Happy Fourth

(via Nag on the Lake)

Fireworks Guns

When John Adams wrote about American celebrating Independence day with bonfires and illuminations, he never dreamt it would be like this. CodyBPyrotechnics shows us the latest innovations in Roman candles. The ones available for consumer use are bigger than ever before. There's also a model of launcher that resemble a Gatling gun. Why would you need a rotating gun for fireworks? I guess because it just seems cool. The real innovation is that you can aim your massive fireworks somewhere other than straight up, which doesn't seem all that safe to me. He compares several of these guns in this video. 
 
The fireworks are pretty, but watching a video is as risky as I want to get with this. Not to mention I dont want to pay for such a single-use gun. These should not be used near people, or forests, or homes, or after holiday drinking. (via Geeks Are Sexy) 

Pot Shot

From 1931. (via Undine)

Homemade Rocket Revolver

A handheld rocket launcher is bad enough, so how about one that carries three rockets at a time? The YouTuber called Current Concept has a 3D printer and plenty of time, so that seemed like a challenge- the kind that will get you a knock on the door from some government agency. Still, he started out knowing nothing about rockets, so the main part of the story is figuring out how his rockets failed so hilariously. And they failed in every kind of way. 

The next challenge was to design the revolver, which he skips through quickly. Maybe it's because he didn't want anyone to try this at home for national security reasons, but I believe it's because it wasn't quite as funny as the rockets. The rocket revolver finally worked! And you'll be glad to hear that the only one injured was himself. There's a sponsor message from 4:28 to 5:13. (via Born in Space) 

If the Sun Were a Laser Beam

The What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich has returned to form with a theoretical question that would surely lead to the death of everyone. Humans have learned to concentrate light into a small space to produce lasers, which can be dangerous depending on their power. What if the sun did that, with all its power? What if the star concentrated all its light and heat into a single laser beam the diameter of, say, a meter? As you might guess, this is not good. Yet how each of us would die depends on where you are when it happens, and what would happen to the planet itself might surprise you. 

All in all, we would prefer the sun to stay the way it is, radiating heat and light in all directions, and sending us just the right amount to power life on earth.  

Big Pumpkin vs. Little Car

What do you do with a car that's 35 years old, has stopped running, and is no good for a trade in? What do you do with a pumpkin that weights nearly a ton and is too tough to cut? Both belonged to one man- Alan Gebert of Millville, Utah, so the answer was to smash them into each other. 

The 1991 Geo Metro named Frosty had been a loyal transport for 35 years, and a tribute video about it went viral earlier this year when Gebert retired from his day job. Gebert's plan was to eventually drop a giant pumpkin on it to give the car a fitting sendoff when it quit working, which it did this year. Gebert grows giant pumpkins for fun, and this year's behemoth weighed 1,917 pounds and won first prize at the Utah Giant Pumpkin Festival weigh-off. 

The pumpkin drop was staged at Hee Haw Farms. A crane lifted the pumpkin 14 stories high and dropped it, to the utter satisfaction of the crowd below. Both the pumpkin and the car were destroyed. 

Testing Firecrackers

A guy in China is testing the power of different levels of firecrackers by placing them under a cooking pot. He starts with the least powerful firecracker he has, which is still enough to lift the pot off the ground. As they increasingly get bigger, the pot flies to amazing heights. Do not try this at home! It appears quite dangerous, although if you're not in China, you probably can't get this variety of firecrackers.

He's purportedly testing the firecrackers, but I'm most impressed with the pot. How heavy is that thing? What is it made of? It goes to ridiculous heights before showing even the slightest dent. Up until the last explosion, it's only slightly damaged by falling, not from the fireworks. (via Laughing Squid) 

Cup of Tea

(via She Who Seeks)

Memories

(via Slow Robot)

Electrocuting a Watermelon

Your Fourth of July picnic will surely have a watermelon, but what if a storm suddenly blows in? Greg Leyh of Lightning On Demand is an electrical engineer with a voice made for The Muppet Show. His talents do not extend to summoning lightning, but he has a 40 kilojoule high voltage capacitor bank that he wanted to test, and a watermelon is a visually interesting way to do it. In this video, he sends 160 megawatts of electricity through the melon just to see what happens. 

If you just want to see the electrical strike, skip to the three-minute mark. The explosion is shown in slow motion and then in a close-up so you can see how the interior of the melon lights up as the electricity hits. Then melon guts and water are gloriously flung to the horizon, or as Leyh says, "The melon has achieved a high state of division." In other words, he blew it up real good. (via Born in Space) 

Fun With Gravity

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker of Muppet Labs not only explain gravity, but perform field experiments that mainly consist of dropping things that satisfyingly smash to pieces. And who better to assist with such experiments than Adam Savage? They are recreating Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment, more or less, and make their point in the first half of the video. The rest is nonsense, but a lot of fun, as they channel David Letterman and come up with more and more things that are just fun to drop and smash. Savage even tries to hire Beaker away from Honeydew, which sets up more mayhem. Isn't science wonderful?  

