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A Toast to Science

by The 100 Companies

New Year’s Eve evokes thoughts of ball drops, parties, resolutions, champagne toasts … and science? Yes, science. For every 72 million bottles of champagne uncorked at the turn of this new decade, there were 72 million instances of breaking the sound barrier.

French scientists recently filmed the phenomenon using a camera that records 12,000 frames per second. The footage proved that characteristic shock waves called Mach disks form in the pressurized carbon dioxide that is released upon popping a champagne cork – the same Mach disks are also seen in the exhaust of fighter jets.

Read more about this bubbly experiment here.

– Nellie Betzen, The Engineering 100

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