Jefferson Lab

Joanna and Steve are back! This time, they have dry ice that's been cooled in liquid nitrogen! When they drop it in water, how much fog will it make?

Let's say you've carelessly dunked your hand into a vat of liquid nitrogen and let is freeze solid. Every movie you've seen where this happens tells you that your hand will shatter like fine china should you bump it into something. If you're extremely careful, will your hand be okay once it thaws out? We'll explore this issue, using flower and onion cells rather than our hands!

We've just posted the last of the first season of our Physics Out Loud video glossary segments. Take a look at the five new videos (all will feature closed captions for your convenience). We have a lot of terms left to describe in the future. If there's a term that you'd like to see our scientists discuss, let us know! Thank you for watching - we hope you enjoy these newest offerings.

I'm using 'reduce' colloquially, meaning to change a substance to a more basic form.

Yes.

Did. See "Liquid Nitrogen vs. Liquid Oxygen: Fire!"

That 'bubble' doesn't last for long. The egg was also hotter than the liquid nitrogen and you see what happened to it.

In that a sealed container, such as a soda bottle, containing something like dry ice will eventually fail catastrophically? Yes, that's true. Whether or not it would be enough to do what's being depicted may or may not be.

Yes. We ate the ice cream. This is no different than baking cookies and eating the cookies. You don't eat the oven that supplies the heat to bake the cookies any more than you eat the liquid nitrogen that cools the ice cream mixture.

A little. The vast majority of it stayed in.

At the time, yes, she was.

We've added five new physics terms to the Physics Out Loud video glossary list. We hope you enjoy learning about cross sections, baryons, cryomodules and more. These new terms provide a little more insight into how nuclear and particle physics experiments are conducted.