Scientists at Trinity College Dublin have caught a drop of tar pitch on camera for the very first time since the experiment began 69 years ago in 1944. It takes between seven and thirteen years for a single drop to form, but less than a second for it to fall. A similar experiment has been running since 1927 at the University of Queensland in Brisbane — the longest-running laboratory experiment according to Guinness World Records — but their camera was offline when the last drop fell in 2000. The Queensland experiment is expecting its ninth drop to fall sometime in 2013, and a live webcam is set to catch the drop’s inevitable fall when it happens.

video via Nature

via Nature