Awesome Frozen

Ice seems like a terrible material from which to build tools. That didn’t stop JaDropping Science from giving it the old college try by making hammers from ice. The trick is to combine the ice with absorbent materials to provide strength. Place your bets now on which stuffing will best reinforce the ice hammer.

If you’re going to live somewhere that’s already cold enough to keep ice frozen, we’re not sure you really need a freezer. But that didn’t stop Zhang Zhilei from making one outside of his home in Mongolia. Rather than going with a store-bought electric freezer, he froze water in baking sheets, then glued the pieces together with water to form a literal ice box.

As we’ve learned over and over again, crushing things with a hydraulic press can be quite satisfying. In this clip, the master of the machine shop, Lauri subjects tungsten, titanium, aluminum, magnesium, and copper cubes to the force of his press. Will freezing them in liquid nitrogen first cause them to explode?

Equipped with a DJI Mini 2 drone, photographer Vadim Sherbakov takes us on an eye-opening journey to Siberia’s Lake Baikal. The area is known for its beautiful rock formations, which are even more dramatic when covered with snow and ice. The film’s title is the Buryat word for lake, a tribute to the area’s indigenous people.

A few years back, the guys at the Beyond the Press channel created a small carousel on a frozen lake by cutting a circle in the ice. Now, they’re back with a super-sized version of the stunt, in which they helped make a 1000-foot diameter circle out of Finland’s lake Lappajärvi. The ice disc is estimated to weigh about 30,000 tons.

Photographer and artist Jonna Jinton lives in Northern Sweden, where frigid temperatures prevail in the winter. In this lighthearted video, she shows us what it’s like to hand wash laundry in these extreme conditions, using a frozen lake as her washing machine, and trudging through the snow to dry (or freeze) her wet clothes.

Artist and museum exhibit designer Shawn Lani has built a machine that circulates dry ice into a shallow tub of water, resulting in captivating cloud-like motion as the frozen carbon dioxide melts. His Icy Bodies exhibit can be found in a number of science museums around the world.

Photographer ZALUSKArt captured these impressively detailed time-lapse macro shots of ice crystals forming along the surface of soap bubbles as they’re frozen. Since each crystal is unique, every bubble is a one-of-a-kind, yet temporary work of art. More here.

(NSFW: Gore, Language) From the warped mind of clay animator Lee Hardcastle comes a redo of one of the most disturbing scenes from John Carpenter’s horror classic The Thing, in which the cast of Frozen drop by the Antarctic outpost.