Quick science sift #15: The "Leidenball" demo

The Leidennfrost effect is the effect that causes blobs of water to skitter across a hot pan without boiling and allows you to touch liquid nitrogen for short periods of time. When the very hot (glowing red) metal ball is immersed into water, a film of water vapor is immediately formed around the object. Water vapor is a poor conductor of heat so the ball stays hot for an unusually long period of time. However, once its temperature drops blow that required to create the film boiling, nucleate boiling takes over and the watter explodes into many small bubbles forming all over the surface separately.

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