Awesome Science

Still wishing those Star Wars ABC posters were available? These engraved Mad Scientist blocks include “F is for Freeze Ray,” “H is for Henchmen,” and “U is for Underground Lair.”

We wish St. Louis’ City Museum existed when we were kids; it has everything from multi-story slides and dinosaur caves to a rooftop sky tunnels made out of airplanes. Thanks, Doug!

And a thousand physicists squealed at 3×10^8 m/s: Particle Zoo is a collection of subatomic particle plushes. They include everything from quarks and electrons to the elusive Higgs Boson.

No, it’s not a UFO: the flying saucer above is actually a backshell that will protect the Mars Science Laboratory rover (which launches Fall 2009) when it reenters the Martian atmosphere.

Throw in a low coefficient of friction and a bit of angular momentum, and you get Hurricane Balls; they’re two welded ball bearings which spin at crazy high speeds with a puff of air.

Mythbusters has a preoccupation with cannons, not that we’re complaining. Their Creamer Cannon uses non-dairy creamer to create an explosion that is both terrifying and awesome to watch.

Laid out in logarithmic, Height is a hand-drawn poster by xkcd that puts everything from the Eiffel Tower to the Horsehead Nebula in perspective; it measures 28″ and will ship 10/15.

Using C++, OpenFrameWorks, and OpenCV, Chris O’Shea and rAndom Int’l created Audience, a funky flock of 64 interactive mirrors at the Royal Opera House in the UK.

Like Ruben’s Tube, these musical Tesla coils by Steve Ward and Jeff Larson are designed to be seen and heard. Above: listen to them play the Zelda theme song. Even crazier: Lightsabers.

Math nerds the world over will love the Pi Be Rational t-shirt, which gets right to the decimal point. Though, like many of us, the negative square root is real; he’s just complex, too.

Physics class needn’t be boring: a Rubens’ Tube uses sound waves, propane and fire to put on a pyrotechnics show. It was MADE for hard rock: skip to 2:00 to really watch things cook.

Above is a methane rocket test by XCOR Aerospace; check out those shock diamonds! There are certain advantages to methane, including lower price, higher density and easier storage.

The movie above was filmed at NASA’s Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley; Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have turned magnetism into a visual and auditory feast for the eyes.

The BBC’s “Britain From Above” uses satellite data and jazzes it up with computer graphics. Jaw dropping: watch thousands of taxis, boats and planes go about their business.

This spectacular lightning video was taken at 10k frames per second by Tim Samaras. The initial tentacles are electrons heading down; the final stroke is electrons heading back up.