God bless the red hot nickel ball. The humble sphere of destruction anchors a YouTube channel where its owner tests its ability to melt through all kinds of materials with relative ease. We don’t post every one of them on here because it’d take us all day, but once in a while a clip comes along that pits the ball against other balls and we feel the need to share.

We’ve seen ping-pong balls melt before, but this experiment has a few interesting factors to it that make it worth watching. First, the balls are made of celluloid, the traditional material for table tennis spheres - not plastic. And second, they’re arranged vertically in a tube, allowing gravity to pull the red hot nickel ball through them.

The end result is pretty fascinating to watch - a massive plume of flame erupts out of the top of the tube as the heat is channeled upwards, and each ball pops in turn as the oxygen is sucked out and the red hot ball falls through the tube. It’s pretty awesome to watch and at the end there’s literally nothing left of any of the ping-pong balls.