Tuesday, November 04, 2025
Making Liquid Out of Sand and Air
Mark Rober builds a contraption in his backyard to play with sand. It's more than a sandbox- it's a hot tub full of sand, which can be made liquid with the injection of air. But you better keep that air flowing, because without it, you're trapped! Watch him try all kinds of weird tricks to show how sand and air acts like water. Oh yeah, if you're going to dive into liquid sand headfirst, you might want to pinch your nose shut. It's still sand. He eventually gets around to explaining the science of how it works, but most of the video is the fun stuff. (via Digg)
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5 comments:
Wow!
So what he is doing, basically, is playing in quicksand.
The phenomenon is known as a.fluidized bed and has several applications in chemical engineering, the most prominent of which is the FCC - Fluidized Catalytic Cracker - in which heavy hydrocarbons are 'cracked' into lighter ones such as motor gasoline. Aside from that, it looks like fun!
Unlike everywhere else lately that someone said enthusiastically to me, "This is the coolest thing ever," this in fact is. It reminded me instantly of a movie I saw once on teevee at my Uncle Jack's and Aunt Wanda's house when I was a little boy, that made a profound impression on me, about a boy interested in astronomy (as I was), who witnesses from his window a spaceship crash in the bleak sand dunes near his house on the edge of town. It turns out to be a /trap of boiling, down-funneling sand/ that catches people, including his parents and the police, everybody but him, and the aliens do something that turns people into bad-dream robots of themselves that talk softly, gently, menacingly weirdly. You can tell they're taken over, by a tiny mark on the skin at the base of the neck (the camera moves to show you this, and the music does something tingly but also low). The boy saves the world, and his parents, by somehow avoiding capture and conversion himself, while getting the U.S. Army to come and get down through the sand to the ship and break the glass around the alien octopus/brain creature, which kills it and releases its control over everyone. Whew!
Invaders from Mars-original Robert Menzies 1953-remade in 1986 by Tobe Hooper.
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