This video might look fake, but it's only exploiting capillary action and magnetism. Watch it first, then read on.

The big black ball at the center is a magnet and the black fluid is just a ferrofluid, i.e., a liquid that becomes magnetized in the presence of a magnetic field. More specifically, the liquid itself is made up of magnetic nanoparticles suspended in a solution. The action in the video comes from the ferrofluid being added to the bubbles away from the central magnet which then draws the fluid towards it through capillary action where the bubbles intersect. The orange color is just normal dye adding to the fun, because why let black have all the fun?

Speaking of fun, more geek for your week:

• What do your eyes have in common with the Hubble Space Telescope?
• One drop of venom from this snake will turn your blood into Jello. Or at least a really gross version of Jello. [WITH VIDEO]

• In advance of the return of the 17-year cicadas, read about this fungus that eats them from the inside out.
• Check out this amazing video of a mama river otter teaching her pup to swim. The lesson begins around 0:45.
• Baby lizards can hatch early if they sense danger is near.
• Weapons used in the South Pacific contain a history of sharks.
• Parachute of NASA's Mars Curiosity rover still blowing in the martian wind.
• Japanese scientists can now see inside your dreams. Inception is one step closer.
• How plants sense gravity and know how to grow "up" regardless of orientation. [WITH VIDEO]
• Fluorescent millipedes discovered on Alcatraz.

Geek you later. @Summer_Ash

Rachel ended Friday's show with a segment including a picture of the oldest light in the Universe. Since the Week in Geek skipped last week after this picture was released, I thought this would be good opportunity to explain it in detail. As Rachel said, the picture shows our "baby Universe," which in astronomer-speak is when the universe was 370,000 years old. That's a frighteningly old baby by human terms, but an itty bitty one by the Universe's standards.

We actually can't take a picture of the Universe when it was any younger than this because prior to this point, the Universe was so small and dense that photons kept bumping into electrons and weren't able to travel freely until the Universe grew and cooled enough for protons and neutrons to capture these electrons, thereby allowing the photons escape.

Think of it as being like trying to walk through Times Square on New Year's Eve: the place is jam-packed with people, and trying to go in a straight line is next to impossible. But then at midnight, everyone embraces, and suddenly small passages open up everywhere in the spaces between couples and groups of friends. (That's clearly oversimplified, but hopefully you get the idea.)

The photons that were eventually released from our infant Universe have been traveling through space ever since, even as space itself has been expanding, which has caused them to be "redshifted" from infrared radiation to microwaves. Hence the name we have for this image: the Cosmic Microwave Background, or the CMB for short.

This latest image of the CMB was captured by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. Why do we care about the CMB? Well, in general, because it tells us about the distribution of matter in the early Universe. This allows us to better understand how gravity and expansion acted to produce the galaxies, galaxy clusters, and voids we see today. The color scale in the image illustrates differences in temperature (and therefore matter), with blue being cold, or less dense areas, and red being hot, or more dense areas. The most amazing part is that the difference between the hottest and coldest points on the map is less than one thousandth of a degree.

To learn more, here is a great Q&A on Planck and the CMB and a great write-up of the implications on our current cosmological models.

And now for some geek that's relatively recent:

• New stars in the neighborhood. Astronomers discover a pair of brown dwarfs only 6.5 light years away.
• Data visualization geek: causes of death in the 20th century.
• What the shape of the Neanderthal skull can tell us about the Neanderthal brain.
• The view through a whale's eye. Long, but FASCINATING read.
• Roosters know when to crow, even without exposure to day and night.
• How big is space? Try manually scrolling through it here. It should only take 22 million years or so.
• Abstract "Black Hole" artwork made with power drills and paint.
• Physicists at the University of Chicago have found ways to create knotted vortices, i.e., the most complicated "smoke rings" ever. Watch this video for a great explanation.
• Roadside billboard in Peru uses humidity to produce clean drinking water for local village.
• Jeff Bezos recovers a Saturn V engine from the ocean floor. [WITH VIDEO]

Happy "Geekster"! @Summer_Ash

Robert Krulwich recently shone a light on this fascinating nine-year-old boy. Krulwich's acquaintance Zia encountered the boy through his fiancee, who is the boy's babysitter. You can read the full account here, but most importantly: watch this video. This boy has a better perspective on the world and the Universe than almost anyone I know. His humility and his ability to reflect on such large and abstract concepts is astounding. And as Krulwich says, he is quick to point out that he could be wrong. 

Watch for the kid's little brother getting in on the act around 3:08. To be a fly on the wall at dinnertime with this family...

The amazing phenomenon captured above is not actually visible to your naked eye, only to the camera. Running at 24 frames per second, as opposed to the ~12 frames per second rate of our eyes, the camera can register the vibrational signature of the sound coming out of the speaker as it affects the nozzle of the hose. You can see this in slow motion at around 1:07. To try this experiment yourself, check out the instructions by the filmmaker on YouTube. And for a cool discussion on what your eye can and can't detect, read this.

Now here's your geek round-up:

• In honor of Brain Awareness Week, download and play The Great Brain Experiment to help researchers investigate how the mind works.
• Want to know what it's like inside a black hole? There's an app for that.
• Tongue-eating fish parasites. Not my favorite four-word phrase in the English language, but I have to admit they're kind-of fascinating. Gross, but fascinating.[VIDEO]
• Australian researchers theorize now-extinct wolf species on Falkland islands came from South America during the last ice age.
• Even Saturn isn't safe from meteors. Check out these cool pictures of its rings taking the hit.
• This 13-year-old Massai boy in Kenya created an LED system to keep lions from attacking his family's livestock. [VIDEO via TED]
• Giant salamander sucks up its prey like a jet engine sucks up oxygen. [VIDEO]
• John Snow's cholera map of London in the 1850s is now digital.
• Best new tumblr this week: highlights from National Geographic's photo archive over the past 125 years.
• Hearing only half of a conversation (i.e., someone talking on their cell phone) is annoying as heck, scientifically speaking.
• Three new huge and cleverly named telescopes coming soon to a mountain top not so near to you: the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).
• Lastly, 55 years ago today, Vanguard 1 was launched into orbit and it remains the oldest man-made object in orbit today. You can watch the launch and listen in as the engineers in mission control discover it has successfully attained orbit (around 3:55). [VIDEO]

Until we geek again. @Summer_Ash