As someone who has played with her share of vortex cannons, I can assure you that messing around with smoke generators and vortex rings is a lot of fun. And in this video, Dianna gives things a little twist: she makes the vortex cannon’s mouth a square instead of a circle.

Now, that doesn’t create a square vortex ring. (Vortex rings don’t really do 90-degree corners.) But it does make the vortex ring all neat and wobbly. Whenever you have two vortices near one another (or, in this case, two parts of a vortex line near one another), they interact. As Dianna shows with hurricanes, depending on the direction of rotation and their relative strength, nearby vortices can orbit one another or travel together in straight lines -- or they can cause more complicated interactions, like in the case of the square-launched rings.  

Backyard Scientist Makes His Very Own Fiery Vortex Cannon [GoPro]

Kevin Kohler, the Backyard Scientist, shows you how you can apply the physics behind an air vortex cannon to make one 10 times bigger. Then, to make things really exciting, he adds some fire to the mix.

A farmer named Mel Potter would lose 10% of his crop per year due to hail storms before he started using his hail cannon in 1995.

Since 1995, there have been no hail storms in his area.

It cost $1,000 per year to operate and it is still a fraction of the cost when compared to losing 10% of his crop on average.