The World’s Smallest Movie

You’re about to see the movie that holds the Guinness World Records record for the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film (see how it was made at http://youtu.be/xA4QWwaweWA). The ability to move single atoms — the smallest particles of any element in the universe — is crucial to IBM’s research in the field of atomic memory. But even nanophysicists need to have a little fun. In that spirit, IBM researchers used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other), all in pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times. A movie made with atoms …

Learn more here.

Red Hot Nickel Ball On Ice

Absolute zero is the coldest possible temperature. By international agreement, absolute zero is defined as 0K on the Kelvin scale and as −273.15° on the Celsius scale. This equates to −459.67° on the Fahrenheit scale.

At the other end of the scale things can get quite hot, see:

Amazing Superhydrophobic Spray

A hydrophobic substance is repelled by water; literally, hydrophobe means something with a fear of water.

Superhydrophobic surfaces such as the leaves of the lotus plant have surfaces that are highly hydrophobic, i.e., extremely difficult to wet.

My question is … why are we not spraying virtually everything we own with this AMAZING stuff:

Let’s Pour Liquid Nitrogen on the Floor!

This is fun …

A forest affected by a flood of corrosive sludge

Neither art installation nor photographic effect, this is the high-tide mark left by a million cubic metres of corrosive sludge that burst the banks of an industrial reservoir in Ajka, Hungary, in October 2010. Sweeping across farmland and through the villages of Kolontár and Devecser in waves up to 2 metres high, the red deluge swept cars off roads and damaged houses, before spilling into the river Torna, a tributary of the Danube. At least seven people were killed, over 100 injured, and many more displaced.

Visiting the site six months later, Spanish photographer Palíndromo Mészáros documented the effect on the landscape in a series of images. The breached reservoir held caustic waste from a local plant that refined bauxite ore into an aluminium oxide known as alumina, the basic ingredient for manufacturing aluminium. Chief among the components of this by-product was iron oxide – hence the rust-red staining – but it also contained highly alkaline sodium hydroxide, used to dissolve aluminium oxide. Learn more here.

Hand vs Liquid Nitrogen

The Leidenfrost effect is the formation of a gas barrier between a hot surface and a boiling liquid if the temperature difference is great enough. This gas barrier greatly slows the heat transfer between the two and allows the liquid to last longer and consequently the hot surface to remain hot longer. This effect can be seen in a frying pan as it’s being heated. At first the water quickly boils as it’s dropped in but at a hot enough temperature the Leidenfrost effect takes over and makes the water skate around the surface lasting a very long time.

See (DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!!!):

The genius of Mendeleev’s periodic table

The elements had been listed and carefully arranged before Dmitri Mendeleev. They had even been organized by similar properties before. So why is Mendeelev’s periodic table the one that has endured? Lou Serico explains via Ekaaluminium, an element whose existence Mendeelev predicted decades before it was discovered.

Water-hating knife slices droplet in half

Cutting a drop of water in half may sound like the kind of impossible task given to heroes of folk tales. You don’t need a magic knife, though – just one that really, really hates liquid. Scientists have shown that a superhydrophobic knife can create two cleanly separated drops, with potential applications in biomedical research.

Learn more here.

Sugar Found In Space: A Sign of Life?

Astronomers have made a sweet discovery: simple sugar molecules floating in the gas around a star some 400 light-years away, suggesting the possibility of life on other planets.

The discovery doesn’t prove that life has developed elsewhere in the universe—but it implies that there is no reason it could not. It shows that the carbon-rich molecules that are the building blocks of life can be present even before planets have begun forming.

Scientists use the term “sugar” to loosely refer to organic molecules known as carbohydrates, which are made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

The molecules that the team detected in space are the simplest form of sugar, called glycoaldehyde. Learn more here.

How big is a mole? (Not the animal, the other one.)

The word “mole” suggests a small, furry burrowing animal to many. But in this lesson, we look at the concept of the mole in chemistry. Learn the incredible magnitude of the mole–and how something so big can help us calculate the tiniest particles in the world.