Some researchers wanted to know what would happen if a person fell into the lava lake of the Erta Ale volcano in Ethiopia. Would the force of the impact be enough to break through the thick crust, or would the person simply lie on top of the crust and get toasted?
To answer this important question, the researchers used a 30kg bag of trash as a stand-in for a human and threw it into the lava, from a height of 80 meters. Watch the video to see what happened. If they're true mad scientists, they'll find a way to repeat the test with a human body.
Sent there recently by California high school students to measure the radiation from a solar storm. Details here. I wish my high school science projects had been that cool. Instead, they were all intensely boring. The only one I even remember was a water electrolysis experiment that I had to work on for weeks, and which involved the edge-of-your-seat thrill of watching a battery split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde creates temporary clouds inside rooms by regulating the temperature and humidity inside the rooms.
When I saw this it immediately reminded me of an experiment conducted in the eighteenth century by the Dutch scientist Martin van Marum. He created two artificial clouds by filling calf's bladders with hydrogen, causing them to float around his laboratory. He gave one of these bladder-clouds a positive charge, and another a negative charge. As these charged clouds floated around, sparks would pass between them. This was Van Marum's way of simulating a lightning storm.
But van Marum had an extra trick that was always a great crowd pleaser. He introduced a third (non-charged) cloud into the room. When this non-charged cloud passed between the two charged ones as they were exchanging sparks, it would noisily explode into flames (kinda like a miniature Hindenburg). That's how to do an interior cloud installation properly!
One of our illustrious founders, Alex B., has been away from us too long. Now he offers us The Mad Science Museum and says he might be back blogging at WU. For now, visit his new site!
The streets of Rome are a little quieter today as thousands of locals have chosen to skip work and head for the hills after a huge earthquake was predicted to hit the Italian Capital some time today by a well-known Italian seismologist, over 30 years ago!
Raffaele Bendandi was a self-taught scientist who believed that earthquakes were caused by the gravitational influence of the Sun, Moon and other planets. Though he never attempted to provide proof for his theories, which he believed were intuitively correct, Bendandi scored a number of notable successes in 1910s and 1920s that led to him being feted as “the man who can predict earthquakes” and made a Knight of the Crown of Italy by Mussolini (who also banned him from making public predictions). Because of this ban, Bendandi made no further earthquake predictions until the 1970s, when he successfully forecast the 1976 quake that hit Friuli, Italy.
Bendandi also claimed to have detected another planet, which he named Faenza, orbiting closer to the Sun than Mercury, but, like his science of ‘seismogenics’, his findings are roundly dismissed by modern scientists as imaginative but nothing more.
That he even made today’s prediction is a matter of dispute. Many sources claim that the prediction comes from dates written on notes found after his death and do not give a specific event or location at all, and even among Bendandi’s dedicated following, there is argument as to whether he predicted the Rome quake is due today or in 2511.
Still such is the reputation of Bendandi, who died in 1979, that as much as 18% of city employees are reported to have called in sick today, and many stores are closed and shuttered. (BBC News).
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.