Phenomena for NGSS

That’s not an ant perched on top of another bug—that’s a species of treehopper called the Cyphonia clavata, which has adapted to grow a realistic ant-shaped protrusion on its back. There is no limit to the variety of ways these incredible insects evolve to adapt in even the harshest of environments.

In this example, the Cyphonia mimics an insect notoriously difficult to prey upon—a local tree ant— all the way down to the spikes that protrude from the ant’s back—which is why it’s so unappetizing to predators in the first place. This species of treehopper was first discovered in 1788 by Caspar Stroll, an entomologist from Germany, and can be found in the rainforests of Central America.

When M&M's are placed in warm water the candy coating dissolves and colors the water - but the little "M's" don't dissolve and float to the surface.  

When a slinky is held extended off of the ground, and then is dropped - the bottom does not seem to move until the top of the slinky catches up with it.  

How can there be a rock on the earth OLDER than the earth?!?! What is the scale we are talking about? Where did these rocks come from? How do we know how old they are?

Sensitive plants (Mimosa pudica) move when they are touched. When touched, their leaflets fold together quickly and the stalk on which these leaflets are located often droop down. The closing of leaflets and lowering of the stalks can occur like a wave, with one stalk drooping down onto another, causing the entire plant to fold down.

The beekeeper forgot to put the frame in his hive, so the bees just freestyled, building a structure that would best handle temperature and ventilation. Should all hives look like this?!? How could we test this layout vs. the traditional?

A coyote and a badger use a culvert as a wildlife crossing to pass under a busy California highway together.

Newton's third law says that forces come in equal and opposite pairs. This means that when air exerts lift on an airplane, the airplane also exerts a downward force on the air. When an airplane is launched through a wall of smoke, the air is pushed downward. The high pressure air on the underside of the wings moves around the wingtip to the upper surface, where the local pressure is low. 

A bubble in freezing temperatures. 

A crow solves a challenge.

This is what it would look like to cry in space. 

This is a cross section of a deep sea underwater cable.

Levitation Melting of Metal

Humpback Whales have developed a hunting strategy where they circle underwater while emitting a continuous stream of bubbles - creating a wall that "traps" fish in a column of water.  They then can converge and consume all of fish that are "trapped" in their bubble net.

A polymer is invisible when submerged in liquid, but visible when in open air. 

This is how engineers launch giant battleships from boatyards - into the water.  

This is a volcano as viewed from the International Space Station.

What happens when snake venom enters blood. 

Images shift when looking through water.  

A geyser right before it erupts.

The shrimp uses the giant claw to snap so hard that it briefly heats the water to 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit. 

This is a picture taken directly above these camels at sunset in Saudi Arabia.  

Ladybird beetles (commonly known as ladybugs) are not the most aerodynamic insect, yet are able to fly through a complicated set of body structures. 

Snakes use their muscles and scales to move.  Because they don't have arms or legs, they need to push off of something to help propel them forward.  What they find to push off of changes how they are able to move. 

Fighter jets push the limits of what can be done in aviation.  When a jet pulls 9 g's the pilot can easily lose consciousness.  To make these extreme turns, a drastic change can be seen around the airplane.  

Some astronomers believe that one reason Earth is habitable is that the gravity of Jupiter protects us from comets. Long-period comets, in particular, enter the solar system from its outer reaches. Jupiter’s gravity is thought to sling most of these fast-moving ice balls out of the solar system before they can get close to Earth. 

When solid particles move through water their movement takes interesting forms around objects. 

Video of a nuclear explosion.  

Eyes have structures within them to help focus objects to be seen. 

Elon Musk's Tesla Motors utilizes am AI system to allow his cars to be placed on "autopilot" and drive themselves.  While this is not entirely a self-driving car, it is proving to be extremely safe.  

Penguins "fly" through the water yet commonly need to be able to launch out of the water onto large masses of ice. 

Trees are super hard to climb - even with hands!  Snakes have no arms or legs yet seem to have figured out how to climb trees easily.  

Most seeds use dispersal methods like wind, water, or by sticking to animals.  Some plants have a very different method of dispersing their seeds.  

The sun is known to cause damage to our skin.  While this damage can be seen in moles and skin cancer, UV light is able to detect sunlights damage when viewed through a UV lens.  

Only 1 out of 1300 species of bat is able to run along the ground.  This vampire bat is able to use its' wings to run along the ground. 

The summer solstice is the longest day (most daylight hours) of the year for people living in the northern hemisphere. It is also the day that the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky. The winter solstice, or the shortest day of the year, happens when the Earth's North Pole is tilted farthest from the Sun.

This saw is able to sense the difference between cutting through wood and hitting human flesh.  When it hits something that it senses as human flesh it immediately stops. 

A woodpecker’s skull is like an internal helmet to keep its brain from getting hurt. Woodpeckers’ heads are kind of like bike shocks for their brains. The bones in a woodpecker’s skull keep its brain safe and avoids concussions.

Most species of slugs are generalists, feeding on a number of organic materials, including leaves, lichens, mushrooms, and even carrion. Some slugs are predators and eat other slugs and snails, or earthworms.

