that answers questions about how cats of all sizes communicate. They are also behind Do Big Cats Like Catnip? and Do Big Cats Like To Chase Laser Pointers? that we have previously posted.

Also check out the video on their community of “weird, strange and rare” big small cats:

la llareta #0308-23b26 (up to 3,000 years old, atacama desert, chile)

welwitschia mirabilis #0707-22411 (2,000 years old; namib naukluft desert, namibia)

clonal quaking aspens #0906-4711 (80,000 years old, fish lake, UT)

underground forest #0707-10333 (up to 13,000 years old; pretoria, south africa)

The Oldest Living Things in the World is a fascinating ongoing project by photographer Rachel Sussman to document the world’s “continuously living organisms 2000 years old and older”. Her online gallery of images is filled with amazing things as the 80,000 year old clonal colony of Quaking Aspen in Utah. She was featured in a 2010 TED talk where she talked in depth about her interest in the world’s oldest living things.

The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of our past, a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future. They’ve survived for millennia in desert, in the permafrost, at the tops of mountains and at the bottom of the ocean. They’ve withstood untold natural perils and human encroachments, but now some of them are in jeopardy, and they can’t just get up and get out of the way. It’s my hope that, by going to find these organisms, that I can help draw attention to their remarkable resilience and help play a part in insuring their continued longevity into the foreseeable future.

photos by Rachel Sussman

This physics newbie shows us an incredibly ill-advised way to create an explosion with liquid nitrogen: by sealing it in a plastic bottle. Fair warning, the video is very loud.

via Geeks Are Sexy & HARDOCP

video by hicookie

Artist Mickey Duzyj and writer Jon Korn collaborated on the Patron Saints of Time Travel Candles, a set of devotional-style candles that honor three theoretical physicists “whose work was instrumental to the development of time travel later this century”: Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Ronald Mallett. The candles are available from Echo Park Time Travel Mart, the time travel-themed retail store that benefits the nonprofit children’s tutoring center in Los Angeles named 826LA.

Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Ronald Mallett are the first three Patron Saints to be featured, in a planned series of infinity. Make sure to collect them all, as the full set of Patron Saints candles can be used to construct a working Tipler Cylinder!

Modeled after saints candles, each Patron Saints candle features: a portrait of the respective scientist; a pertinent quote about time travel; some specific information about each man’s contribution to time travel, from wormholes to black holes, via ring lasers. (In a pinch, before 1809, or after 2473, the candles can also function as a source of light.)

See also:

– Echo Park Time Travel Mart photo gallery by Scott Beale

– Time Travel Posters by Echo Park Time Travel Mart and 826LA

Researchers at UC San Diego have bioengineered fluorescent bacteria that, when combined into bacterial colonies, flash in unison. These “biopixel” colonies can be used to form flashing living displays (see the video demonstration).

via Wired

In 2008, Discovery’s Science Channel created the fascinating segment How It’s Made: Candy Canes for its How It’s Made television show. The segment not only shows how factory-made candy canes are concocted but it also gives the history behind this crooked cane Christmas treat.

Candy canes, invented in the 1700s, now come in myriad colors and sizes. Find out how giant batches of sugary goop are transformed into beautiful, tasty striped candies. Be sure to brush your teeth after watching!

via Justin Ouellette

Dr. Ramesh Raskar and his research team at the MIT Media Lab have developed a camera capable of capturing video at one trillion frames per second (video). The camera can produce a video in which the speed of light is shown in slow motion—light can be observed slowly advancing across a scene.

The device has been developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group in collaboration with Bawendi Lab in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. A laser pulse that lasts less than one trillionth of a second is used as a flash and the light returning from the scene is collected by a camera at a rate equivalent to roughly half a trillion frames per second. However, due to very short exposure times (roughly two trillionth of a second) and a narrow field of view of the camera, the video is captured over several minutes by repeated and periodic sampling.

via The New York Times

X is for X-Ray is an interactive children’s book for iPad that features 26 objects (from A to Z) that can be viewed with X-Ray photography (demo video). The book is by Hugh Turvey, Artist in Residence at the British Institute of Radiology, and children’s book author Paul Rosenthal.

X is for X-Ray is a magical new interactive iPad book. It offers a remarkable perspective on 26 everyday objects. For many of the objects, swipe horizontally and they rotate at your fingertip. A double-tap offers an amazing stereoscopic option, really bringing the objects to life. For others, pinch to zoom and reveal incredible detail. With all objects, swipe vertically to discover what’s really inside!

“60-Second Adventures in Thought” is a fast-paced animated overview of six famous thought experiments from Achilles and the tortoise to Schrödinger’s cat. The animation is by the Open University in the UK. We previously wrote about another Open University animated lecture “The History of English.”

via The Daily What

Earlier this month HRL Laboratories announced the invention of the metallic micro-lattice, the world’s lightest material. The micro-lattice is 99.99% air, 100 times lighter than styofoam and is extremely resilient. The material was developed in conjunction with researchers at The California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Irvine.

via Nature News Blog & The Los Angeles Times

photo by Dan Little

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.

via The Awesomer and Gakken

PhD candidate Jun Axup has created a series of plush DNA molecule dolls (that magnetically-interact where they naturally hydrogen bond) called Biochemies as a way to promote science education, “especially to bring more girls into science & technology”. She has launched a campaign on Kickstarter to raise funds for the project.

