Visually-Cool Simple Experiments
- Dry ice is used to pack things that need to stay cold and dry. This experiment involves making giant bubbles filled with the frothy "smoke" dry ice produces as it melts and becomes a gas. You'll need a bucket, water, a little soap and some dry ice, which you can typically find at grocery stores or ice cream parlors. Dry ice is not ice, but rather frozen carbon dioxide that is about 700 times denser than carbon dioxide is as a gas. When it melts, it skips a liquid phase and "sublimes" directly into gaseous form. So, as the dry ice melts, it generates a lot of gaseous carbon dioxide that creates and fills giant bubbles made from the soapy water.
- It's a simple experiment that's been performed as a parlor trick in many homes. You will need a candle, preferably with the wick easily accessible, and either a lighter or matches. First, light the candle and let it burn for a bit to warm up. Once a sizable pool of wax has formed around the wick, get your lighter or a match lit and ready, blow out the candle, place your flame in the path of the smoke -- and watch the candle relight! The fine particulates of the smoke just after the candle has been blown out are hot and readily combustible. When you introduce the candle into the smoke's path, it ignites, relighting the candle.
- It's easy to make a ping-pong ball float in midair with nothing but a hair dryer and an empty toilet paper tube. The idea is to point the hair dryer upward and use the stream of air to make the ping-pong ball hover. As air moves around and past the ball, it creates an area of low pressure around its surface, helping to keep the ball in the stream of air. This enables you to use the hair dryer to direct the ball around by changing the direction of the air stream. When you place the toilet paper tube in the path of the air just above the ball, the air moves even faster around the ball, sucking the ball up into the tube.
- It's an experiment as old as, well, diet cola and Mentos mints. Mix them together and they react in a way that brings foam shooting out of the cola bottle. It's best done with a 2-liter bottle of diet cola, and half a pack of Mentos. In an open area -- consider doing this outdoors, as it can get very messy -- tear off one end of a Mentos package and push four or five mints out the end by squeezing in the middle. Open the bottle of soda, drop in the mints as quickly as you can, stand back and admire the geyser that comes shooting out.
It's a combination of the dissolved carbon dioxide and aspartame (a sweetener) in the cola and the gum arabic and gelatin that yields this foaming.
