I’d love to be a scientist. You basically get to buy a lot of stuff, put it together, and then film it, explaining that you’re “generating a magnetic field by spinning liquid sodium metal” when you’re really just building a huge bong.

This thing weighs 30 tons and is ten feet high. If you or I were scientists, we’d probably fill it with beer but the folks at the University of Maryland instead filled it with the sodium to simulate the contents of the Earth and see if they spun it enough if they could create a magnetic field. Apparently this field prevents us all from dying, which is good.

via Make