Archive for the ‘Demo du jour’ Category

Newton’s Cradle: Fail!

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Our lecture demo of Newton's Cradle, also known as Collision Balls, dropped one of its steel balls.   Fortunately, it is one of the outer balls, which means we can still use it, but with only five balls.  The wikipedia page linked above has our actual apparatus as the first reference. The ...

Exploding mouse red blood cells

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

I suppose I'm taking a chance, what with the law about visualizations of animal cruelty still under consideration by the Supremes.   I feel a little cruel making my dog sit and wait (and drool) for her dinner, so I'm not being flip about this. I brought our crufty video enabled microscope ...

Ig Nobel Moments of Science

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

The Ig Nobel Awards Ceremony is happening tonight at 7:15 in Sanders Theater at Harvard University.   My friend and co-conspirator Joost and I will once again don our lab coats as Performing Scientists, and perpetrate two Moments of Science. Each Moment of Science is a one minute science demonstration, presented and ...

Gas laws

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Today, the physics professor was demonstrating centripetal force, by swinging a bucket around and not spilling the water within. Then, to up the ante, he put a wineglass full of faux wine on a small board made like a swing.  He got it going, and whipped it around four or ...

Hey, where did the categories go?

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Must have been the upgrade to wordpress.  I liked the categories, I guess I will put them back in.  I can go over my ouevre and re-assign.  I haven't hit 100 posts yet, so its not that laborious. Physics demos today. A rigid pair of verticals and a horizontal clamped up to ...