6 Everyday Things That Look Completely Insane in Slow Motion

Everyone reading this probably has a cigarette lighter in their house, if not in their pocket. And we bet you've never stopped to appreciate how beautiful it is:

Look at that! It's like a tiny little fireworks display, at your fingertips. See those sparks at the beginning? Those are tiny, molten globules of steel that actually jump up and explode in mid-air.

While the steel is melting and bursting all over the place, the button under the strike wheel opens a valve and, since its boiling point is relatively high, the liquid butane in the lighter evaporates and rushes out to join the party. Then the flying globs of molten steel heat the gas enough for it to break down and rebond with oxygen, and voila! You've just birthed an itty-bitty phoenix. That you used to light a bong.

YouTube is full of videos like this, proving that the internet is a wonderful tool for appreciating the simple things in life:

Here's one slowed down even more, really showing off how the individual balls of metal pop and burst in mid-air like the Fourth of July:

Almost makes us want to take up smoking.

It's just that you have to record it at 2,700 frames per second to find out.

What's happening there is that the balloon gets all big and ... balloony because the air particles inside it act like a bunch of drunk dudes trying to find their way out of a nightclub -- all bumping into each other and stumbling against the walls and hitting on your girlfriend even though she's clearly sitting right next to you. The walls expand and eventually burst, but in completely different ways depending on how they fail. For instance, you give the balloon one place to pop, with a pin (or in this case, some kind of dissolving spray), you get the Pac-Man effect:

But if you just keep blowing on it so that the force is pushing out in every direction equally, you get the split-second balloon skeleton:

Again, if you see it in real time, you just see a balloon vanishing as if by magic (watch how the guy doesn't even have time to even react to the sound before the whole process has completed itself:

Incidentally, the reason balloons make that "popping" noise is for the exact same reason as a stick of dynamite or a gunshot -- the ball of expanding gases creates a pressure wave that smacks into your eardrums. Only a balloon doesn't produce a huge ball of fire ... unless you fill it with Hydrogen, that is:

Okay, we totally want to try that now. Here's what happens when they do it with a giant one:

No, that's just Mother Nature demonstrating her uncanny ability to fucking erase you from this planet at a whim by showing off one of the pants-shitting-iest weapons in her arsenal: ground to cloud lightning. It turns out that bolts of Zeus's wrath can actually go either direction, and it's theorized that the bottom-up bolts you see are from previous lightning strikes building up a charge in the ground. So we guess lightning ... bounces?

Not that regular top-down strikes are any less terrifying:

Notice how it seems to send out little feelers, like tentacles made of pure electricity, before WHAM! Big-ass electro-shaft, right down the middle. We like to pretend that anything that happened to be in its way at the time did something to deserve such a sizzling fate (fish can be real assholes sometimes, you know?), because otherwise the entire phenomenon paints Mother Nature as, frankly, kind of a bitch.

What you're looking at are the first, invisible "leaders" of ionized air that form lightning, basically channels of conductive air that will then discharge in a pants-shitting way, all at once. Slow it down enough, and you can see the process happening -- the charge exploding up the path traced by the ionized leaders:

And if you'd like a reminder of what it's like to be at ground level when this shit goes down:

Popcorn is special because it's one of only a few foods in your kitchen that you explode in order to eat it. But slow it down and it looks like some kind of alien larvae bursting out of a cocoon:

Did you see the little jet of steam shoot out the bottom? Sometimes you'll see the seed jump into the air before it pops, like here ...

... and that blast of steam is why (notice how the shell peels open from the bottom up, as the same force that propelled it upward blows the outer casing open). Yeah, popcorn is weird.

So weird, in fact, that NASA has a section on their website dedicated to popcorn ... we'll pause here for a second so you can re-read that if you need to ... where they explain that popcorn's trademark pop is caused by water inside the kernel. When the popcorn is heated, the water molecules inside the kernel start frantically moshing -- we might even be talking a wall of death type situation here. The molecules get hotter and hotter and sweatier and sweatier until the outer casing of the kernel just can't contain their pure moshy metalness anymore.

Meanwhile, the starch inside the kernel gets superheated into a gelatin. When the casing is finally breached, the remaining gas in the corn causes the insides to expand. The kernel proceeds to turn itself inside out and the starch immediately cools and hardens into a foam, like the tastiest Transformer ever.

To do this, they developed an imaging system called Femto-Photography, which involves throwing lasers, a Coke bottle (?) and some mirrors together, with an end result of being able to visualize the movement of photons at a trillion frames per second. That's a trillion as in 12 zeros, folks -- the standard rate for full-motion video is 24 to 30 fps.

Without getting too technical, their "video" is actually a series of still photos captured basically all at once, by 500 sensors each operating on a delay of one trillionth of a second. They each capture the pulse of photons at a different stage of the journey, then piece it together in a YouTube video for your viewing pleasure.

Besides being able to make light look like something that should be pewing out of the end of a Storm Trooper's barrel, Femto-Photography has some other, equally amazing, applications. Obviously it lets them study the movement of light particles like never before (which is helpful in designing, well, any future device that uses light). And for example, we're betting there are plenty of soldiers or police officers who've found themselves in a situation where the ability to see around corners would come in handy. Well, thanks to Femto-Photography, science has made that happen, thanks to this device's ability to track the movement of photons bouncing off the unseen object:

Thanks, science! Now, when can we expect that feature on our smartphones?

Related Reading: Enjoy this article? Then you'll love the exact opposite. There's a dam blowing up- what more could you ask for? Keep the hole we just blew in your mind open, with normal things that look trippy under a microscope. Add an electron microscope, and alcohol looks the way LSD feels. Double down on zoomed-in craziness and click this link. Chalk will give you freaking nightmares.