Imagine It!

Plain glass, Laminated glass, tempered glass: what’s the difference and how much force does it take to break them?

What happens to a salty pickle when you apply 110 Volts to it? Chief Scientist, Carl Nelson, talks about why the pickle lights up and sparks.

An amazing example of the heart and lung system!

Liquid nitrogen is probably the coldest substance most people will ever see in person.

The Chemistry of combustion and the Physics of acoustics combine in the flame tube.

Cabbage leaves contain a natural acid/base indicator you can release at home and use to test all sorts of things around the house.

use an old garbage can and a shower curtain to make a giant vortex canon.

It looks like leprechaun science, a copper penny turns silver then gold.

What happens to peeps when you remove all the air inside them?

Build electrical circuits using play-doh and batteries.

It’s all about pressure and force

Check out this fun video about the Electrostatic Generator

Time to crush some cans with Air Pressure!

Want to learn a new trick? Check out this video to learn more about the Tablecloth Pull trick!

Water, Oil and some fizzing tablets are all you need to make a cool lava lamp at home.

Movie set snow – just add water!

Time to learn some chemistry!

Use seaweed extract (sodium alginate) to make instant and edible worms.

How to make edible blood with kitchen supplies.

Peroxide really does nothing for smal cuts and scrapes!

Lifesavers plus cola equals huge mess!

Will a light bulb filament light up inside liquid nitrogen?

Liquid Nitrogen is literally super-cool. It boils at -320 F.

Create super bubbles at home with this simple bubble juice recipe.

Making a cloud in a bottle is easy if you have the right equipment.

Depending on how much oxygen is around, hydrogen gas can combust in a few interesting ways.

Magnesium combusts in a dramatic way inside a block of solid carbon dioxide.

A mixture of cornstarch and water displays some interesting properties. Sometimes it’s a liquid, sometimes it’s a solid.

Multiple chemical reactions occurring at the same time keeps this solution clear, for a while, then it suddenly changes to a deep dark blue.

With a bit of science you can push something right through a balloon without it popping!

This demonstration has been done for over 2,000 years! Non-the-less there are still incorrect explanations of the science being published and distributed today.

Combine some iron oxide (rust) with a little aluminum and you get some really nice sparks as well as some microscale chemistry.

Combine whole milk, some food coloring and dish detergent to create some cool color mixing patterns.

How can you get an egg inside a jar that has an opening smaller than the diameter of the egg? Find out in this weeks Imagine It! video.

Using simple items you have in your bathroom and kitchen, you can extract DNA from fruits like bananas, kiwi or strawberries.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day we’re making green snow, and blue snow, and pink snow ….

What better way to determine the caloric content of food than to burn it with liquid oxygen? There are more exacting ways of course, but the flames (and smells) created this way are pretty impressive. Check it out!

Slime is one of those easy-to-do, fun activities that never gets old. There is something that everyone loves about making a substance that is gooey and gross.

Using just air pressure, 14.7 pounds per square inch, we watch a steel drum collapse in on itself. Amazing example of the power of air pressure.

Before watching the video answer this question, “does a soda can placed in water float or sink?” A clue might be that this is all about density, or the mass per volume of a substance.

Check this out to find out how an antacid works.

A cow eye is very similar to a human eye. What better way to understand how your eye works than to take apart a cow eye? Check this out!

If you fill a plastic bottle with a small amount of liquid nitrogen, seal the bottle, then let the gas expand, you get an explosion. If you pour 30 gallons or so of plastic balls on top of the bottle before it explodes, you get a Ballplostion! Check it out!

With a head of red cabbage you can have lots of fun doing some kitchen chemistry. Red cabbage has a natural acid/base indicator that you can extract and test all sort of things to see if they are an acid or base.

Hot air makes these metal pipes howl with noise.

A rocket powered by the combustion of ethyl alcohol. In the end it’s all about action and reaction and rocket nozzle design.

What happens when you torch a towel soaked in a flammable liquid? This result may surprise you.

Using liquid nitrogen, which boils at -320 degrees, we make a batch of tasty ice cream in less than 2 minutes.

