This is the natural disaster to worry about

Forty-one minutes...that's the length of this video from Veritasium about the transformation of raw rubber into the amazing modern material we have today - primarily through the development of vulcanization by Charles Goodyear in the late 1800s.

In those forty-one minutes, Dr Derek explores - with seemingly a co-host for the first time that I've seen - the science behind rubber's stretchiness, the efforts to find an additive that can improve rubber's less useful properties, and a fungi that threatens the millions of rubber trees currently supplying our world's rubber needs.

But it's still forty-one minutes long...and that's without a whole lot of stretching.

Sorry...I'll see myself out.

Lamberts: Mouth blown Restoration glass - cylinder glass method - window

I've heard about and watched videos about the float method of producing flat, plate glass in which molten glass is poured onto a river of molten tin. The tin cools the glass very slowly and allows the glass to cool perfectly flat and smooth resulting in plate glass that can effectively be infinitely long.

I've also heard about crown or table glass (click here and scroll down a bit) in which an inflated ball of glass was cut open and spun into a flat disk. The larger the disk could be spun, the larger the panels of mostly flat glass that could be cut from that disk. The panels would by necessity be thicker on one side (the side nearer to the center of the disk) than on the other. 

Cylinder blown glass - as shown in the above video - requires a ball of glass with a bubble to be blown then swung into a longer and longer cylinder which is then cut open and laid flat to produce the flat pane of glass. The larger and longer the cylinder, the larger the pane of flat glass.

Float glass is much cheaper, but this cylinder glass process is far more fascinating to watch.

Molten Steel Exploding at 10,000fps - The Slow Mo Guys

There's not a ton of science in today's video, just some ridiculously slowed down footage of molten iron being smacked with a cricket bat by two British guys - thankfully with good personal protective equipment (PPE) for themselves. 

...but at least it's really, really pretty footage.