Is it possible to bounce a water balloon off a bed of nails? Surprisingly, yes.

In a study published this month in The European Journal of Physics, scientists dropped water balloons on a grid of 256 nails and filmed them bouncing off in slow motion.

What’s the point, you ask? In this GIF science lesson, we learn about the pancake bounce effect and how making tiny things giant can sometimes make them easier to comprehend.

Researchers demonstrated in a slow-motion recording how a water balloon hitting a bed of nails responded with a “pancake bounce.” The video pauses at the moment the balloon achieves the pancake-like state. Moevius, et al.

Tina Hecksher, a physicist at Roskilde University in Denmark assigned this task as a project for some of her students after learning how water droplets bounced off super-water-repelling surfaces in a 2014 study by Julia Yeomans, a physicist at the University of Oxford, and her colleagues. Read more

Goulburn-Murray Water is responsible for all Victorian water ways and bodies in its region north of the Great Divide covering approximately 68,000 square kilometres. The surface water managed includes an extensive network of streams, creeks, rivers, lakes, weirs and reservoirs, and also irrigation canals. Surface water is managed in two ways, in unregulated systems and regulated systems.  Read more

It has become increasingly clear in recent years that ocean waters are eating away at the undersides of the ice shelves that fringe Antarctica and buttress its many glaciers. A new study released Tuesday has found that hundreds of feet of ice have been lost from the bottoms of a few of these ice shelves and glaciers in a region of the continent that is contributing the most to sea level rise.

The glacier that saw the most melt, Smith, lost about 1,000 feet of ice between 2002 and 2009, a stunning amount. The authors think this melt is “a strong piece of evidence” that these glaciers, along with the larger Amundsen region, were subjected to a large influx of warm ocean water during that period.

That influx could be due to changes in ocean circulation related to other changes wrought by climate change, but is still something scientists are avidly investigating. Read more

Frozen water has been lurking beneath the rocky surface of the Solar System’s biggest asteroid since its birth billions of years ago.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft began orbiting Ceres (pictured), which is also a dwarf planet, in 2015. This allowed a team led by Thomas Prettyman at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, to measure hydrogen at the asteroid’s surface.

Water inside Ceres chemically alters the surface, leaving a hydrogen imprint there. The highest hydrogen concentrations appeared at mid to high latitudes. Read more

Although most cyclists probably don’t give much thought to their water bottle or bottle cage, the fact is that like just about anything else, those components can be lightened and simplified. That’s just what British cycling design company Fabric has done, with its new Cageless water bottle.

The idea behind the product is pretty simple. Instead of a separate cage and bottle, Cageless consists of a BPA-free 600-mL bottle with built-in retaining clips, and a couple of plastic studs that mount on the bike’s existing cage bosses. The clips on the bottle engage those studs, so there’s no empty cage left sitting on the frame when the bottle isn’t being used. Read more