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Another "Do This At Home" Video!
Hi, All. This is another video from the "Do This At Home" video MASTER!If you like this one, once again, www.youtube.com and search "science experiments to do at home". Well, adios!
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Hi Guys! This is a really easy and fun science experiment to do at home. And yes, I tried it, and it's simple and amuzing!
If you want some more of this guys experiments, go to www.youtube.com and search "fun science experiments"
If you reconize his face, you'll see a WHOLE BUNCH of science videos! Well, for now, bye!
The Un-ending mobious strip!!!
Standing wave on 2D surface
Courtesy Oleg_AlexandrovThe mixture of corn starch and water literally stands up in the video below because of standing waves. If you want to try this, place a mixture of corn starch and water on cookie sheet. Hold the cookie sheet down over a bass speaker with some of your fingers. The speaker should be playing music with low frequencies. By varying the distance an position of your fingers you can alter the standing wave patterns within the cookie sheet.
August Ferdinand Mobius, German astronomer, mathematician, and author, was born on November 17, 1790. He's best known for the discovery in 1858 of the Mobius strip, a two-dimensional surface with only one side. Celebrate his birthday by making a Mobius strip of your own. Here's how.
Dermestid colony: (Courtesy US FWS)
First of all, check out the Museum's dermestid cam. (Dermestid beetles are scavengers—organisms that eat the remains and wastes of other plants and animals.)
If you're at the museum, go to the Science Buzz station in the Mississippi River Gallery on Level 5 to watch a live feed from the dermestid colony. Or, even better, you can look into the colony itself from the queue for the 3D theater, down by the Triceratops on Level 3.
It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
Rot happens. And scavengers—like dermestid beetles and turkey vultures—eat rotting things. We associate rot with death, but it also makes life possible. How? As dead plants and animals decay—helped along by scavengers—the nutrients inside their bodies are returned to the soil. That helps new plants grow and starts the food chain over again. Without scavengers and decomposers, we’d be up to our necks in dead stuff. Think of them as the ultimate recyclers!
Bad to the bone
Adult dermestid beetles are small, black, and hairy with patches of white. The brownish-gold larvae have blunt heads and tufts of long brown hair on their rear ends. And they’re hungry—an infestation of dermestid beetles can destroy a museum’s collections. So why does the Museum keep a dermestid colony? The insects eat old, dried out, mummified stuff—leather, fur, feathers, skin, hair, wool, silk, and dried food products. They eat it all, right down to the bone. So they’re valuable for cleaning skeletons.
Many insects lay eggs and develop on dead bodies, eating them as they go. Blow flies—among the first to colonize a body—come and go fairly quickly. Dermestids, on the other hand, can be found around a body as long as there’s anything to eat—from near the time of death to years later. The kinds of insects that a scientist finds with a corpse, and the ages of the larvae and pupae, can be used to estimate when the death occurred. So insect scavengers can also help solve crimes.
Young blowfly maggots on a rat carcass: Photo courtesy Aaron Tarone
Set up a beetle habitat of your own
It’s easy to observe the transformation of complete metamorphosis when you set up your own mealworm colony. Mealworms, the larval form of darkling beetles, are commonly sold in pet stores as food for reptiles and amphibians. These beetles are completely harmless and cannot bite or run very fast. As long as they're well fed, adult beetles won't try to escape their habitat.
Materials
- A large plastic bin, 2–3” deep
- A bag of oat or wheat bran
- Two layers of burlap or cheesecloth, cut to fit inside the bin
- Light all-purpose household oil to coat the outside edges of the bin when the beetles mature
- Approximately 50 mealworms, available at pet stores or bait shops
What to do
- Lay a square of burlap in the tray.
- Pour 1–2” of bran into the tray.
- Add the mealworms.
- Lay a square of burlap or cheesecloth on top of the bran. (This gives the older larvae a place to pupate.)
- Add a fresh slice of apple, potato, or lettuce on top of the bran every week. This will provide all the moisture your mealworms need. Add fresh bran as the level goes down.
Simple experiments
Develop some simple experiments to observe behaviors and record major events in the mealworms’ life cycle:
- Measure individual mealworms weekly and record growth rates on a graph.
- Place a few “control” mealworms in the refrigerator to see if they develop at the same rate.
- Place mealworms in the centers of some Styrofoam meat trays. Cover half of each tray with black construction paper, and hypothesize whether the mealworms will move to the light side or the dark side of the tray.
- Record the number of times the mealworm molts, or sheds its exoskeleton, as it grows.
- Record the number of weeks until their mealworms pupate, and how long they remain in the pupae.
You're invited to attend the annual Fall Color Blast on Sunday, October 1, from 1-5pm, at the Warner Nature Center. The event is free and features a professional storyteller, live fiddle music, bird banding demonstrations, canoeing, rides on a solar-powered pontoon, hikes, kids' crafts, free apple pie and ice cream, cider and coffee, and more. (Want more information about programs at the Center?)
It's all over the Internet. It's on David Letterman and the Today Show. It's on NPR, for Pete's sake. Across the country, people are caught up in a frenzy of extreme Diet Coke and Mentos experiments.
Want to try it at home?
Get permission, go outside, and have a hose handy. Things are gonna get messy...
- The simplest thing is to just drop a Mentos or two into a small bottle of Diet Coke.
- Not so satisfying? OK, now it's time to get serious.
- Make a "cartridge" of Mentos. Hold each candy with a pair of pliers, and carefully drill a small hole through the center. Then string five or six Mentos onto a straightened paper clip or a piece of fishing line.
- Hold the bottle cap with a pair of pliers and drill a hole through the top. (Start with a hole 1/4" in diameter.) Thread the paper clip or fishing line with the Mentos cartridge through the bottle cap so that the candy will hang down inside the bottle when you screw on the cap. Different sized holes in the cap will yield different effects.
- You can also carefully drill holes in the bottle, above the level of the soda. If you drill a ring of holes, you get a pretty neat effect. And you'll also make a super big mess.
Of course, you don't have to use Mentos and Diet Coke. The good folks at EepyBird.com have done many, many experiments, and it turns out that dropping just about anything into any kind of soda creates at least a little fizz. But Mentos and Diet Coke is an especially satisfying combination.
So how does it work?
The explosive effect is caused when the carbon dioxide that's been compressed in the soda escapes so quickly that the pressure pushes the soda out of the bottle. That's the easy part. But why do Mentos, in particular, cause such a good effect?
Part of the answer has to do with nucleation sites. "Huh?" you ask. Yeah, me, too. Soda is a liquid supersaturated with carbon dioxide gas, and nucleation sites are places where the carbon dioxide can make bubbles. A nucleation site can be a scratch on a surface, a speck of dust, or any place where you have a high surface area relative to volume.
Bubbles in soda: (Photo courtesy Spiff, Wikipedia Commons)
Courtesy Spiff
And Mentos have a lot of nucleation sites. There are lots of imperfections in their surfaces, and that allows lots and lots of bubbles to form. Plus, Mentos are heavy enough to sink when you drop them in, so they react to with the soda all the way to the bottom of the container. The sticky result is a fun, foaming mess.
But what happens if you drink Diet Coke and eat Mentos at the same time?
The EepyBird website has the answer, if you really must know...
Science Buzz and all related activities
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