4 Awesome Internet Things To Show Your Kid Today

Every day the internet gifts us a weird, wonderful mix of videos, GIFs, and memes, the best of which offer funny, informative, horizon-expanding stuff to share with your kids. Problem is, it takes a while to wade through all the other nonsense to find them. And who has time for that? Not you. Here, then, is a daily batch of cool new internet stuff to share with your kids — and keep you in the viral-loop. Today’s finds include new pics of our solar system, some mind-blowing, slow-mo Triboluminescence, and instructions for a DIY flextangle. What’s a flextangle? Read on.

How to Make a Flextangle

A flextangle might sound like a super buff geometric shape, but it’s actually a kaleidoscopic paper puzzle. It’s similar in design to one of those fortune tellers kids make in grade school, except it changes colors instead of forecasting future crushes. The above video provides detailed instructions that, considering the mind-bending result, are pretty simple to follow.

Lightning Conjuring Light Savers

You know how if someone chomps on a Win-O-Green Life Saver in the dark, you can see a lightning-like spark? That’s because of triboluminescence, an optical phenomenon where light is generated by smashing or breaking certain chemicals. Youtuber Destin Sandlin decided to have some fun with this on his Smarter Every Day channel and smashed some of the white orbs with a hammer while filming the whole thing and slowing it down to thousands of frames per second. The result looks like Thor’s hammer crashing down. If that’s not fun, try seeing if your kid can say TRY-BOW-LOOM-IN-ESS-ANTS three times fast.

A First Hand Look At Saturn’s Rings

On April 26, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft dove through the gap between Saturn and its rings for the first time ever, and one of its imaging cameras took photos of the first hour of the dive. The resulting photographs give us a passenger’s eye view and also play out like an old silent film. Still, it’s a super cool first glimpse.

A Game of Catch With A GoPro

What do you do if you want to take awesome, on-the-go photos but can’t afford a selfie drone? If you’re Nicolas Vuignier, you just buy a GoPro and start tossing it instead. In this video called “poor man’s selfie drone” he and his friends continually toss around their GoPro as they sky down the slopes. The resulting footage captures their downhill antics and the scenery in a way that makes you feel like you’re part of their fun.