Hello. I've seen a number of these over the years and figured a communal thread would lead to some seriously interesting things to watch! Here are a few of mine. They are often trippy, often non-intuitive, and really just cool as all heck. I'm going to try to limit my descriptions so they can be surprising and fun to watch! First two are pretty well known and not as interesting as the rest. Didn't want to end the post boring people!
First up, Ferro-magnetic metals! Many of you probably caught these over the past couple years. This is this ladies' artwork. I love how the little coffee cup looking thing is a solid state device -- runs perfectly silently. Seeing it noiselessly twist about would probably be extremely meditative / trancelike.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDnrFgd7yfo (The ladies' described above)
http://www.youtube.com/w...1ZI-w6LQ&feature=fvw (some other interesting designs and movements)
Next up, Cornstarch on a speaker! Relevant to a lot of the cymatics type ideas floating around the biosphere these days.
http://www.youtube.com/w...8fRQ&feature=related (lots of other videos like this that do similarly beautiful and bizarre things)
Following that, Highlighters in Milk with a drop of dish soap!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFxppyWVNDA (with blacklight)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxZWDstXlus (without blacklight, has a couple minute explanation)
This one is just super awesome. Uses baking soda, vinegar, calcium bicarb, salt, and a little heating and cooling. SUPER COOL EFFECT! Apologies this is not on youtube. Going to do this one or the milk one next time I find myself looking for eye candy during a voyage.
http://vodpod.com/watch/981679-liquid-spheres-Vortex Ring Collision! Looks like it was filmed a long time back. But so beautiful!
http://www.youtube.com/w...bedded&v=XJk8ijAUCiICan't find the video for this one but maybe if I describe it someone else can. I saw this interesting video some time back where two streams of a glycerin/water mixture were angled so that they "braided" around each other in a helix for a little while. This turned to a solid ovalish sheet of water that, due to some quirks of fluid dynamics ended up splitting off into two parallel streams of droplets. Very beautiful stuff.
Well that's all I could come up with at the moment. Please add your own!! Beautiful dang mechanics going on behind the scenes of this crazy place we call the universe.