Dip your hand in molten lead without being burned!

"Don't try this at home," isn't enough of a warning for this.

Adam Savage recently answered a question about this video asking whether it was as surreal an experience as it seemed.

Adam said, 'yes', it was and went on to explain why it works, why they were understandably afraid of it, and how they slightly cheated by wetting their hands first.

There's a lot of explanation about the leidenfrost effect and how it protected their hands (and hot dogs), but the short version is that if the surface is hot enough relative to the liquid, enough of the liquid can instantly boil, creating a cushion of boiling gas between the liquid and the solid surface, sort of protecting the two from each other.

That's all well and good - as well as an explanation of how walking on hot coals works - but I'm still not sure I'd trust myself with the molten lead.

Why salt crystals grow as pyramids (sometimes)

Some explanations are so remarkably simply that I never would've thought of them.

I've heard of hopper crystals in bismuth for years. I always assumed that they were studied by a scientist named Hopper. In this video, Adam Ragusea explains that they're actually called hopper crystals (not Hopper crystals) because they resemble the shape of a hopper that feeds ingredients into a production line.

And that's just the surface level of new knowledge that I got from this video. Adam spends much more time trying to explain why making hopper crystals of salt - the ones he shows and that I have in my cabinets at home as Maldon salt - is hard to do. Apparently they only form in super-saturated salt solutions and then only stay hopper-shaped pyramids until they either bump into other crystals to form a raft or get heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the solution and in-fill with more salt.

If only they could get them to grow in space - as an International Space Station experiment shown in the video recounts...