The Fall of Kingda Ka

The roller coaster known as Kingda Ka was erected at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey in 2005. At the time, it was the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world. It also gave a memorable phallic feature to the landscape. But that was 20 years ago, and nothing lasts forever. The demolition of Kingda Ka was last month.

It came down exactly as planned, and not even a tree was injured. But when that tower hit the ground, every beam and strut just fell apart like they were toothpicks! This might give you the impression that the tower wasn't all that sturdy for the 19 years it was in operation. But it's better to assume that the experts who planned and carried out the demolition loosened those components before detonating the final explosion that brought it to earth. (via Boing Boing)

An Unstoppable Force Meets an Immovable Object

 

Typhoon Yagi raged across Southeast Asia earlier this month with such force that it has been classified as a super typhoon. More than 700 people have been killed by the storm, thousands were injured, and the damage exceeds $15 billion. In Vietnam, floodwaters caused two sand dredgers laden with equipment to become unmoored on the Chay River in Vietnam on September 9. One was carrying a crane! Both barges struck the To Mau bridge. As you can see in this footage, the first barge was completely broken up, with the wrecked pieces passing under the bridge. That's some powerful flow. The second barge became stuck, although the crane was eventually toast as the dredger came apart underneath it. The bridge held up surprisingly well, considering the mass that hit it.  (Thanks, Brother Bill!)

Tweet of the Day

Perfectly executed demolition pic.twitter.com/vMz99i61Su

— Interesting Things (@interesting_aIl) May 24, 2024

Like dominos! (Thanks, WTM!)

The Power of Explosions

Yes, we manage to blow things up real good. MetaBallStudios takes us through the power of various explosives starting with a firecracker, which is not supposed to kill anyone but could under the right circumstances. The comparison moves up through ever-more destructive big booms. Some of the real explosions are shown in fictional scenarios so that we can understand the effects better. For example, the nuclear bomb detonated in Nagasaki in 1945 is shown over modern-day Tokyo, and the 2020 Beirut explosion (which was an industrial accident) is shown over New York City. That can be pretty unnerving. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

Could Humans Survive a Major Asteroid Impact?

We learned long ago that the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago spelled the end of the dinosaurs, and most other species on earth. Reading about the effects of that impact is chilling, but you know what would be even more chilling? To imagine what that asteroid impact would do to the earth as it is now. There were no humans around 66 million years ago, no cities, no infrastructure, and no national boundaries.

John D. Boswell, also known as Melodysheep (previously https://www.neatorama.com/tag/melodysheep/ at Neatorama) took what we know about the asteroid impact and transposed it onto our modern world, so that we can envision just how big and earth-shattering it was. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

I also found out that if you put the word Chicxulub into Google search, the asteroid rolls across your screen and you can feel the impact.  

Why The World's Biggest Aquarium Broke

You might remember when the AquaDom in Berlin shattered in 2022. The AquaDom was 46 feet tall (15 meters), held a million liters of sea water, and even had an elevator inside it! The aquarium stood for 19 years and became quite an attraction for the Radisson Hotel in whose lobby it stood.

When it shattered, no one witnessed it, because it was in the middle of the night and there were no security cameras trained on it. Two people were injured and the lobby, as well as six shops adjacent to it, were ruined. Most of the tropical fish died, too. A team of investigators painstakingly gathered all the shattered parts to determine where the failure began and what may have caused it. While they came up with three good possibilities, the actual reason for the destruction has never been determined. However, the process of looking for it was quite a job, and well worth a watch. There's a 45-second ad beginning at 2:00. (via Damn Interesting)

Tweet of the Day

#AdventCalendar 6 On reflection, buying his nephew a popgun as a stocking filler wasn’t his best idea. pic.twitter.com/FOueX07GkH

— Dame VictoriaG Esq (MPhil (failed)) (@ancientnmodern) December 6, 2022

(via Everlasting Blort)

The Most Impactful Event in Earth's History

The Chicxulub asteroid hit the earth in the Yucatan subcontinent 66 million years ago and changed everything. The impact itself was devastating for a large part of the earth, but the aftereffects changed the entire earth. It even changed the global climate! And that's why we have no dinosaurs today, unless you count the birds that somehow survived. We've never had an event as powerful or as destructive as the Chicxulub impact before or after. Could it happen again? Yes, but the chances are pretty small. I hope that makes you feel better about it because we've got plenty of other things to worry about. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

400 MPH Bowling Ball to the Dome

Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys, teamed up with the Brett and Scott from the YouTube channel How Ridiculous to bring us a thoroughly disturbing demonstration of wanton destruction. They procured an anatomically-correct model head, and then shot a bowling ball at it with a cannon. The bowling ball is traveling at almost 400 miles per hour, so you know that head is going to be obliterated. Yep, they blew it up real good. But they have more heads, so they get to blow more of them away. I'm glad they chose their heads to be equipped with green blood instead of red. (via Digg)