Chemistry is a fascinating science, but it's often taught poorly in today's
boring schools. Here's how chemistry should be taught: by mad
scientists! Here's Neatorama's list of the Top 10 Mad Science-Worthy Chemistry
Experiments:
The Briggs-Rauscher reaction is a well known example of oscillating chemical
reactions, also known as chemical clocks because the periodicity can be
used to tell time. What's going on in the beaker is actually quite a complex
set of chemical reactions. Here's how to do it: Link
2. Gummy Bear and Molten Potassium Chlorate
Who'da thunk that Gummy Bear can be so ... violent? Here's what
happen if you drop a Gummy Bear (which is mostly sugar), to a tube of
molten potassium chlorate:
Mentos in various carbonated liquids. From left to right: carbonated water
(Perrier), Classic Coke, Sprite, and Diet Coke. By K.
Shimada [Wikipedia]
You've all seen this before. The Diet Coke and Mentos experiment by Fritz
Grobe and Stephen Voltz of EepyBird
was the stuff of Internet legend back in 2007. But what exactly happens
when you drop a Mentos into a solution of Diet Coke?
According to Hyneman (he's the mustachioed MythBuster), it's a
process called "nucleation," in which the particular chemistry
of the Mentos candy interacts with the chemistry of the carbonated Diet
Coke, causing the carbon dioxide gas, or CO2, to suddenly come out of
suspension in the liquid and make a break for freedom. [...]
Hyneman says, "There's a cascade that happens with -- it's
a little esoteric -- an ion exchange. Basically the Mentos start to
dissolve, and it's like tripping a switch. It's not what you would call
a chain reaction, because that's something else in chemistry terms,
but it's a cascade whereon all of a sudden, all of the CO2 that was
contained in the liquid is suddenly not as attracted to the liquid as
it was before, because of this slight change in the chemistry that occurs."
Whatever you do, don't eat a mentos then chug a mouthful of diet soda,
mmkay?
Yes, even elephants need to maintain good dental hygiene, but what kind
of toothpaste do they use? Here's a favorite chemistry demo called Elephant
Toothpaste (no, elephants don't actually use this as a toothpaste, silly
- it's only called that because it looks like the kind and quantity of
toothpaste an elephant would use).
This one's easy to do, all you need is dish soap, hydrogen peroxide,
and potassium iodide: Link
5. Grape Plasma
What happens if you put a grape and nuke it in a microwave? You get something
very cool ... and dangerous at the same time, because it *will* ruin your
microwave, release poisonous gases, and you *can* burn down your house
- so don't do it, mmkay? Watch:
What just happened? Here's the explanation, according to The
Plasma Universe:
It is relatively easy to generate a plasmoid using a microwave
and a medium that will initiate the formation of a plasmoid, this can
be caused by the carbon microparticles in the smoke from a naked flame
or match, which ignites and moves about as plasmoids, and some biological
cells are known to produce plasma under microwave conditions, such as
grapes (electrons try to move through highly resistive grape-skin, and
plasmoids may form) This is due to the fact that microwaves, being high
frequency electromagnetic radiation in the GHz range, are capable of
exciting electrodeless gas discharges in air, similar to the process
used in Sulfur lamps.
Got that?
6. Burning Salts
Quick: what color is fire? Orangey red? Obviously you haven't seen alcohol,
barium chloride, boron, strontium, calcium, lithium, sodium, copper, and
potassium salts set aflame ...
You've probably heard that fire needs oxygen to burn (indeed, the principle
behind CO2 fire extinguisher is to use the heavier carbon dioxide
to displace the oxygen needed by the flame).
But does a fire really need oxygen? Not burning magnesium! It'll
burn even when encased in dry ice (solid CO2). Note: magnesium
shavings are used - not powder, which will explode if you try to set it
on fire.
Ferrofluid, a colloidal
mixture of nanoscale magnetic particles in a solvent, reacts to magnetic
field in an awesomely bizarre way. Sachiko Kodama uses ferrofluid to create
dynamic sculptures called Morpho
Towers:
A drop of mercury in a solution of potassium chromate and sulfuric acid,
set so it's almost touching an iron nail, will start to beat like a heart.
Journal of Chemical Education explains why: Link
John Farrier posted this back
in May, 2009 but it's too good not to post again here. Behold, the
World of Chemistry, a video from the Europe Research Commission using
a dance party to explain basic chemical reactions.
