Posts filed under 'Awesome Science Videos'
When I read the blurb that Dean Kamen (who invented the Segway) had been inspired by Star Wars to produce a robotic limb for amputees, I thought ‘yeah, right, it probably weighs 50lbs and is little more than a glorified claw’. Oh, how wrong I was. Kamen’s team have created a bionic limb that is lightweight, modular, and highly dexterous - controlled by pressure pads or even by muscle impulses, his limb is far and beyond anything I thought I’d see in my lifetime. The video is mind-blowing.
February 20th, 2008
Pushing us forward into the awesome robotic future that Hollywood has been promising us, RISE is a small six-legged robot that can climb a variety of surfaces using sticky pads, claws, or “micro-claws”. It’s not slow either - the little guy can shift its 2kg body upwards at 0.3m/s. The question is - what’s it trying to get to?
February 18th, 2008
Ratcheting up the freaky-meter is this video of a giant centipede, which as well as being highly poisonous and strong as a small snake, can catch and kill bats, straight out of the air.
February 11th, 2008
Nitinol is an awesome alloy of nickel and titanium that can be made to return to a fixed shape no matter how twist or bent it becomes. We should definitely start making cars out of this stuff - then a pot of hot water would be enough to fix even the most crumpled wreck!
Hat tip to Hayden at It’s Alive!
February 6th, 2008
You’ve all seen someone blow smoke rings, even if it was only in a movie. Well, the same physics seem to apply underwater. This video appears to show dolphins blowing bubbles underwater, and then using a jet of water to turn them into bubble rings - donut shaped bubbles (or torus-shaped, if you want to be scientific about it). They dolphins are very skilled at it, and look like they’re having fun, too.
January 28th, 2008
Link to an interesting-looking film from Channel 4 made in association with Arts Council England and NASA Space Services. Snip:
The secret lives of invisible magnetic fields are revealed as chaotic ever-changing geometries. All action takes place around NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratories, UC Berkeley, to recordings of space scientists describing their discoveries. Actual VLF audio recordings control the evolution of the fields as they delve into our inaudible surroundings, revealing recurrent ‘whistlers’ produced by fleeting electrons. Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?
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January 8th, 2008
In the 60s, space travel fired the imagination of the planet. People envisioned exploring new worlds, holidaying on the moon and commuting through the asteroid belt. Now, forty years on, where have we got up to? Answer: a group of scientists throwing a cat in zero g. Really struggling to see the real world applications of this one, guys…
I’d like to see the funding proposal for this one. I imagine it goes something like this:
OBJECTIVE: Take the parabolic flight aircraft up for a spin, and throw Henderson’s cat around.
HYPOTHESIS: Dunno, seems like a fun thing to do. Plus, I hate cats.
December 28th, 2007
Robert Krampf makes super-neat short videos of science experiments. They’re so simple, and Krampf is so likeable, you can’t help but love them!
Plus, I have a considerable amount of beard envy going on.
December 19th, 2007
Those wacky euro lab denizens Discover MC TV have just added a new video, “Culture Club”. Follow the trials and tribulations of a group of cells as they discuss the benefits of cryopreservation (”better than DNAge!”) and tensions due to uncontrolled stem cell division (”This petri dish is overcrowded already! We need to start a political movement to preserve our identity!”).
Wonderful, absurd, geeky.
December 17th, 2007
I think this is probably the coolest video I’ve featured on SciencePunk yet. The fact that the train looks like a Mad Max / GI Joe / steampunk mashup makes this video one hundred million shades of awesome!
In retrospect, I should have tweaked that something like this ought to exist, I just never made the connection. Thankfully, train snow plow videos are in abundance on the internets. Yay!
Here are some picture of train snowplows. They come in lots of designs, all of which look like they’d make freakin’ excellent zombie-smashing tanks.
December 16th, 2007
Robert W. Brussard was assistant director at the Atomic Energy Commission in the 70s. He had an interesting idea for alternative to fossil fuels - “inertial electrostatic confinement”. Essentially, electrons are shot into a magnetic prison until fusion occurs:
I’ve no idea if it’s feasible, but it seems pretty neat.
December 5th, 2007
In perhaps the awesomest advance in transportation since monster cars, Jake Layall has combined the motorbike, unicycle, and 1,100 lbs of badass to create the R.I.O.T. Wheel, the “first radical departure in single-wheel designs in over a hundred years”. Housing a motor and counterweight inside a giant wheel, the driver sits on a platform that extends out in front of the device, where they can fully appreciate the admiring glances from laydeez. It looks like it shouldn’t work, but it does. And if you feel the need to live out your steampunk / Dr Doom fantasies, simply stump up several thousands dollars and Jake will build you one himself!
See awesome video action below the fold!
November 8th, 2007
What do you do with several tonnes of a chemical so reactive no-one will agree to transport it? No, “hire the A-team” is not the correct answer. The correct answer is “throw it in a lake and enjoy the fireworks”.
November 7th, 2007
How do you quickly evacuate a lot of people from a building? With a car, obviously. A flying car!
I’m pretty sure I saw this same idea in an episode of Wacky Races.
September 24th, 2007
Plotting a course deep in the belly of the Uncanny Valley, the Waseda-Docomo face robot No.2 is a shape-shifting automaton face capable of mimicking any human with an average 3mm of error. An image of the person to be imitated is projected onto the robot face, which then contorts and stretches in a very unsettling manner until a near-perfect doppelgänger is rendered. Like something out of H. R. Giger’s bad dream.
Here’s the same robot, seen from three different angles, with the facial image overlaid.
September 20th, 2007
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