The badminton birdie many Americans hit around their backyards can fly faster than 200mph in professional games! The key to the birdie's speed is its unique aerodynamic shape and materials combined with a complicated kinetic chain of movements by players.

Credits

Produced by Emily V. Driscoll

Filmed By
Jon Foy
Emily V. Driscoll
Chris Colton

Narrated by Luke Groskin

Music by Audio Network

Stills by Shutterstock

Special Thanks
The Boston Open sponsored by MIT
Michele Cruz
Alex Liu
Kota Morikawa
Nilay Nanavanti
New York City Badminton
Victor Ng
Beth Sopka
Peter Teuben
Xun Wang
Chibing & Vernoica Wu

*** We're now on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/scifri - Please Help Support Our Video Productions! ***

A new line of camouflage was designed with deer eyes in mind.

There are millions of specimens of ice age plants and animals in the Page Museum's collections. Yet excavators and preparators will continue to dig up, clean and catalog millions of more fossils for the foreseeable future. The Page Museum's Chief Curator, Dr. John Harris, explains how paleontological and climatological research at the museum relies upon on tar pit's prolific fossil deposits.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Filmed by Luke Groskin and Christian Baker
Additional Stills and Video by The Page Museum
Shutterstock
Robin O'Keefe
Charles R. Knight
Rudyard Sadleir
David Berkowitz

www.sciencefriday.com
Why Spiders Don't Stick to The Web

William Eberhard, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Costa Rica, and colleague Daniel Briceno film spiders in the lab, in the field and under a dissecting microscope to untangle this longstanding arachnological mystery. The secret to not getting stuck? Oily, hairy legs and delicate movements.

Produced by Flora Lichtman
Video footage: Daniel Briceno and William Eberhard.
Additional: archive.org, prelinger archives

The axolotl is a Mexican salamander with an incredible ability: Cut its leg off, and the limb will grow right back! How it does this and why humans can't is still a bit of a mystery. Researchers like Susan Bryant of UC Irvine are studying these amphibians to understand the underlying mechanisms for their miraculous regenerative powers.
Produced by Christian Baker
Music by Audio Network
Additional Stills and Video by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Dr. Susan Bryant, Dr. David Gardiner, and Dr. Akira Satoh

SCIENCE FRIDAY'S CEPHALOPOD WEEK 2016 BEGINS May 17th!
http://www.sciencefriday.com/cephalopodweek
With thousands of chemically-sensitive suckers, color-changing skin, and a brain that literally stretches when they eat, octopuses seem like aliens living in our oceans. Understanding their physical adaptations and how octopuses might process their own sensations requires a flexible imagination. Thankfully, Frank Grasso of Brooklyn College is up to the task. He reveals some of the small biological and behavioral clues that researchers have uncovered as they try to understand these curious creatures.

http://www.sciencefriday.com
Armed with appetites and attitudes, brush-clearing goats will mow down weeds and shrubs from even the steepest of Southern California's hillsides. Perfectly adapted to a life of constant browsing, these ruminants are being deployed as a shield against the region's rampant wildfires. We join Ian Newsam, owner of Brush Goats 4 Hire, and his "elite" herd of goats as they reduce the invasive plants and fuel that contributes to the fires.

Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network

Additional Stills and Video Courtesy
Henry the Goat, California Office of Emergency Management, U.S. Geological Survey, Youtube User "thatlocalsportsguy"

If you spin a hard-boiled egg in a pool of milk, the milk will wick up the sides of the egg and spray off at the egg's equator. Engineer Tadd Truscott, of Brigham Young University, along with Ken Langley and others, launched an investigation to figure out why this happens -- complete with a custom-built spinning apparatus, billiard balls and high speed video cameras.

http://www.sciencefriday.com
Can you roll a ball without touching it? Mold an object simply by waving your hands? MIT's Tangible Media Group can. They demo two innovative projects as part their vision to make user interfaces more physical. Entitled "InFORM," this interactive shape-changing display boasts a myriad of functions and a mind-bending design. "jamSheets" combines pneumatic pumps and thin sheets of paper and fabric to enable users to mold surfaces, clothing or even furniture without the aid of a computer.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional video by MIT's Tangible Media Group

"I have always emphasized the willingness to discard," says psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus at Princeton University. That philosophy works on two levels -- forget desk trinkets, Kahneman doesn't have a desk -- and he doesn't hoard ideas either, he says. If an idea doesn't work, he lets it go. Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences for his research with Amos Tversky on how people make decisions, is retired and works from his New York City apartment.

