A new viral sensation on YouTube involves a hydraulic press crushing various things. These videos seem to be hypnotic, you won’t believe the view counts. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks breakdown this new YouTube trend. Watch the Hydraulic Press Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcMD…

Read more here: http://www.dailydot.com/lol/hydraulic…

“The Hydraulic Press Channel is pretty self-explanatory: “Wanna see stuff getting crushed by hydraulic press? This is the right channel for you.”

So reads the YouTube description of this hot new viral sensation. Weekly footage depicting heavy-duty machinery crushing objects as innocuous as an Easter basket and finicky as hockey pucks have proved wildly popular on social sites like Reddit ever since an Oct. 6 video introduced the world to the most surprisingly soothing thing since ASMR.

The 100-ton machine featured in the videos costs tens of thousands of dollars and has been used for commercial purposes for over two decades—mostly bending and unbending things. Only recently did a Finnish man who’d been using the press for work think about its other applications. In his first experiment, the hydraulic press crushed a golf ball. Ethan Meixsell’s metal banger “Thor’s Hammer” sets the mood before the cathartic hum of a hydraulic cylinder cuts in and crushes the object.”