When water is supercooled but remains undisturbed, it does not freeze into a solid unless there is an impurity present (a rough surface, for example) for the cold water to crystallize around (a “nucleation” site). Disturbing supercold water also causes it to crystallize.
The same can happen to liquified sugar if a single grain of sugar falls back in the mix.
Interesting clip from a BBC documentary on time.
Physicist Michio Kaku investigates claims of time dilation under the influence of Adrenaline and other drugs.
This is an enlightening clip from a film by James Burke called ‘Machine Thinking’. This is only a little bit of the original but still very good.
I guess you could say that the point of this video is that things are created in such a systematic way that all originality has been lost. People’s posessions and, if i may add, lives have been shaped into cookie cutter routines that ultimately produce rather than create. Wipe your tears, now.
Talk about staying “green”, this is one of the coolest things I have come across.
I found this titled as “the ultimate tree house” on TechEBlog and this is a quick summation of this brilliant idea:
 Mitchell Joachim, Javier Arbona, and environmental engineer Lara Greden have designed the ultimate treehouse, which “will grow from a few seedlings into a two-story, water-recycling, energy-efficient abode.†Video overview after the jump.
More info and a video: Continue reading Grow Your Tree *HOUSE*
Video of one of Asch’s conformity experiments. Below is a paraphrase from Wikipedia:
 The Asch conformity experiments, published in 1951, were a series of studies that starkly demonstrated the power of conformity in groups.
Experiments led by Solomon Asch asked students to participate in a “vision test.” In reality, all but one of the participants were confederates of the experimenter, and the study was really about how the remaining student would react to the confederates’ behavior.
The participants — the real subject and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom where they were told to announce out loud their judgment of the length of several lines drawn on a series of displays. They were asked which line was longer than the other, which were the same length, etc. The confederates had been prearranged to all give an incorrect answer to the tests.
While most subjects answered correctly, many showed extreme discomfort, and a high proportion (32%) conformed to the erroneous majority view of the others in the room when there were at least three confederates present, even when the majority said that two lines different in length by several inches were the same length. When the confederates were not unanimous in their judgment, subjects were much more likely to defect than when the confederates all agreed. Control subjects with no exposure to a majority view had no trouble giving the correct answer.
This excerpt comes from HowStufWorks and explains the math behind beer goggles!
Many of us have heard of the so-called “beer goggle” effect. It’s the phenomenon that occurs when someone’s had a few alcoholic drinks and suddenly, all of those people who looked semi-attractive on entering the bar look really, really appealing. Scientists have shown that it’s not just a lowering of standards — alcohol actually stimulates the part of the brain that judges facial attractiveness. Continue reading Beer Goggles Are REAL!
This stuff is really amazing. At first you might watch these and think ‘so what’ but its truly amazing that by using sound the objects in the videos I have linked below float. I wondering what kind of energy consumption it takes to do this because if it’s low — this might be a cheap and green way to transport things efficiently and possibly cheaply.
Here are the videos. Continue reading Objects Suspended in Air