The La Brea Tar Pits represent much more than world-renowned fossil sites - they're the mass graves of thousands of ice age creatures, each with a story to tell. Researchers at the nearby Page Museum clean the asphalt from the fossil remains, and using paleoforensics, recount the grim details of their deaths. In the process, clues emerge about what life was like in prehistoric Los Angeles.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Luke Groskin and Christian Baker
Animation by Joshua Krause
Narrated by Shane Morris
Additonal Footage and Stills provided by The Page Museum, Shutterstock
Pond5, Getty Images, Miles Roberts/John Ososky, Smithsonian Institution
Kathleen Cantner, AGI, created for EARTH Magazine

Find out why this special ice cream stretches like silly putty. It's all in the molecules.

http://www.sciencefriday.com
Have you ever noticed that it's easier to walk without spilling a foamy beer versus walking around with regular cup of coffee? Have you ever wondered why? To solve this everyday physics phenomenon, a team of fluid mechanics researchers at Princeton University's Complex Fluids Lab investigate the anti-sloshing abilities of foam.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage Provided by Alban Sauret, Emilie Dressaire, Francois Boulogne, Howard Stone, Jean Cappello
Dusty Wobbls (C.C. 3.0), and Jake Millie (C.C. 3.0)

From the SciFri Archive: This toilet floats. It's an outhouse and sewage-treatment plant in one, processing human waste through a "constructed wetlands." Adam Katzman, the inventor and builder of the toilet-boat, says it's meant to be more inspirational than practical. "Poop and Paddle" demonstrates how sewage and rainwater can be converted to cattails and clean water.

Brenda Tan and Matthew Cost, high school seniors from Trinity School in New York City, used a technique called DNA barcoding to find out what species were present in over 200 animal products. Their extracurricular experiment, which they completed with the help of Mark Stoeckle, of The Rockefeller University, suggests that buyers should beware!

http://www.patreon.com/scifri - Please Help Support Our Video Productions!
Meet the farmers who want to make cheap, environmentally friendly kelp America's next favorite vegetable.

Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage Provided by Kurt Mann /NOAA

http://www.sciencefriday.com/cephalopodweek
We all know that squids use ink to disguise themselves while making a quick getaway, but what other uses might ink serve? Stephanie "Stephalopod" Bush, a scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), suggests that these crafty cephalopods might use ink to attract a mate, repel a predator, or even confuse their prey.
Produced by Christian Baker
Music by Audio Network
Pygmy squid footage courtesy Dr. Noriyosi Sato
Additional Squid Footage by MBARI

http://www.sciencefriday.com
In the third episode of our wine science series, Out of the Bottle, Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, explains how expectations, environment, and social cues can fool us into believing that our wine tastes better or worse than it is.
Featuring Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of the Cornell University Food and Brand lab
And author of Mindless Eating (mindlesseating.org), and Slim by Design
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Location provided by Corkbuzz
Prop Master: Phyllis Shalant
Wine Wrangler: Sam Flatow
Additional Stills: Shutterstock, Proxy Design, Derek Skey

By studying tiger and cat tongues, Alexis Noel of Georgia Institute of Technology has discovered some surprising uses for their infamously raspy licking apparatuses. Noel research has demonstrated that not only do their tongues tenderize meat, but the conical and scoop-like form of their papillae are optimized for depositing allergen infused saliva baths. So basically every time you pet your cat you are just rubbing your hand over their evenly-distributed saliva.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Brandon Swanson
Music by Audio Network
Live Cats filmed at Happy Tabby Cat Cafe
Additional Footage ands Stills by Alexis Noel, Candler Hobbs, David Hu, Joseph Cebak,
Pond5, Youtube User Commissarius, Emmanuel Keller (C.C. BY 2.0), Shutterstock
Special Thanks to David Hu Lab and the Happy Tabby Cat Cafe
All tongues were donated post-mortem. No cats were harmed in the making of this video.
Although some were given a ton of catnip.

What can't 3D printers do? We've all heard news stories about 3D-printed food and medical prostheses—even cars and entire houses. But how does additive manufacturing, as it's also known, really work? And how can an at-home hobbyist get started? Ira teams up with Makerbot's Bre Pettis to present the ultimate beginner's guide to 3D printing.
Produced by Annie Minoff
Video by Luke Groskin