Jun describes her inspiration for Biochemies:

“The best way to capture girls’ attention is plushies!” I said during a car ride in January of this year.

Something sparked. Two weeks later, this was made.

I’ve never sewed anything before, but with a trip to the fabric store and some googling, Bio+chemies is now a plush toy!

Australian graphic designer Simon Bent has created an art portrait series of psychedelic scientists titled Science Vs Delirium.

Science Vs Delirium is a series of illustrations
celebrating some of the greatest scientists
in history. The series was created to
re-popularise these iconic figures.

via Comunicadores

The Lightning Foundry is an ambitious project by Lightning On Demand to build two ten story tall Tesla coils that will generate super long discharge effects hundreds of feet in length, or in other words, man-made lightning. The Tesla coils would be the world’s largest, surpassing the current champion, Electrum, also by Lightning on Demand. San Francisco Bay Area-based LOD was founded in the 1990s by Greg Leyh, who has also worked with Survival Research Labs.

Leyh is raising funds for the Lightning Foundry on Kickstarter.

What is the Lightning Foundry? The Lightning Foundry is a project to re-create super-long discharge effects normally found only in lightning. Two 10-story Tesla Coil towers will fill an area the size of a football field with lightning-like discharges hundreds of feet in length. If we trigger super-long discharge effects the arcs could strike considerably further.

via Boing Boing

Science writer Carl Zimmer asked on his blog, The Loom on Discover Magazine: “Are scientists hiding tattoos of their science?” and it turns out some of them were. In his latest book, Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, he shares images and stories of these tattoos and the science nerds behind them. More images are available for viewing at The New York Times, Flavorwire and at The Loom.

Body art meets popular science in this elegant, mind-blowing collection, written by renowned science writer Carl Zimmer. This fascinating book showcases hundreds of eye-catching tattoos that pay tribute to various scientific disciplines, from evolutionary biology and neuroscience to mathematics and astrophysics and reveals the stories of the individuals who chose to inscribe their obsessions in their skin. Best of all, each tattoo provides a leaping-off point for bestselling essayist and lecturer Zimmer to reflect on the science in question, whether it’s the importance of an image of Darwin’s finches or the significance of the uranium atom inked into the chest of a young radiologist.

images via The Loom and Flavorwire

Richard Hartel, professor of Food Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, demonstrates how a mixture of granulated sugar, corn syrup and water boiled to over 300 degrees Fahrenheit cools down to technically become a ‘sugar glass’ in the video, Hard Candy Chemistry!.

via The Presurfer

Earlier today, six astronauts emerged from 520 days of voluntary isolation aboard a simulated spacecraft, marking the end of Mars500, the first full-length simulation of a mission to Mars. The mission began on June 3, 2010, when the astronauts closed the hatch to the simulation complex at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The hermetically sealed complex included spacecraft and Mars lander mockups, as well as a simulated Mars surface for a landing on Mars (which occurred February 12, 2011).

The astronauts lived with one another in near complete isolation from the outside world. Their only links to Earth were Internet and a phone link that included simulated communication delays of up to 25 minutes. The mission was a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems. The ESA has posted a 15 minute video compilation from videos shot by astronauts during the course of the 17 month mission.

via The Verge

Minute Physics takes a look at How To Break the Speed of Light.

In 2009 chemistry teacher Chris Bergmann showed his students The Exploding Pumpkin Trick for Halloween demo day.

via Daily Picks and Flicks

“Why Do We Dream?” is a fascinating short video about dreaming by Vsauce.

via BuzzFeed

A scientist from the Superconductivity Group at Tel Aviv University demonstrates the mind-boggling properties of superconductors, quantum levitation and quantum trapping in this demonstration video. The video was shot in Baltimore at the annual conference of the Association of Science – Technology Centers.

For more quantum levitation (and more on the science that causes it) see this extended demo video by Dr. Boaz Almog of Tel Aviv University’s Superconductivity Group.

via Gizmodo

photo via Tel Aviv University

Physics for Dogs is a handy textbook that teaches dogs the fundamentals of physics, using examples dogs can understand: chasing the mailman, pooping, and playing fetch. The book is by John-Andrew Sandbrook and Dara Flynn.

via The Awesomer

Researcher Kevin Karsch and his team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are developing a software system that lets users easily insert objects into photographs, complete with convincing lighting and perspective. The system is astonishingly effective–to see it in action, watch their demo video.

We propose a method to realistically insert synthetic objects into existing photographs without requiring access to the scene or any additional scene measurements. With a single image and a small amount of annotation, our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects with diffuse, specular, and even glowing materials while accounting for lighting interactions between the objects and the scene. We demonstrate in a user study that synthetic images produced by our method are confusable with real scenes, even for people who believe they are good at telling the difference.

via PetaPixel & PhotoWeeklyOnline

“The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect” by Daniel Keogh, aka Professor Funk, is an animated rundown of the curious properties of the placebo effect.

via Ronen V