Roosting hawks do not hear the silent flight of a large owl who takes one hawk and is gone before the other seems to notice.

Sound may appear to be an independent phenomenon, but our perception of sound waves is affected by speed. Austrian physicist Christian Doppler discovered that when a moving object such as a siren produces sound waves, the waves bunch in front of the object and disperse behind it. This induced wave disturbance, known as the Doppler Effect, causes the sound of an approaching object to rise in pitch due to wavelength shortening. When the object passes, the trailing waves extend and are perceived lower in pitch. The Doppler Effect is also seen in the bunching of waves in front of a ship and the dispersing wake.

Human granulocytes killing cervical cancer cells.

A Rose of Jericho three hours after being watered having nearly returned to is previous, alive, state!

The Rose of Jericho (Anastatica hierochuntica) is a species of resurrection plant. These plants are characterized by their ability to utilize mechanisms which enable them to survive extreme dehydration for years at a time.

This man uses physics to help him escape from a hole in the ground. 

Organisms have many different ways of communicating.  Fireflies communicate by flashes of light to attract mates or prey.  Fireflies use bioluminescence to create these flashes, but apparently the light emitted from a LED is close enough to 'speak' to this firefly! 

Rivers change their course over time due to a number of different factors.  While erosion difficult to study, as it occurs over long periods of time, satellite images can be used to allow us to see changes in landforms.  These images of the Ucayali River are placed together allowing us to see 30 years of changes in a few seconds.   

Image from NASA/USGS Landsat, GIF created by Zoltan Sylvester, geologist https://hinderedsettling.com/2014/03/16/rivers-through-time-as-seen-in-landsat-images/ 

When a queen bee became locked inside a car - the rest of the swarm followed for 2 days until they were collected by an entomologist.  

How could the bees know she was in there?  How were they able to pick the exact car she was in?!?

Squeezing the outside of an orange onto balloons causes them to pop.  While the acid of the orange would make sense in explaining this - it might eat away at the surface of the balloon, that is not why this happens.  The juice of the orange does not make them pop, only by squeezing the outside of the rind.  

Along the legs of spiders are chemoreceptors, kind of like how we think of a nose. These chemoreceptors on the legs of spiders can sense a number of chemicals, and are there to avoid predators, and to seek out prey.

If a spider was to come close to our mouth when we were sleeping it would sense 1000’s of different chemicals in our breath. From the toothpaste, to the evening meal and even the carbon dioxide we breath out - a spider would be able to tell that a massive and dangerous mouth is nearby, and it would move in the opposite direction.

During the rainy season in Columbia and Venezuela, an odd landscape feature appears in places: mounds of grassy plants, as big as five meters across and two meters tall, surrounded by water. Traversing this landscape, called surales, requires either hopping from mound to mound or trudging through the boggy bits in between.

What causes these mounds was a mystery - until recently scientists discovered they are created by earthworm poop.

Venus spins backwards compared to most of the other planets. It spins in the opposite direction that Earth rotates.  This means that on Venus the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east. 

Hydromedusa, a type of small jellyfish, likely belonging to the genus Crossota. Its tentacles are used to ensnare and subdue prey, which is why you see it floating with them outstretched in the beginning of the video — it was lying in wait for a fish to swim by.

If you spin a piece of PVC with your finger, you can only see the letter that you had your finger on when you started spinning it.  If you start on the "X" - you can only see the X.  If you start on the "O" you can only see the O.

Airblade-type models spread 1,300 times more viral plaque-forming units than paper towels. Compared to “warm air” dryers, Airblades spread 60 times the amount. Among the grossest of their results, they found that jet dryers can fling viruses up to 3 meters (10 feet), while standard warm air dryers only managed 75 centimeters (2.5 feet) and hand towels just 25 centimeters (10 inches).

Red and yellow feathers get their color from nutrients that are in the foods birds eat - but the color blue is fairly rare in nature. The color blue that we see on a bird is created by the way light waves interact with the feathers and their arrangement of protein molecules, called keratin. Different keratin structures reflect light in subtly different ways to produce different shades of what our eyes perceive as the color blue. This makes blue birds a result of feather structure and not pigment. 

Ice spikes are odd ice structures that occasionally grow out of ice cube trays.  Unlike some of the strange things you might find growing in your refrigerator, ice spikes are made of nothing but ice.  Some find that their tap water commonly creates ice spike while others can only cause these structures to form with distilled water. 

Comb Jellies have groups of cilia that help them move through the water.  They are the largest animals that move using only cilia and their bodies consist of a mass of jelly with with 1-2 layers of cells on the outside and inside.  Most comb jellies are predators and can consume ten times their weight per day. 

Landforms are much more than just mountains, rivers, and hills.  They are incredible in their diversity and scale of these are sometimes hard to imagine.  

In the Finnish Lapland, weather can include sub-freezing temperatures and driving snow. Surreal landscapes sometimes result, where common trees become cloaked in white and look like frozen sculptures. 

