Bifalgorithm post

This is called dry water. It's 91.7% water by weight, but it looks and feels like a dry powder. This stuff was made in a chemistry lab in Japan, but I'm gonna show you how to make it yourself. Dr. Shuji Fuji showed us how to make these, and he made it look super easy. You just throw 10 grams of water and 0.9 grams of silica into a NutriBullet, basically, and you spin it for 10 seconds, and then boom, you get dry water. Okay, my turn. Measuring out 10 grams of water freehand. Absolutely nailed it. No big deal moving on. Water goes into the blender and now for the 0.9 grams of silica goes in the blender and I guess I just turned it on. This looks like magic. The water has disappeared. Like look this is under a 5 times magnification macro lens and it still looks bone dry. But the water is there. Look what happens when I push down on some dry water with the gloved finger? The water gets squeezed out. What's happening here? To show you, I need to make a liquid marble. This is silica. It's not dry water, it's just pure silica. And this is water with yellow food coloring in it. And you can see that a liquid marble forms. Basically a droplet of water coated in silica. That's it. But if I take a razor blade and slice it in half, well, okay, slice it in half. Come on. Slice it in half. There we go. See how it becomes two other liquid marbles? Okay, now imagine this happening in a blender at about 20,000 RPM. You get smaller and smaller and smaller liquid marbles until eventually the marbles are 10 microns in diameter and all the water is encapsulated in silica. I tried it with red water and yeah, it looks like blood when you blend it and it looks like blood when you squish it. And then I had a very weird thought. Could I make a liquid marble in which the surface layer isn't silica but instead other liquid marbles? To find out I added some water to my dry water and it turns out that yes, you can. You absolutely can. This is a liquid marble where the surface layer is much smaller liquid marbles. It's a chemistry fractal, sort of.

This is called dry water. It's 91.7% water by weight, but it looks and feels like a dry powder. This stuff was made in a chemistry lab in Japan, but I'm gonna…