Elon Musk has been sitting on a trove of spectacular fail videos from the SpaceX archives, and on August 31st he promised to release a blooper reel with “some epic explosion footage.” This morning, he made good on that promise. Now you can watch many millions of dollars go kaboom in just over two minutes.
When you get exclusive access to a 150-foot-tall tower, you’re going to want to do more than just take in the view. So when the team from How Ridiculous got just such an opportunity, they made the most of it, hauling a heavy anvil to the top and then dropping it on a stack of spray paint cans on the ground below.
On the night of March 11, 1437, Korean astronomers recorded a strange light low in the sky, in the tail of the constellation Scorpius. It must have been at least as bright as the North Star, Polaris, maybe even as bright as the stars of the Big Dipper. Fourteen days later, the light disappeared.
We’ve been told our entire lives not to play with fire. But whoever coined that expression never stopped to think about how flames and explosions could make falling dominoes even more captivating to watch.
If a looming helium shortage isn’t enough to dissuade you from getting balloons for your next birthday party, consider the consequences if they escape from their ribbon moorings and end up brushing against some high-voltage power lines. You might be safer decorating for your kid’s party with hand grenades.
“Oh, it’s so majestic! Watch it zoom around those trees! It gets so close to the grass! It goes upside down! It swoops over the crowd! It’s heading straight for the ground! It’s heading straight for the ground!! It’s heading straight for the ground!!! It’s hea——”
When thing go wrong underground, we’re often reminded that the Earth is nothing but a big ball of hot rocks, covered in a delicate skin of smaller, slightly cooler rocks. That became clear on Monday, when an underground water pipe exploded in Kiev, Ukraine. It actually looked kinda hilarious.
There’s no better way to celebrate a long weekend, or your nation’s birthday, than by blowing up giant paper shells packed with explosives. It’s not hard to understand how the firecrackers you played with as a kid worked, but YouTube’s BeyondSlowMotion channel reveals how those gigantic fireworks that fill the night…
Unlike a battery, which stores power as chemical energy that’s slowly and steadily discharged to keep your gadgets running, a capacitor can unload all of its juice in the blink of an eye. Even a small capacitor has the potential to stop your heart, but when it’s the size of a dishwasher, well, this watermelon…
By now we’ve all seen how dangerous some batteries can be, but the Slow Mo Guys are back with some more incredible slow-motion footage revealing that even the seemingly innocuous AA batteries stuffed in your TV remote can easily turn into a high-speed, exploding projectile if you’re not careful.
This particular engine we’re looking at has four strokes: the intake, the compression, the combustion (or power), and the exhaust. Smarter Every Day visited the guys of 805 Road King and their see through engine to show us exactly what’s going on in an engine when we fire it up and it’s pretty fascinating stuff.
Universal has bought Michael Bay’s new future dystopia project Little America. The movie is apparently set the near-future where a Trump-like president has bankrupted the country, China has called in its debts, and Americans are migrating to China looking for work. It’s also being described as “sci-fun.” I have some…
If you’re someone who occasionally puffs on electronic cigarettes, you should stop right now. Because when shit goes awry, it turns into a disgusting scene of blood, charred skin, and broken bones.
Watching popcorn pop is utterly captivating, even in real-time. But when you film the process with a high-speed camera capable of capturing 30,000 frames every second, watching those kernels explode in super slow motion turns making popcorn into a spectacle that rivals the Fourth of July.
It’s not often that a new body appears in the night sky—aside from meteors and the occasionally comet, things tend to look pretty much the same. Now, astronomers predict that a pair of stars so close they’re basically touching will collide and create a so-called red nova, resulting in a bright explosion visible to the…
Well, why the hell not. The Slow Mo Guys put an old iMac in front of a combustion tube that fires out blasts at 1,800 meters a second (that’s, uh, over 4,000 miles per hour)—and holy smokes, that thing gets smashed to bits. The combustion tube is meant to test flame acceleration and deflagration to detonation…
Over 60 people have been injured after an explosion occurred at the San Pablito fireworks market in Tultepec, Mexico, a city north of Mexico City. The blast is especially terrifying because the thick smoke plume covers the entire market while fireworks were still catching fire and going off in every direction. Nearby…
There’s an infinite number of ways the internet has improved our lives, but at the top of the list is the fact we all have easy access to videos of things getting crushed by a hydraulic press. And what better way is there to celebrate the holidays than by crushing a mountain of glitter and a CO2 cartridge? Can you…
Here’s a really fantastic use of time, resources, and uh, creative freedom: get 100,000 firecrackers and light ‘em all up at the same dang time.
It is deeply satisfying—momentarily, anyway—to watch a bloated exercise ball filled with water explode as it hits the ground. It reminds me of something I watched recently, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Huh!
