This is something I’ve wanted to do for many years, which we discussed when I was at the Royal Institution but never quite got around to: careful macrophotography of chemical phenomena and reactions.
The Institute of Advanced Technology at the University of Science and Technology of China and Tsinghua University Press have teamed up with photographer and science visualisation specialist Yan Liang to film a series of reactions, and from the looks of this trailer they’ve made a really good job of it. There’s a ‘Beautiful Chemistry’ project website and blog, and I suspect I’ll be posting again when the main project goes live next month.
We’ve all winced at those scenes in CSI:Nowheresville when somebody in a lab coat ‘enhances’ an image until you can see the reflection of the room in the pupil of somebody’s eye, or whatever.
This video is like that. Clearly implausible, most likely witchcraft.
Alternatively, a group of researchers at MIT really have found a way of extracting temporal information from CMOS sensor skew, sufficient to reconstruct audio up to around the 400Hz range from pictures alone.
Damned impressive, even if ‘sorcery’ is a more plausible algorithm.
Many of us stumble upon the Leidenfrost Effect accidentally when cooking. The 2010 winner of the SciCast Best Physics film is one of the best short films on the subject I’ve seen, but the video above, also made by students, introduced me to a surprising new effect related to it. I’m pretty sure Jonathan, who’s away in Abu Dhabi at the moment, is going to love it.
Not a demo, and my string theory is nowhere near good enough to keep up, but when there’s this much work involved I can’t hold any of that against the creator. Heck of a job, this.
I should probably run a ‘Wing Week’ here, but then I’d have to delve into explanations of how wings work. And we all know how messy that gets. So here’s a video from Ruesch Productions via the wonderful Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics, via @elinoroberts. I like demos on this scale, even if they’re more commonly known as ‘landing.’
