If you visit Pacific Beach in San Diego, you might spy an older dude skating in slow motion along the boardwalk. Known as "Slomo," man’s been mistaken for many things through the years—homeless, insane, etc.—but he’s actually there very much on purpose. This short New York Times doc is his strange, inspiring story.
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Plants have evolved all kinds of wonderful mechanisms that let them disperse their seeds and reproduce, from puffy dandy lions to maple keys that spin their way to the ground. But none are quite as impressive as the squirting cucumber, which launches its seed pods like tiny high-speed missiles.
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You may remember our friend Destin at Smarter Every Day shooting an AK-47 underwater
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Here’s a brilliant experiment you can do at home if you’ve got yourself a lengthy chain of metal beads, and a container big enough to hold them. You just take one end of the chain out and drop it so that it drags the rest with it, and almost immediately you’ll see it rise up out of the container like it’s magically defying gravity.
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The AK-47 can be considered the Timex watch of the gun world. It takes a licking, and keeps on ticking, except that by ticking we of course mean firing round after round of ammunition. The automatic machine gun is based on a gas recoil system that uses the hot expanding gases of a bullet being fired to automatically rechamber the next round, and surprisingly, it appears to work even better under water.
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Given you rarely see owls in the day outside of a zoo or museum setting, you’ve probably never thought of them as stone cold killers. But when hunting at night they can be as terrifying as a hawk, particularly if you happen to see them swooping in from a mouse’s point of view. More »
BBC Earth Productions is back with another mesmerizing bit of high-speed footage that captures hawks as they’re swooping in to attack their prey. Seeing all of the bird’s complex feather mechanics in action as it slows mid-air to snatch its target is utterly fascinating, and seeing it extend those terrifying claws will make you happy you’re not a tiny rodent caught in its crosshairs. [YouTube via Laughing Squid] More »
Slo-mo footage of wet dogs shaking themselves dry are a dime a dozen online. But wet dogs and wet hedgehogs and rats? Now that’s something new, and we can thank BBC Earth Productions for this mesmerizing footage. More »
There are incredible feats of engineering going completely unnoticed all around us. The way a high speed camera shutter works is one of them. More »
We’ve probably all seen high-speed footage of soap bubbles detonating in mid-air. But footage shot at 18,000 frames per second? That brings a whole new level of awesome to this childhood pastime. Just makes sure you stop and remember the countless bubbles that had to die so The Slow Mo Guys could bring us this lovely footage. Your deaths were not in vain. [YouTube] More »
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