I’m not sure why you’re asking me, specifically, but… yes? It doesn’t always work – the snow needs to be a specific texture and temperature to stick. A heavy blanket of freshly-fallen snow works best, preferably early in the season when it’s below freezing but not hellishly cold. It makes a bizarrely satisfying rumbling noise as you push the ball of snow further and it grows larger and larger until you can’t push it any further. It’s one of the sweetest pleasures in life.
It doesn’t work as beautifully as in cartoons, but snow does tend to stick to itself when it’s not really powdery, so you can absolutely do that.
When it’s especially windy in flat areas or gently rolling hills, you get rolly barrels of snow that look like giant bales of ice covered hay.
This liquid is boiling and freezing simultaneously because it’s reaching its ‘triple point,’ which is the temperature and pressure at which three phases of a substance (gas, liquid, and solid) co-exist in equilibrium. Source
You’ve gone and confused it for fucks sake
Fucked up a perfectly good chemical compound, is what you did. Look at it, it’s got anxiety.
Substances don’t have to be a liquid or a gas to behave like a fluid. Swarms of fire ants display viscoelastic properties, meaning they can act like both a liquid and a solid. Like a spring, a ball of fire ants is elastic, bouncing back after being squished (top image). But the group can also act like a viscous liquid. A ball of ants can flow and diffuse outward (middle image). The ants are excellent at linking with one another, which allows them to survive floods by forming rafts and to escape containers by building towers.
Researchers found the key characteristic is that ants will only maintain links with nearby ants as long as they themselves experience no more than 3 times their own weight in load. In practice, the ants can easily withstand 100 times that load without injury, but that lower threshold describes the transition point between ants as a solid and ants as a fluid. If an ant in a structure is loaded with more force, he’ll let go of his neighbors and start moving around.
When they’re linked, the fire ants are close enough together to be water-repellent. Even if an ant raft gets submerged (bottom image), the space between ants is small enough that water can’t get in and the air around them can’t get out. This coats the submerged ants in their own little bubble, which the ants use to breathe while they float out a flood. For more, check out the video below and the full (fun and readable!) research paper linked in the credits. (Video and image credits: Vox/Georgia Tech; research credit: S. Phonekeo et al., pdf; submitted by Joyce S., Rebecca S., and possibly others)
A sand pendulum that creates a beautiful pattern only by its movement.
But why does the ellipse change shape?
The pattern gets smaller because energy is not conserved (and in fact decreases) in the system. The mass in the pendulum gets smaller and the center of mass lowers as a function of time. Easy as that, an amazing pattern arises through the laws of physics.
Actually! This was a very clever setup by a team of divers in the Arctic, I believe. The person is upside down, their bouyancy belt calibrated just so that they are slightly lighter than water, and able to walk upside down on the ice. In the first segment, when his mask vents, watch the bubbles flow DOWNWARD, which is really the up that we know. Science is really fricking cool!
To all those who are wondering, while I don’t speak the language I do understand the science behind this video. Basically what is happening is they’re blowing a bunch of tiny bubbles into the dry sand, what this does is make all the particles move around each other actively making the sand act as a fluid. So while the sand is aerated you can easily move things around in it, but when it’s not, it settles and returns to a more solid mass. It’s the same idea of how real life quick sand works, just substituting water for air.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 