As dangerous as explosions are in air, they are even more destructive in water. Because air is a compressible fluid, some part of an explosion’s energy is directed into air compression. Water, on the other hand, is incompressible, which makes it an excellent conductor of shock waves. In the video above we see some simple underwater explosions using water bottles filled with dry ice or liquid nitrogen. The explosions pulsate after detonation due to the interplay between the expanding gases and the surrounding water. When the gases expand too quickly, the water pressure is able to compress the gases back down. When the water pushes too far, the gases re-expand and the cycle repeats until the explosion’s energy is expended. This pulsating change in pressure is part of what makes underwater explosions so dangerous, especially to humans. Note in the video how the balloons ripple and distort due to the changing pressure. Those same changes in pressure can cause major internal damage to people. (Video credit: The Backyard Scientist; submitted by logicalamaze)
First U.S. Space Walk (From the Earth to the Moon)
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51_TXnerpRE)
(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSiehK2asbI)
(via New Galactic Supercluster Map Shows Milky Way's 'Heavenly' Home )
The Right Stuff Ending (1983)
There will always be those who mean to do us harm. To stop them, we risk awakening the same evil within ourselves. Our first instinct is to seek revenge when those we love are taken from us. But that’s not who we are… When Christopher Pike first gave me his ship, he had me recite the Captain’s Oath. Words I didn’t appreciate at the time. But now I see them as a call for us to remember who we once were and who we must be again. And those words: Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), dir. J. J. Abrams.
The simple coalescence of a drop with a pool is more complicated than the human eye can capture. Fortunately, we have high-speed cameras. Here a droplet coalesces by what is known as the coalescence cascade. Because it has been dropped with very little momentum, the droplet will initially bounce, then seem to settle like a bead on the surface. A tiny film of air separates the drop and the pool at this point. When that air drains away, the drop contacts the pool and part–but not all!–of it coalesces. Surface tension snaps the remainder into a smaller droplet which follows the same pattern: bounce, settle, drain, partially coalesce. This continues until the remaining droplet is so small that it can be coalesced completely. (Image credit: Laboratory of Porous Media and Thermophysical Properties, source video)