Liquid Nitrogen Experiments
The Flame Tube
Create a giant smoke ring
Peeps in a vacuum chamber
Chief Scientist, Carl Nelson puts Peeps in a vacuum chamber to find out what happens when the air is removed from the fluffy candy.
Squishy Circuits with Play-Doh
Making circuits with Play-doh is pretty cool. If you have some doh at home you can use that for conductive circuits. To take it to the next level you will need some insulating doh as well. Below are recipes for both at home conductive and insulating “Play-doh”.
Making Conductive Play-doh
The Ingredients
- 1 cup Water
- 1 1/2 cups Flour
- 1/4 cup Salt
- 3 Tbsp. Cream of Tartar (or 9Tbsp of lemon juice)
- 1 Tbsp. Vegetable Oil
- Food Coloring (optional)
Cooking Procedure
- Mix water, 1cup of flour, salt, cream of tartar, vegetable oil, and food coloring in a medium sized pot.
- Cook over medium heat and stir continuously.
- The mixture will begin to boil and start to get chunky.
- Keep stirring the mixture until it forms a ball in the center of the pot.
- Once a ball forms, place the ball on a lightly floured surface.
- The ball will be very hot. We suggest flattening it out and letting it cool for a couple minutes before handling.
- Slowly knead the remaining flour into the ball until you’ve reached a desired consistency.
- Store in an airtight container or plastic bag. While in the bag, water from the dough will create condensation. This is normal. Just knead the dough after removing it from the bag, and it will be as good as new. If stored properly, the dough should keep for several weeks.
Making Insulating Play-doh
The Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cup Flour
- 1/2 cup Sugar
- 3 Tbsp. Vegetable Oil
- 1/2 cup Deionized (or Distilled) Water
(You really want to use Distilled water to keep the amount of conductive ions to a minimum. Otherwise, the doh will be conductive rather than insulating.)
Cooking Procedure
- Mix solid ingredients and oil in a pot or large bowl, setting aside ½ cup flour to be used later.
- Mix with this mixture a small amount of deionized water (about 1 Tbsp.) and stir.
- Repeat this step until a majority water is absorbed by the mixture.
- Once your mixture is at this consistency, knead the mixture into one “lump”.
- Knead more water into the dough until it has a sticky, dough-like texture.
- Now, knead in flour to the dough, until a desired texture is reached.
- Store in an airtight container or plastic bag. While in the bag, water from the dough will create condensation. This is normal. Just knead the dough after removing it from the bag, and it will be as good as new. If stored properly, the dough should keep for several weeks.
The idea of creating electrical circuits using Play-doh and the recipes above come from The University of St. Thomas. Check out their Squishy Circuits page for more details.
The Bed of Nails
The electrostatic generator
Crush a can with air pressure
Tablecloth Pull Trick
The mentos fountain experiment
It’s become a classic summertime messy experiment. Drop some mentos (or lifesavers, or sweet tarts, or salt, or …) into a bottle of carbonated soda and you can release volumes of gas and soda from the container.
How to create a cloud in a bottle
Making a cloud in a bottle is easy if you have the right equipment. A bicycle pump and cork or rubber stopper will make an amazingly dense cloud inside a two liter bottle.
Fun with Oobleck
A mixture of cornstarch and water displays some interesting properties. Sometimes it’s a liquid, sometimes it’s a solid and it all depends on how you handle it.
Stab a balloon without popping it
With a bit of science you can push something right through a balloon without it popping! Read more
View the sun safely
The upcoming annular eclipse of 2012 won’t be visible to us in Ohio, however that dosen’t mean you still can have some fun with the sun.
As always, never look directly at the sun!
A safe and very simple way to view the sun is by making a pinhole viewer. Here is a nice description of how to make one. The Stanford Solar Center has some nice information on how to view the sun and of course NASA has a great calendar of upcoming solar events.
Micro-scale thermite reaction
Combine some iron oxide (rust) with a little aluminum and you get some really nice sparks as well as some microscale chemistry.
Amazing Milk Experiment
Combine whole milk, some food coloring and dish detergent to create some cool color mixing patterns. Read more
The egg in a jar experiment
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.
Crushing a Steel Drum with air pressure
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. Read more
Does it float or does it sink?
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.
Read more
What is a Ballplosion?
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 Ballplosion! Check it out!
Read more
Sound Pipes
Hot air makes these metal pipes howl with noise.
Read more
Ethanol powered bottle rocket
A rocket powered by the combustion of ethyl alcohol. In the end it’s all about action and reaction and rocket nozzle design.
Read more
The Flame Tube
The Flame Tube (aka Rubens’ tube) allows us to “visualize sound waves” based on the gas pressure inside a steel tube. Read more
Make your own hovercraft
Our hovercraft is pretty simple in construction. A circle of plywood, a plastic tarp, a coffee can lid and a leaf blower. Check out this video for more information.
Magnetic Direction of Sense?
Every wonder why dad constantly gets lost while mom always knows where she is? It may have little to do with reading a map and more to do with genetics. Butterflies and other animals use the magnetic field of the earth to navigate, and humans may have this gene as well. Read more
The Newest Elements
The periodic table may be a constant on the wall of science classrooms, but that doesn’t mean it never changes. Just this month scientists added two new elements to the periodic table! You won’t find elements 114 or 116 floating around just anywhere – they were made in an atom smasher and stick around for less than a second. Now the challenge is to name them – any ideas?
Jay lays on a bed-of-nails
Not only do we 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! Read more
Ping Pong Ball Cannon
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.