__________
Don't miss these other fun science articles from Neatorama:
For kids with xeroderma pigmentosum, sunshine is deadly. UV rays cause them to develop cancerous tumors. They stay inside and covered, except for rare occasions late at night. Patients travel to Camp Sundown in New York to meet others with the condition and enjoy activities designed to accommodate their needs. This year, those activities included a major league baseball game at Yankee Stadium.
Because they couldn’t leave until the sun was almost down, and because it was a three-hour drive, they knew they’d be able to see only the last couple of innings of the game. But then it rained, causing a more-than-two-hour rain delay. While the rest of the crowd cursed, the campers rejoiced. How lucky can you get? The bus arrived just before the first pitch. “It was almost like the game was waiting for them to show up,” Yankees GM Brian Cashman said. “That kind of gave us goosebumps.”
To get the kids out of the bus and into their VIP suite for the game, Yankees media-relations director Jason Zillo — the man who dreamed up the whole night — had to take them on a rat’s route of back staircases and tunnels to avoid any fluorescent lights. After the Yankees beat the A’s 6-3, the stadium lights had to be dimmed to 30 percent. Once they were, all the kids came running onto the field with smiles that could’ve lit up the Bronx.
“It’s cool to be part of this,” said [Yankee player A.J.] Burnett, whom Zillo forced to leave at 3:15. “And it’s kind of mind-boggling. I can’t imagine if I couldn’t take my children outside.”
The Yankees partied and played baseball with the campers until they had to leave at 3:30 AM to beat the sunrise. Link -via YesButNoButYes
Before the age of photography, there was a strange custom of making a plaster cast of the face of the recently departed.
These "death masks" were mementos of the dead, though they also had other purposes like for creating portraits or for recording facial records of unknown corpses.
Here’s a collection of death masks of the famous at Socyberty. To the left is Alfred Hitchcock:
Alfred Hitchcock dealt with death any number of times in his films – murder most horrid quite often – and in his death he retains a certain air of petulance.
He had a career that spanned six decades and most people are surprised to hear that he died as late as 1980. He directed over fifty feature films and is regarded by many as the most influential British film maker of all time.
He died of renal failure in California at the age of eighty. It is somewhat ironic that the film-maker who made generations of moviegoers wet themselves with fright should die of a kidney related illness.
W00t! It’s time for our collaboration with the What is it? Blog – can you guess what this object is for? Place your guess in the comment section. Please post no URL, let others play. No prize this week, so you’re playing for bragging rights only.
Update 5/17/09 – The answer is: A Geyser Tube, used for the Coke and Mentos geyser experiment, to see it in action check out the video at the link. Congrats to Jared who got it right out of the gate!
So, we all knew about Mentos and Coke (thanks, Jamie and Adam), but I didn’t know that Alka-Seltzer could, in fact, kill a bird or that apple seeds have cyanide! See for yourself!
As we get older, it’s easier to logically dismiss some of the outlandish claims we heard as kids—never really needing to investigate if there’s any truth behind them. But some of these assertions—like whether eating too many carrots will turn you orange or if rice really does harm birds when ingested—tend to keep us guessing far into adulthood. To satisfy our curiosity (and yours) we’ve done research that debunks or confirms common food-related fables.
If you recall the Diet Coke/Mentos phenomenon, you already know Fritz Grobe and Stephen Yoltz, even if you don’t know their names. They’re the geniuses behind the theater company Eepybird.
Geeks Are Sexy has a two-part interview with Grobe and Yoltz about how they took six months to develop the Bellagio Fountain routine for their “Experiment #137″ video and what went into the creation of their “Sticky Notes Experiments” video the next year.
You’ll also see them do the Diet Coke/Mentos routine in front of a live audience at the Maker Fair! Link
If the weather is freezing where you are, check this out. Throwing boiling water into the air is going to be the new “mentos and diet coke” meme on the Net.
LHC Explained with … Mince Pies! If you don’t understand anything about the Large Hadron Collider, perhaps it just hasn’t been explained clearly to you.
Here’s the LHC demonstrated by Professor Heinz Wolff of Brunel University with the Small Pie Collider: Link
Seventeen Years in Two Minutes Dan Hanna took photos of himself every day for 17 years using a home-made camera positioning ring. The result is an amazing stop-motion film that is unlike any other I’ve seen! Link
Mouth to Cat Resuscitation Bedford fireman Al Machado went beyond the call of duty to save a cat he saved from a burning building: he gave it a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation!
