The cliché is that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. I submit, however, that that particular aphorism lacks vision. If you’re a habitual YouTube viewer and/or someone with an interest in science, you’ll already know that there are at least two more things on which you can rely: that anything uploaded by Drake “Styropyro” Anthony will be both a) worth watching and b) at least mildly terrifying. So it proves for our hero’s latest video, which apparently doesn’t meet the standards for his main channel—on which he was last seen wiring a shitton of car batteries together, if you’ve forgotten—and thus surfaced on his second channel instead. Don’t be fooled into thinking that it’s any less quintessentially Styropyro, though: not unless you think that putting together a plasma tube that generates light by shaking some mercury metal sealed within somehow constitutes going soft. The video starts with Anthony relating the history of the device he’s about to make, which goes as far back as 1675—impressive, when you consider that the device in question is basically a light bulb. As Anthony explains, astronomer Jean Picard—perhaps a distant ancestor, or at least a spiritual forebear—decided to see if anything would happen if he put mercury inside an evacuated glass tube and then shook it around a bit. Something did indeed happen—Picard discovered that the mercury glowed with a strange, otherworldly light. The light is the result of something called the triboelectric effect, which you can learn all about here.