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" Does water really drain differently in the southern hemisphere? It turns out the answer to that question that got Bart Simpson in so much retrograde hot water is a qualified yes, with a number of caveats.  Destin Sandlin at Smarter Every Day and Derek Muller at Veritasiumteamed up to answer the question once and for all, but realized some of the complicating factors along the way. For instance, toilets aren&amp;#039;t a great indicator of the effect. Water doesn&amp;#039;t flush uniformly across the toilet; instead, it&amp;#039;s projected from a jet, which might counteract any hemisphere-related motion. A sink might be affected by the same factors, meaning a two-basin sink may have water draining in different directions. Muller worked in Sydney, Australia, while Sandlin was in Huntsville, Alabama. They filled up kiddie pools, leaving the water to settle overnight until it was as still as possible. They had center drains installed in the pools so there wasn&amp;#039;t a directional bias. Then after waiting long enough, they began the draining process.  &amp;quot;It was a logistics nightmare, but we were able to get all the data,&amp;quot; Sandlin said in an interview with Popular Mechanics. The long and short of it: in the northern hemisphere, water went counter-clockwise; in the southern hemisphere, it moved clockwise. It boils down to the direction of rotation of the Earth in relation to the draining of the water. If the Earth stopped rotating tomorrow, aside from perpetual darkness falling over the land, water would drain straight down. In other words, the Coriolis effect is real. Evidence to the contrary involves outside factors like jet streams from the water source. &amp;quot;I did not think it would work,&amp;quot; Sandlin said. &amp;quot;I thought maybe if you have a huge eight or nine foot trough and you had a lab with a climate controlled anything, maybe you&amp;#039;d see it.&amp;quot; The guys based their experiment not on other myth-busting tests, but on a study from MIT that outlined some of the problems with other methods. They also intentionally built the experiment so that it could be easily replicated by an amateur scientist with an inexpensive swimming pool. The videos are embedded below. They&amp;#039;re designed to be played side-by-side, interacting with each other, so the Smarter Every Day site is the best place to see it. Or, as Sandlin suggests, bust out your phone and watch it alongside your computer.           "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a15852/does-water-drain-backwards-southern-hemisphere/>