Have science, will travel
Home to the finest science shows this side of the Big Bang performed by the two best science guys in this (or any other) universe. Have science, will travel.
Aaron's back with another episode of Constant Science! Today he explains just how and why flames can come in different colors and he uses an old friend of ours: the Fire Tornado.
With his help you will be forever safe from The Goblin King. Click through to watch!
Read MoreI get asked a lot of questions. “What does Don smell like? Did you mean to set that on fire? Why are the townsfolk outside with pitchforks and torches AGAIN?” For legal and moral reasons I can’t always answer those questions, but sometimes the fates are kind and I am happy to share my wisdom with Explosions Inc.’s loyal fans. This week I’ll open up the mailbag and serve up some hot steamy knowledge in our first installment of:
with Aaron
Read MoreAaron is back! This week on Constant Science, Aaron demonstrates one of the more creative ways to break a bottle: with the powerful physics of cavitation.
Read MoreWoo Hoo! Some of you may have seen it on our Instagram, our Twitter, or our Facebook page, but for anyone who missed it, some friends helped me build a pair of beds of nails over the weekend for an upcoming physics show. Let me tell you: that is some tedious work. I need to make friends with someone with a drill press.
To celebrate this momentous achievement (and the fact that I'm super busy this week) I've decided to share our Bed of Nails episode of Constant Science again, one of our very first videos. If you're wondering why a bed of nails is a useful tool for the popularization of science, look no further. The video is a segment from a show, but I give a brief intro at the top. Enjoy!
Read MoreThanks to the hurly-burly of modern life, we seem to spend every moment of every day under constant pressure. School, jobs, relationships, the constant threat of velociraptor attack, the list seems endless. Among this litany of pressures, however, is one that we cannot do without. I'm talking about air pressure. This week I want to show you a neat demo you can try at home that takes advantage of a quirk of air pressure. So sit back, relax, and make sure to keep your velociraptor spray handy.
Read MoreIsaac Newton is, quite justifiably, one of the most famous scientists in history. He was a scientist before scientists were even scientists, back when they were called “natural philosophers” and you pretty much had to be a rich white male to even think about joining their ranks. Back before regular experimental protocols had been developed. The Enlightenment was a turbulent time for our understanding of the universe, and Newton was one of the people sitting right in the center of it.
And Isaac Newton was really kind of weird.
But let’s start with the science.
Read MoreI did not set out to make a post with a rhyming title but it looks like I ended up there anyway. We do a lot of media here at Explosions, Inc., but it's mostly of the video variety. Today I've put together some pictures packed full of sweet, sweet science tidbits that are perfect for posting to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Imgur, what have you. They're all here in this post and I'll be tossing them out one at a time on our own Twitter and Instagram feeds over the course of the next week or two. If you don't follow us on any social media, what the heck are you waiting for?
Is this a common thing to do these days? Yes. Are we sell-outs for hopping on the train? Maybe, but that train is going places, baby! Share the crap out of these, if you would. Aaron and I really tried to make these serious and seriously interesting instead of fluff pieces and we think people will dig them. We want to see these all over social media! Click through for the pictures!
Read MoreHey, hey, hey! I'm back from my travels (you know, the travels that led Aaron to write about my super-cool doppelganger Ron Diefler) with a video that combines some sweet underwater footage my wife and I got while scuba diving in the Caribbean with a whole bunch of science. I talk about water pressure, dive medicine, optics, and, of course, marine biology. Click through to check it out!
Read MoreIn the annals of scientific research there are many sober, conscientious minds, meticulously following protocol to slowly, inexorably advance the state of human knowledge towards the goal of being just a little bit less wrong about the universe. There's also a lot of silly whack-a-doodles who can't be trusted not to run with scissors. Guess which group I'm going to write about today.........
Read MoreLet’s say you’ve sealed a cat in a box with a killing device powered by the radioactive decay of an element (Don’t ask why. In this hypothetical you’re a sociopath). If the element decays, the device is triggered, the cat dies, and the ASPCA will come gunning for you. Whereas the average decay rate of elements is well known, exactly when each atom actually decays is not able to be predicted. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory states that until an observation is made of the inside of the box, the quantum system described above is represented by a wave function in superposition. That is, the cat can be considered both alive and dead.
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We may live in a holographic simulation. Everything that can be conceived of must exist somewhere in the universe. There's this cat, you see, in this box that's both dead and alive, man. Dead and alive.
s much as I love the mind-bending ideas of scientific conjecture, sometimes the use of these ideas rankle my common sense. Especially when ideas like the quirks of quantum theory are accidentally or, even worse, purposefully misinterpreted and the model of the universe science is trying to build is mistaken for the actual thing
Read MoreI was reading through science news, like you do, when I came across this article about some chemists at UC Irvine who have developed a way to un-boil hard-boiled eggs. The process wasn't developed specifically to turn back the clock on boiled eggs, though, but to "reset" proteins that have been tangled and misfolded through some sort of chemical process so they can be recycled or reused. Medicine, biotech, and food production rely on the steady production of proteins but sometimes the manufacturing goes awry. Currently the only way to reuse the misfolded proteins requires an expensive and time-consuming process. This new one cuts the time and the cost to a small fraction of what it used to be.
And it doesn't really unboil the whole egg, either. It just resets one of the proteins in the egg what to what it was before the heat screwed it all up and solidified the albumen. The protein is lysozyme, which makes up only a few percent of the albumen. The egg isn't completely reset; heck, the egg white isn't even mostly reset, but it's still a really cool proof of concept.
This got me thinking about two things: first, if we're now one step closer to reversing the Maillard reaction and fixing overcooked steaks (probably not) and second, entropy.
Read MoreAs someone who has been, for years now, essentially a professional Science Guy (not nearly on the level of Bill Nye, of course, but a man can dream) it might surprise some people that my background is not actually in hard science. In fact, neither is Aaron's. We both have oddly parallel histories when it comes to college education. Both of us have degrees in philosophy. Both of us later went back to undergrad for second degrees, mine in anthropology and his in music. Both of us went into informal science because of a deep love and appreciation for science and the scientific method even if our formal schooling wasn't in hard science. We're living, breathing examples of what we preach: that science is for everyone, whether or not you studied it specifically in school.
Read MoreNot that long ago, I had a kid ask me what my favorite thing about science was. I had to think about it for a minute. I mean, it's not an easy question. Science put humans on the moon and has shown us the depths of time and space. With a little applied chemistry, you can create all sorts of spectacular and safe (for us professionals, anyway) pyrotechnics. Hell, science gave us the technology to create Fallout 3.
After consideration, though, I gave him the answer "My favorite thing about science is that, when I think like a scientist, I'm better at knowing true things from false things." That may seem self-explanatory, but I think it bears a bit of unpacking.
Read MoreSo I didn't have a lot of time this week to put together a new vlog covering some sweet new content. Instead I have pulled another bit from our full-length show "Don't Try This at Home," which you can watch in its entirety on our Performances page. In this clip, Aaron faces my wrath as I wield my mighty sledgehammer. After trapping him between two beds of nails. With a cinderblock on top. This is a classic demonstration of the sometimes counterintuitive nature of physics and energy transfer, but like everything we do we do it up. We bring a flair and style to this demo that you'll rarely, if ever, find elsewhere. And so far I haven't killed Aaron.
So far.
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