Something unusual happens when a drop of molten glass falls into water. As it cools, it creates a crystal clear tadpole-like droplet that’s bulletproof on one end, but impossibly fragile on the other. We’ve known about these droplets for 400 years, but scientists have only recently figured out what makes them almost…
As fun as building your own six-foot model rocket might be, launching it is no where near as impressive as watching one of NASA’s towering rockets blast into orbit—unless you point a high-speed camera at it. At 28,000 frames per second, a wonderful pyrotechnics show is revealed as it leaves the launch pad.
Even the strongest artificial glues are completely useless when you try to apply them underwater, but somehow shellfish are able to hold fast to rocks to deter predators from trying to carry them away. Clearly, nature has already figured out how to make glues that work underwater, and now researchers may have…
There's a recent fitness trend that sees people switching from a traditional desk to working on a treadmill to maximize their physical activity. The problem is that at anything more vigorous than a casual stride, it's difficult to read a static display while on a treadmill. At least until researchers at Purdue…
There's no shortage of plans online for building a simple ping pong cannon that can fire balls at hundreds of miles per hour. But you're probably not going to find the details of Purdue University Professor Mark French's cannon, since his creation can accelerate a ping pong ball to 900 miles per hour, or just over…
It's not going to replace the claw that snatches prizes in the machine at your local arcade. But this tiny scotch tape gripper could one day provide a cheap and low-tech way for autonomous vehicles to snatch samples. And you thought duct tape was the king of adhesives.
It might look like a souped-up bagel toaster you'd find in a cafeteria, but this radiant heat oven was designed by a Purdue University food researcher to fry up foods without requiring them to swim in a vat of fatty oil. Which means healthier fried foods with less calories, fat, and cooking times.
The only painful part of wearing an adhesive bandage is having to peel them off, so researchers at Purdue University's Birck Nanotechnology Center have developed a way to turn Band-Aids into a nearly pain free alternative to needles. By integrating a tiny heat-powered pump, adhesive patches could automatically deliver…
The surgeons in this (somewhat gory, you've been warned!) video followed a lighted path to the cancer cells they needed to remove.
Rube Goldberg contraptions are cool no matter what—but getting one to mechanize dinosaurs, WWII, the Cold War, and the 2012 apocalypse is extra icing. Extra extra icing is the machine's 244 steps—a new world record for convoluted mechanisms.
