What Causes Spontaneous Combustion?

What Causes Spontaneous Combustion?

Most of us experience combustion, a chemical process where a fuel combines with oxygen to produce heat and light, in the form of a fire where both the fuel and ignition source are well known.

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What Happens When You Drop a Red Hot Nickel Ball Onto Aerogel

Red hot nickel ball of fire meet your toughest opponent yet: aerogel. In fact, aerogel is such an amazing material and excellent insulator that the eternal flame of the nickel ball does absolutely nothing to it. Like, seriously. It affects the aerogel as much as the normal air around it (or in it too?). But hey. We’re in the business of seeing destruction and in order to destroy aerogel, the nickel ball brought in reinforcements in the form of an hydrogen and oxygen flame. Everything burns eventually. [Cars and Water]

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Watch a Red Hot Nickel Ball Destroy a Box of Crayons

Watching the Red Hot Nickel Ball destroy various materials just never gets old. So here’s a Red Hot Ball of Nickel turning a box of crayons into a rainbow of destruction.

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What Happens When You Drop a Red Hot Ball of Nickel Into Peanut Butter

Everyone’s favorite Red Hot Nickel Ball has been on an absurd amount of adventures between boiling a jar of honey and completely demolishing the world’s largest gummy bear. Naturally, the next stop on its quest to be submerged in everything known to man is peanut butter. Why not, right?

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You Won’t Believe What Happens When You Light These Chemicals on Fire

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you mixed Mercury(II) thiocyanate (Hg(SCN)2) and Ammonium chromate (NH4)2CrO4 together and then lit it on fire? NO?! What’s wrong with you? It’s unbelievably hellish and impossibly alien combined with one burning force of what the horrifically kraken insane.

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Watch 15,000 Volts of Raw Power Burn Lightning Strikes into Wood

When lightning flashes across the sky, you only get a chance to glimpse its fractal form for a split second. But when you send 15,000 volts coursing through plywood, you get a much better look at how it grows. Melanie Hoff, a student at the Pratt Institute in New York City did just that, and the result is a timelapse where you can see the patterns slowly grow out and smolder, like lightning made from molasses. [Vimeo Staff Picks] More »