Made for ABC TV Catalyst http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/ as an extended version of my Comparing Temperatures video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNGJ0WHXMyE

A boomerang can execute its unique roundtrip flight by making use of three fundamental physics principles: lift, relative velocity, and gyroscopic precession.

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Lift is an important concept, not only in flying but also in sailing. This week I’m talking to Olympic Sailor, Hunter Lowden. But before I get to the physics of sailing I thought I would explain lift since it’s generally poorly understood.

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Music by Nathaniel Schroeder
youtube: http://bit.ly/pakJLE
myspace: http://mysp.ac/qtmZQj

Starring: Christie Wykes as Chlorine, Carbon, and Sodium
Director of Photography: Sean McCallum
Gravity (John Mayer Cover) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7KpH9_I2Dw
I’m Atoms (Jason Mraz Cover) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBjZz0iQrzI
Electricity (Jet Cover) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY-kiddvAg0
Experiments A Cappella http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRbI_vPyOnc

Some months a go I filmed a slinky falling in slow motion. Now I have interviewed the public about what they expect to happen for ABC TV’s Catalyst program and this is the result.

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/team/default.htm
I have been working with Catalyst on ABC1 to bring some Veritasium to Australian TV. In this segment I ask why astronauts in the space station are weightless. The most common answer is because there is no gravity in space. But of course there is gravity in space, especially where the space station is located (only about 400km from Earth’s surface). So astronauts still experience a gravitational pull – it’s just that they and the space station are in free fall so they are accelerating together towards the Earth. The space station doesn’t crash into the Earth because of its orbital velocity – it’s going 28,000 km/h so as it falls, the Earth curves away from it.

The sun has been producing light for about five billion years but where does all its energy come from? The most common idea is that the sun is burning gas – like a giant fireball in the sky. If this were true, the sun would have gone out long ago. So how is the sun actually fuelling itself? It is converting its own mass into energy. By combining protons (the nucleus of hydrogen) into helium, it squeezes some mass into energy – 4.3 billion kg per second. It is Einstein’s famous E=mc^2 which gives us the quantitative relationship between mass and energy, where c is the speed of light.

Complete unedited interviews: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dcw98B2Nzg
Trees can weigh hundreds or even thousands of tons, but where do they get this mass from? A few common answers are: the soil, water, and sunlight. But the truth is the vast majority of a dry tree’s mass comes from the air – it originated as carbon dioxide

Right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS9OXzSRBMQ
Left: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWQ-HJ4oGKQ
It Depends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3GHiMOHEy8
What happens when nylon rope is wound around a spool and pulled horizontally to the right? Will the spool go to the right, to the left, or does it depend on how the rope is pulled?

Are you heaviest at night before you go to bed and lightest in the morning? I tried to tease out the factors to figure out what really causes weight gain and loss during the day, and what causes daily weight fluctuations.