Ten awesome ping pong ball tricks from Mr. Hacker (8 of which can be tried at home)

You don’t need a table to still be able to partake in some interesting ping pong tricks — heck, you don’t even need a paddle. What you will need is a handful of ping pong balls and some commonly-found items from around the house.

YouTuber Mr. Hacker, who specializes in making videos showing the amazing qualities of everyday objects, came up with ten nifty tricks using ping pong balls — the first eight of which can be safely tried at home.

Due to their light weight and spherical shape, ping pong balls are ideal for demonstrating basic principles of physics. Mr. Hacker shows how a dented ping pong ball can be made whole again by dropping it in boiling water. His final two tricks, which we don’t recommend replicating, highlight the extreme combustibility of the innocent looking orbs.

Ping ping balls are so flammable is because they are made from a composite material of nitrocellulose, which is a low-order explosive. Fire fighters even use ping pong balls for controlled burns, by injecting them with a chemical that ignites them and dropping them from helicopters in the area of a wild fire.