Last week's inaugural Video of the Week, A Boy and His Atom, has had me thinking small of late. Hence this week's clip: Levitating water drops form spinning stars.

Ignore the sub Franz Ferdinand groove on the soundtrack (it's unclear if the track was supplied by the creators), as what you're seeing is quite lovely. It's another film capturing the manipulation of nature's fundamental building blocks, in this case droplets of water. The clip, whose utilitarian title's deadpan poetry wouldn't feel out of place in a list of Brakhage shorts, comes to us from Clemson in South Carolina, where researchers figured out how to use an ultrasonic field to levitate water and then adjusted the field frequency to create the jiggling star shapes you see. The researchers are not sure what the practical uses for this technology might be just yet, but one imagines the wondrous ends Man Ray might have put it to circa 1923:

Youtube commenter "Flopney Spears" also provides a valuable creative suggestion:

DROPS SMALL INSECT ON TOP OF STAR
INSECT WOULD BE LIKE I GOT A FLYING SAUCER BXTCHEZZZZ