XTREME QUIPS

An awesome promotional video from the European Research Commission trying to get more people interested in science. If you thought chemistry was boring, then I hope this ad has somehow changed your perception on the subject.

No, that is not a typo.

Scientists in South Korea claim they have used cloning to produce four dogs which can glow red in the dark. While it sounds like a wacky student prank, it actually has major implications for medical science.

The four cloned beagles look perfectly normal in daylight, but several bodyparts glow red in the dark, including the nails, skin, eyes and abdomen. The entire body glows under ultraviolet light. The effect comes from a gene which produces a protein which glows.

The project involved taking canine fibroblast cells, which appear mainly in connective tissue, and injecting them with a virus which inserted the fluorescent gene into the nucleus. This nucleus was then put into an egg cell from another dog, with this cell used in an implanted embryo.

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Very dangerous stuff!

What happens when you drop a magnet down a copper tube?

Eddy Current Tubes — Drop the Magnets down the tube. An eddy current is set up in a conductor in response to a changing magnetic field. Lenz’s law predicts that the current moves in such a way as to create a magnetic field opposing the change; to do this in a conductor, electrons swirl in a plane perpendicular to the changing magnetic field.

Because the magnetic fields of the eddy currents oppose the magnetic field of the falling magnet; there is attraction between the two fields. Energy is converted into heat. This principle is used in damping the oscillation of the lever arm of mechanical balances.

You don’t need to understand all that to see that it’s neat. The reaction from everyone I’ve shown this to is, “I’ll have to try that!”

Now, we just have to wait for the clinical trials to begin!

Why was Pluto demoted? What is the Kuiper belt? Do you know your way around our galactic neighborhood? Welcome to the Solar System: At least 7 billions miles across, home to 8 planets, 166 moons, and billions of asteroids, comets, and meteorites.

Check out this funny advert for the Institute of Engineering and Technology. This is probably what would happen if you fed the monkeys…

In the following video, Theo Grey from Popular Science fills soap bubbles with a hydrogen-oxygen mixture. He then puts fire to the bubbles as they rise up in the air. While this may look like a very fun experiment to attempt, we do not recommend that you try this at home.

[Via: GAS]

Lightning is hard to see as it appears and disappears in less than a second. Check out this cool animation of lightning in slow motion.

Lightning in Slow Motion

Make your own flame music visualization with this cool physics experiment. Be careful though (we wouldn’t recommend trying it at home – the garage would be better!)