Awesome Experiments

Tesla coils give us one of the few controlled ways to see electricity. Apparently, if you stick a nail into a plastic syringe, point it at a live tesla coil, and pull its plunger that it would extract the electric plasma into its barrel. Original footage from ElectroBOOM.

Video games that play in a 3rd-person perspective help you understand your place within the world and let you see what your character looks like. With the help of a video rig and VR goggles, Ryan Trahan lived his own life from a 3rd-person view – and he did it for two days. We probably would have thrown up after 20 minutes.

James from The Action Lab shows off a physics demonstration that had us scratching our heads at first. While it appears that the ball bearing inside of this glass beaker will spin forever without adding energy, there’s a perfectly rational explanation of what’s going on. The Egg of Columbus demo is pretty neat too.

There’s a good reason that most saw blades are made from steel. Regardless, the Kurahito Craft channel wanted to see if they could make a circular saw blade out of wood and use it to cut things. It makes quick work of paper and thin sheets of plastic, but can it cut its own kind? Let the wood-on-wood battle begin!

Chemistry can be pretty awesome (and dangerous at times). MEL Science show off an energetic reaction that happens when you soak aluminum foil balls in sodium hydroxide, then expose them to oxygen and a flame. By placing the balls inside of a tube, the combustion causes them to race around like tiny cars on fire.

It’s pretty easy to get a LEGO wheel spinning fast with a motor, but what about with human power? The Brick Experiment Channel set up a LEGO flywheel and gear mechanism which he proceeded to spin using only his fingers and a piece of string. He measured the rotations using a laser and a marker to calculate its speed.

Most cars have a 4-, 6-, or 8-cylinder engine. Even a $3 Million Bugatti tops out at 16 cylinders. But this LEGO vehicle has an insane 100-cylinder powertrain. Brick Experiment Channel built this monster which is so long that it needs a 10-point turn to turn a corner. Fortunately, there is a fix – stacking the engine vertically.

For those unfamiliar with Line-X, it’s a heavy-duty coating used for truck bed liners, fender flares, and other vehicle equipment. Tools in Action wanted to see what would happen if they sprayed the coating onto a spinning power drill. The resulting mess could pass for a piece of modern art.

GazR’s Extreme Brick Machines built this unique LEGO Technic vehicle that stores energy in a flywheel. A rig consisting of 21 Powered-Up L motors and six Smart Hubs transfers power to the flywheel, then the car can continue driving on its own. It doesn’t go very far but has enough torque to climb a hill.

With a record low temperature of -64.4°C (-83.9°F), Yakutsk, Russia, is known as the coldest city in the world. Local resident Kiun B braved the outdoors on a typically chilly winter day to perform six experiments to show just how quickly stuff freezes there. We need to try that banana hammer trick here in Chicago.

After playing around with a gasoline-powered pogo stick you could buy in the 1970s, The Backyard Scientist wanted to see what other kinds of things you could add a gas engine to that don’t need one. So he took a tiny nitromethane-powered engine and revved up a desk fan, a USB charger, and a toothbrush.

Inspired by Smarter Every Day’s powerful home run machine, the guys from How Ridiculous wanted to try and beat Destin’s 717-foot batting record. So they teamed up with aeronautical engineering firm Innovaero to a create a batting machine that imitates a helicopter’s rotor blades. This thing is terrifying as it spins up.

BeamNG.drive is known for its ability to simulate vehicle dynamics and crashes with impressive accuracy. In addition to weather conditions, it can also replicate gravitational forces. In this clip from The Action Lab, he shows off what might happen if you tried to drive a pickup truck on the Moon, Jupiter, and even the Sun.

Real laser beams don’t behave like they do in science fiction. Instead of firing in short blasts, they appear as a single coherent beam of light. The Action Lab shows a simple way to achieve the sci-fi effect in camera using a spinning fan blade and by taking advantage of a digital camera’s rolling shutter effect.

Allen Pan is a big Mythbusters fan – but he thinks they got one of their experiments wrong. In 2008 Adam, Jamie, and Grant attempted to create a stun gun that shoots electricity through water and failed. Allen came up with a different approach, playing with laminar flow to keep power flowing through two streams of water.

The main riff from Metallica’s Enter Sandman isn’t that hard to play on an electric guitar. But it’s much trickier to hold a pick and get the fret positions right while wearing rubber gloves. JMAPMUSIC wanted to see how many pairs of gloves he could wear before the song became unrecognizable.

Not long ago, The Backyard Scientist and his pals built a series of dangerous toys. This time, he’s replicated a few toys kids could actually buy, including ones that could strangle you, scramble your brains, and break bones. The highlight: a gas-powered pogo stick that got banned after one year on the market.

Engineer Mark Rober keeps his promise for bigger and more spectacular experiments by building the tallest ever stream of elephant toothpaste, a foamy mess created by mixing hydrogen peroxide, soap, and potassium iodide. The trick to sending the stream sky-high was bolting the giant steel flask to a concrete pad.

We’ve all seen the old baking soda and vinegar volcano experiment at some point. The Action Lab shows off a far more energetic and long-lasting mini volcano, but it requires the use of a toxic chemical that needs to be handles very carefully.

The Hydraulic Press Channel loves to subject things to the force of its 150-ton press. Here’s a compilation of some of the strongest, most dangerous, and most satisfying crushes over the years. It’s also a great demonstration of the varying strengths of different metals.

Pouring boiling water into liquid nitrogen will result in a highly energetic reaction. YouTuber Nick Uhas and his pals put together an experiment where they poured 55 gallons of hot H2O into 200 liters of LN2 and added some soap and washable paint for color. The resulting explosion of bright blue vapor and foam is quite spectacular.

A viewer wrote to the Hydraulic Press Channel with the hypothetical question of whether it would be possible to compress loose ash with enough force that it would turn into a rock. Naturally, they complied and dumped a bucket of moistened ash into a cylinder to see what would happen under the pressure of their 150-ton press.

When we want to extract the creamy filling in the middle of an Oreo cookie, we use our teeth. But James over at The Action Lab prefers to use science. Watch as he uses a vacuum chamber to separate both cookies from the creamy middle without damaging any part. Watch the full experiment and explanation of why it happens here.