How do they get the colors in fireworks? They add various metals to the combustible materials.

Not only do get WTVG meteorologist Jay Berschback to lay on a bed of nails, we also smash a cinder block on top of him. Check it out.

Using just air pressure – not compressed air – you can accelerate a ping pong ball to amazing speeds. Fast enough to rip through a soda can.

What would it feel like to put your body (not your head!) inside a big bag and then remove all the air?

How do you get disappearing ink to fade as fast as possible? You saturate it with carbon dioxide from a fire extinguisher…

Soap bubbles filled with an explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen are ignited in Jay’s bare hands!

Is there a better way to celebrate Mother’s Day than to freeze some flowers in liquid nitrogen? Probably, but flash freezing flowers and then watching them break like glass is pretty cool.

Making an Air Cannon is super easy and you probably have everything you need at home or in the garage right now. Learn how it’s done.

Naked Egg – An egg that has had it’s outer hard shell removed but yet remains intact.

Fill an egg with hydrogen gas, bring a match near-by and see what happens.

When you combine a steel tube filled with a flammable gas and sound waves you can create a pretty cool display of the sound pressure inside the tube.

Ripping a pop can in half with your bare hands is not all that hard if you know a bit of chemistry and a little about how soda cans are fabricated. Watch as ABC13′s Christina Williams rips pop cans apart in this Imagine It! Segment.

It’s March Madness and we are getting crazy ourselves by dunking a basketball in super cold liquid nitrogen. What happens when you cool a basketball down to 320 degrees below zero? Watch the video to find out.

Can you balance an egg only on the vernal equinox? Of course not! you can balance an egg on its end any day of the year. Check out what else you can do with a few eggs at home.

Amazing Milk is a fun “play with your food” moment. Milk is full of tiny clumps of fat. If you add a dash of dish detergent and some food coloring to a plate of milk something interesting starts to happen.

What would grow in a petri dish if we swabbed a sample from your phone or computer keyboard? Watch to find out and learn a simple at home experiment you can do as well.

As part of Engineering Week 2011, we challenge local meteorologist Jay Berschback to build a stable tower on our Earthquake Platform exhibit using only foam noodles and a handful of cross-bracing. Find out if he can do it.

Find out what kinds of glass auto engineers use for the windshield and side windows of your car – and how they break.

What happens if you take away all the air pressure from the outside of a marshmallow by placing in inside a vacuum chamber? Watch the video to find out.

We use our eyes to view our world. A thermal imaging camera can show us things our eyes cannot see. There is so much more to what we call “light”, every thing from gamma rays to radio waves.

There are tiny iron fillings in your iron fortified cereal? Yep, many cereal manufacturers add elemental iron, the kind you would find in a nail, train or car, in your breakfast cereal. It turns out that this form of iron is ideal for a cereal additive.

Our newest Learning World, Engineer It!, is now open. This 5,000 square foot space features 25 new exhibits about engineering in three topics areas: Wind, Water and Structures.

Sloan combines history and science when talking about the origin of the modern breathalyzer – the Drunk-o-meter.

Fatiguing the visual processing system in your brain may not sound like all that much fun, but you should give it a try. Don’t worry, your brain will recover! The Trizonal Space Warper is capable of producing some pretty interesting visual effects.

What happens if you put some liquid nitrogen that is boiling at 320 degrees below zero inside a sealed two liter bottle? A very loud explosion and a shredded bottle!

Food calories are a measure of how much energy is contained in the food item. A very graphic way to visualize how much energy is in a handful of food is to burn it and observer the flame. We try this with a handful of cheesepuffs and Total cereal using liquid oxygen as an oxidizer.

This week Sloan and Jay create a couple of foam volcanoes using a solution of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and some dish soap. Using super concentrated solutions allows the reaction to happen so fast that the foam literally hits the ceiling in our demonstration theater. Check out the video and learn about an at home version.

Methane is a flammable gas that is lighter than air. Often fire fighter have to worry about not only flames that come from the ground, but also dangerous flammable vapors that are lighter than air.

