Psst: You Could Probably Lift a Car by Sucking Through a Straw In another great MythBusters moment, Adam and Jamie managed to lift a car with a vacuum cleaner. That’s pretty cool, but could you replace the vacuum cleaner with just a human sucking on a straw? How Do You Lift a Car With Suction? Really, there is no suction. There is only air pressure. Yes, we are immersed in air. It’s all around us and when air molecules (let’s say it’s mostly nitrogen) collide with some surface it’s like a super tiny little push. Since air has lots of molecules, you get lots of collisions and pushes. The greater the surface area, the greater the force from these pushes. But really, we just like to talk about the push per unit area—we call this pressure. The air around us doesn’t just push down on us. It also pushes up and to the side and every which way since the air molecules are moving in all directions. Ok, technically the air pushes more up than down and this leads ...
Whoever said the best things in
life are free never watched a 4K OLED TV, rode on a hoverboard, or flew
in a jet pack. All those things are pretty great, and they cost a ton of
money—sometimes because only a mountain of cash can buy the sole
existing prototype. But for the purposes of this gift guide, let’s
pretend we’re all loaded. These gifts are a great fit if you want to
stay ahead of the curve and have a bottomless bank account.
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