The cannon is a long PVC tube loaded up with a ping pong ball. To fire it off, both ends are sealed with a single layer of clear tape. Next, a vacuum pump is used to remove most of the air from the cannon tube. When the tape nearest the ball is ripped open (punctured by a knife) 14.7 pounds per square inch of air pressure rushes in and slams into the ball. With no air molecules in front of the ball, it can accelerate to speeds of nearly 300 miles per hour.
Of course if the ball does not rip through the can, you can always rip a soda can in half this way.
A vacuum-packed person
We live in a ocean of air, in fact, we live at the bottom of that ocean of air. All those miles of air above us end up exerting a force of about 14.7 pounds over every square inch of our bodies. We take it for granted since the force per area (pressure) is the same all around us. Things start to get interesting when there is an imbalance in that pressure. What better way to find out what an imbalance in pressure feels like than to vacuum-pack WTVG-13 weekend anchor Christina Williams? Read more
Frozen flowers for Mother’s Day
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. Read more
Make an Air Cannon
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. Read more
How strong is an egg?
A 30 pound cement block supported by eight raw eggs.
Can an ordinary egg support the weight of a 30 pound cement block? That was the question that Jeff and Joe, two of our Team members, were investigating this past Saturday in the Science Studio. They discovered that a single egg is not up to the task of supporting the brick. It just made a big mess on the bottom of the brick when it was crushed. (Actually, a visitor at the Science Studio insisted we try just one egg to see what would happen.)
So the question is how many eggs would you need to support the brick? After cracking a number of eggs in the name of science, the smallest number of eggs they could get to support a block was eight. Check out the video to see how they did it. Read more
How to rip a pop can in half
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. The key, is the plastic liner that coats the inside of the can. In order to protect the aluminum can from the carbonic acid in sodas, can manufacturers coat the inside of a can with a plastic liner. The liner also protects the inside of beer cans as well.
Now, I suppose, if you were really strong you could rip any can in half with your bare hands. In order to make it a for-sure thing for this demonstration, I used a bit of chemistry knowledge to etch the can.
Shattering a Basketball
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. Read more
Balancing an egg – can you make it happen?
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. Read more
How do you build an Earthquake-proof building?
After the massive earthquake near Japan this morning one wonders if it’s possible to build an earthquake-proof building? The answer is yes and no. There are of course, engineering techniques that can be used to create a very sound structure that will endure a modest or even strong quake. Read more
The Earthquake Platform
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 some cross-bracing he must construct a stable tower at least 5 stories tall. Find out if he can meet the challenge. Read more
Breaking Glass
Find out what kinds of glass auto engineers use for the windshield and side windows of your car – and how they break. Read more
How to supersize a marshmallow
What happens if you take away all the air pressure from the outside of a marshmallow? It gets bigger. Normally, 14.7 pounds per square inch of air pressure is pressing on the outside of the marshmallow – and 14.7 pounds per square inch of pressure is pressing outward from the tiny air bubbles inside the mallow. Read more
The Infrared Camera
We use our eyes to view our world. While our eyes are amazing detectors of light, they only “see” a tiny slice of the whole picture of electromagnetic energy that is all around us – we call what our eyes see “light.” Read more
Football Science
This Sunday you may just need a break from the day-long preshow coverage of Superbowl 45. So grab the kids, or just yourself and a bowl of chips, and have some fun learning a little bit of the science behind all those tackles, passes and touchdowns – it’s a great learning lesson. Read more
The Blade Paper Tower Challenge
Design a Newspaper Tower
Saturday, August 13, 2011
10am-5pm
Visitors are invited to participate in this Engineering Challenge, brought to us by The Blade. Teams must build an 18-inch tall tower constructed solely from newspaper and tape that must support the weight of an ordinary baseball. Once completed, the tower must ‘Pass the Test’ – that is, towers will be placed directly in the path of a fan and must remain standing to be considered eligible. All supplies will be provided. Towers constructed off site are eligible to win as long as they pass the test. Prizes will be awarded to the engineers of the three lightest towers that pass the wind test. Read more
Engineer It! our newest exhibition
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. Read more
Liquid nitrogen in a bottle
Oobleck – a non-Newtonian substance
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 Read more
Film Canister Rockets
Film Canister Rockets are a favorite experiment at Imagination Station. We do them frequently within the Science Studio, a learning world that allows visitors to do hands-on experiments and other activities.
One of the best things about this activity is that Read more
Soda and Diet Soda Experiment
Materials:
- 1 can of Soda
- 1 can of Diet Soda
- 1 or 2 Large clear containers (like an aquarium, or large bowls)
- Water
What to do:
- Add water to the aquarium so that it can cover the soda cans.
- Place the cans into the water.
What the Science:
The diet soda and regular soda differ in the amount of solids (sugar/sugar substitute, soft drink ingredients, etc.) that are dissolved in the liquid. The amount of dissolved solids in a liquid will affect the liquids density. An object will become buoyant (float) when it is less dense than the liquid surrounding it. Buoyancy is simply an upward acting force caused by the fluid. Archimedes was the first person to dissect this phenomenon and stated what is now known as Archimedes’ Principle “Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.”
Note that one packet of an artificial sweetener is approximately equal in sweetness to about three packets of sugar and the artificial sweetener weighs less. The regular soda has more solids (soft drink ingredients and sugar) dissolved in the liquid than the diet soda so it is denser than the water surrounding it in the aquarium causing it to sink, and the diet soda has less solids dissolved (soft drink ingredients and artificial sweetener) so it is less dense and floats.