Take a trip back to the 1970′s and make your very own lava lamp using just stuff you have around the house. It’s mesmerizing…

Oobleck is a suspension of cornstarch and water that can behave like a solid or a liquid depending on how much pressure you apply. Try to grab some in your hand and it will form a solid ball in your palm just until you release the pressure, then it will flow out between your fingers. Materials that behave this way are classified as non-Newtonian liquids because their flow properties are not described by a constant viscosity.

Did you eat a few to many chips loaded with a spicy dip? Perhaps just to much during the Game (Ohio vs. Michigan) and are in need of a bit of antacid relief? Check out this video to see just how an antacid works to reduce the acid level in your stomach. One thing I forgot to mention is that Milk of Magnesia is also a laxative … so with all meds read the label before consuming…!

While it looks like Sloan is changing water into wine, what’s really taking place is a chemical clock reaction. Two reactions take place at the same time – reaction number one is trying to create a dark liquid, reaction number two is consuming a chemical needed to turn the liquid dark. After a few seconds the second reaction runs out and the liquid turns an inky black.

A little alcohol in a 5 gallon water jug will combust in an interesting way when a flame is dropped inside.

Super absorbers were developed in the 1960′s by the Department of Agriculture as a product to spread over crops to even out the drench-drought cycle. This class of polymers is capable of absorbing up to 400 times their weight in water. This amazing ability to hold liquids in a gel eventually led to their use in baby diapers, plant soil, grass seed and those fun “grow creatures” toys that swell in water.

What happens if you tilt a room’s floor at 25 degrees, but keep the rest of the room (door frames, windows, etc) at the correct perspective? We call it distorted gravity – or maybe that is more what it feels like. Your eyes and ears get conflicting signals and that can lead to only one thing – a queasy stomach. It’ something you just have to experience in person to fully appreciate.

What would happen if you created a chemical reaction inside a carved pumpkin that generates a whole lot of foam? Watch the video to find out. Question is, what reaction would you choose? We thought it would be fun to use a 35% solution of hydrogen peroxide (that’s more than 10 times more concentrated than what you have at home) and some soap to catch the oxygen gas that is generated.

Solid carbon dioxide is often called dry ice because at normal atmospheric pressure it never forms a liquid state. Instead of changing from a solid to a liquid and then to a gas, it jumps right from solid to gas. This is called sublimation. Dry ice is very cold, around 109 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale. That’s cold enough to freeze flesh and cause frostbite which it why we always wear gloves when handling this stuff.

Sodium Alginate is derived from seaweed and is used as a gelling agent in many foods. We think it’s just fun to play with! When you add the alginate solution to a calcium chloride salt solution it turns into a jell nearly instantly. If you are careful you can make tiny spheres (or caviar balls) if you drip it, but if you squirt a solid stream, it will turn into a “wormy” tube with a solid exterior and a liquid filled interior. Some pretty crazy stuff!

The Boyo is a unique experience – you become much like a yo-yo where you do all the moving. It looks simple enough, you add some energy to the overhead flywheels and then they pull you off the ground a few inches. If you keep adding energy by pulling on the handles, eventually you will be pulled 13 feet off the ground. It takes a bit of practice, so don’t expect to get to the top in one, two or even six pulls.

Flammable liquids can generate invisible vapors that are also flammable. These vapors can be more dangerous than a liquid spill because they are invisible and can travel a distance to an ignition source. Imagine you spill some paint thinner in your basement, as you clean up the liquid, the vapors can move across the floor to a pilot light. As the vapors ignite the flames will flash back to the liquid spill – and you!

These ceramic tiles protect the space shuttle as it renters the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds over 17,000 miles per hour. They are capable of withstanding temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit as the orbiter returns to the surface. A secondary purpose for the tiles is to protect the shuttle from the alternating heat and cold experienced while orbiting the earth. They are amazing insulators!

This is one of our newest exhibits. You have all seen the footage of a TV meteorologist standing outside in some crazy winds reporting on a severe storm or even a hurricane. This exhibit allows you to safely experience winds up to a category one hurricane. If things feel a bit to extreme for you you can simply step out of the wind blast – something you can’t do in a real hurricane.