A cypress knee is a distinctive structure forming above the roots of a cypress tree of any of various species of the subfamily Taxodioideae. Their function is unknown, but they are generally seen on trees growing in swamps.

These rare shapes are formed—under perfect temperature conditions only—when a mass of snow either falls or is blown by the wind. If it manages to catch on to some other snow, and gravity or the wind is in its favor, then the new snowball will roll itself in the exact same way we all used to. In this case, though, the middles tend to collapse to create a donut shape, which can end up as tall as 26 inches (66 cm).

The Gladiator Spider can make an expandable sticky web like a net. When an insect passes below it, it stretches out the net, lunges downwards and flings the net over the prey.

These unique formations are a result of lava flows cracking as they cool, in a perpendicular direction to the original flow. Columnar basalt clusters can be found all over the world.

When a magnet falls it induces a current in the copper pipe.

That current creates a magnetic field that opposes the changing field of the falling magnet, so the magnet is repelled and falls more slowly. It almost looks like it's floating through the pipe.

When the surface of the sea freezes—such as around the north and south poles—it does so in a way that forces pockets of especially cold and salty seawater to gather on the underside of the ice. This mixture of brine is denser than the seawater below it, and as a result it tends to slowly sink to the bottom. Now, because it’s so cold, the fresher water below the brine actually freezes around it as it falls, which results in a giant icicle under the surface.

Water is the most important liquid on Earth. It’s is also one of the most mysterious and counterintuitive compounds in nature. One of water’s lesser know properties, for example, is that hot water freezes faster than cold water.  It is not fully understood why, but the phenomenon, known as the Mpemba effect, was originally discovered by Aristotle over 3,000 years ago. The mysterious effect has been attributed to a range of phenomena, but it remains a mystery.

Prince Rupert's Drops are tadpole-esque structures formed by simply dropping hot molten glass into cold water. While the drops look pretty cool, what’s even more intriguing is that they have some unique materials properties. The rapid solidification process toughens the glass by creating a high compressive strength exterior with a high tensile strength interior, so the drops resist shattering when slammed with a hammer. But, they easily explode with just a little distortion to the tail.

Sailing Stones in Death Valley, are a geological phenomenon where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention.  Stones with rough bottoms leave straight striated tracks while those with smooth bottoms tend to wander.   

Our experience of temperature is pretty subjective. Humidity, individual physiology, and even our mood can change our perception of hot and cold temperatures. It’s the same with wind chill: the temperature that we normally feel is not the true temperature.  The air immediately surrounding the human body is warmed by body heat and stays around the body as a sort of “air cloak”. This insulating cushion of air actually keeps people warm. When the wind blows on you, the cushion of air is blown away, and you are exposed to the true temperature, which feels much colder. Wind chill only affects entities that produce heat.

We’ve seen people on skateboards and motorcycles loop the loop many times. Damian Walter was the first human to figure out how do it on foot. 

The fennec fox of North Africa has large ears which serve a dual purpose: they are great for listening for bugs to eat that may be moving around underground, but they are also loaded with blood vessels, allowing the animals to dissipate excess body heat. While big ears are wonderful radiators during hot days, the fox’s thick fur coat also acts as insulation during cold desert nights.

A tree gets its mass from air and water. It "eats" air, chomps down on airborne carbon dioxide, then uses sunshine to pull the carbon dioxide apart, gets rid of the oxygen, which it spits back into the air, leaving the carbon and water, the stuff to make the substance of the tree.

In the Australian Outback, pooled water can be extremely hard to come by. To deal with this issue, the thorny devil has developed skin that can absorb water like blotter paper (called “capillary action”).  The way the scales on the body are structured, it collects dew and channels it down to the corners of the mouth, where the lizard drinks it. You can actually watch the lizard’s skin darken as it soaks up whatever liquid remains from even the muckiest of puddles.

Seed dispersal is commonly done through using the wind, or water - but some seed pods have another way.  These plants have seed pods with plant structures that allow them to react explosively to disperse their seeds. 

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How can little pebbles sink to the bottom of a cup of water but giant things like boats (and huge rubber ducks) can float?

As the central magnet rotates, the outer lesser magnets vibrates slowly, however if the central magnet slows the velocity of it's rotation, the outer magnets spin faster.

Researchers have only recently found the longest large mammal migration in the continental United States: Mule deer migrate 150 miles (241 kilometers) in western Wyoming each year. And it's no easy task for them-barriers include highways, fences, tough terrain, and bodies of water.

Disc galaxies, like our own Milky Way, spin so fast that they should fly apart. The force of gravity produced by all the stars and dust and everything else we can see is not enough to hold them together.

This is a problem. Either our best theories about gravity are totally wrong over glalactic distances or there is some “dark” matter adding mass to galaxies. If this dark matter exists, we can’t see or detect it or even guess what it is, but it must make up almost 90% of the mass of the universe.

Candles come in all sorts of different shapes, colors, and sizes.  When they are lit, the fire wick burns down and the wax melts. Somehow there seems to be much less wax left as the candle burns.