The Mentos Kiss Fight game was surprisingly fun. It’s like a 2d fighting game, except instead of punches and kicks, you throw high and low kisses. Kissing while backing up throws fireball kisses, and catching a falling Mentos product automatically activates a special move kiss. If you win the one-round fight by inflicting more pleasure then your opponent, then you’ll finish her off with a special move. The end boss is a cougar, and I managed to overwhelm her only after a couple of tries. Perhaps suitably, kissing her feet over and over proved to be the best technique. Via Digital DJ.
Just the latest in a surprisingly long list of Mentos-related posts to grace Neatorama. I wonder if any other commercial product has been mentioned as many times.
Yes, there were videos taken at the world record Mentos/Diet Coke demonstration in Leuven, Belgium. There are several on YouTube already, but none that give you a great overall view (yet).
About 1,500 students participated in a Mentos/Diet Coke demonstration in Leuven, Belgium. Each wore a blue poncho and added Mentos mints to a bottle of Diet Coke for a simultaneous explosion! A new world record has been set. See more picture in The Telegraph. Link -via Fark
A Franciscan friar and a lay brother, as seen before the abolition of their Order.
BibliOdyssey blog has a neat post about a charming set of gouache sketches from a 1836 book titled "Picturesque Review of the Costume of the Portuguese." Though the identity of the artist is not known, it’s surmised that the sketches are mementos or gifts for tourists visiting Portugal way back when!
The sketches are sympathetic and most I would describe as quaint portraits. Even the true caricatures are gently humorous without any hint of malevolence. The language in the title and in some of the captions is just a little skewed or unusual, more likely associated with a non-native speaker, to my mind. I may of course be completely wrong. It’s a sweet little series in any event.
When 40-year-old Tran Thi Kham traveled to Taiwan to search for her long lost father, she only had a few mementos as clues, a gold ring and a picture of a young man. She took several jobs, one of which was to care for an elderly woman until her death. After leaving that job and moving to another city, she realized her precious mementos had been left behind! 77-year-old Tsai Han-chao, the man who had employed her looked for the ring and picture and recognized them as gifts he had given to a Vietnamese woman he had fallen in love with 40 years earlier!
“Life’s ups and downs are just like television drama. How could I have ever dreamed that she is my daughter? I couldn’t stop crying when we were finally united,” he told Taiwan’s TVBS cable news channel.
Tran’s mother had died only two years after her birth, and she did not know that the aunt who raised her was not her birthmother until she was an adult. Link -via Metafilter
College student Trevor is currently doing a stint at the Mentos US Headquarter in Erlanger, Kentucky, as an intern – but not just any intern: a Mentos intern.
You can see him live on webcam, call him up, and order him to do stuff for you like tell you how wonderful you are, prank call your friends and things like that.
After the success of their Coke and Mentos Fountain video, the guys from EepyBird pondered the question of whether one Diet Coke/Mentos reaction could be triggered by another. The result is Experiment #214. Hit play or go to this link.
Oops of the day: Las Vegas bazillionaire Steve Wynn was showing "Le Rêve", a 1932 painting by Picasso, to his friends when he elbowed the $40 million artwork:
[Wynn] began to tell the story of the Picasso’s provenance. As he talked, he had his back to the picture. He was wearing jeans and a golf shirt. Wynn suffers from an eye disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which affects his peripheral vision and therefore, occasionally, his interaction with proximate objects, and, without realizing it, he backed up a step or two as he talked. “So then I made a gesture with my right hand,” Wynn said, “and my right elbow hit the picture. It punctured the picture.” There was a distinct ripping sound. Wynn turned around and saw, on Marie-Thérèse Walter’s left forearm, in the lower-right quadrant of the painting, “a slight puncture, a two-inch tear. We all just stopped. I said, ‘I can’t believe I just did that. Oh, shit. Oh, man.’ ”
Wynn turned around again. He put his pinkie in the hole and observed that a flap of canvas had been pushed back. He told his guests, “Well, I’m glad I did it and not you.” He said that he’d have to call Cohen and William Acquavella, his dealer in New York, to tell them that the deal was off. Then he resumed talking about his paintings, almost, but not quite, as though he hadn’t just delivered what one of the guests would later call, in an impromptu stab at actuarial math, a “forty-million-dollar elbow.”
Even if you can’t afford the $20 million for a launch into Earth orbit, you can still put a little piece of yourself into space for as little as $35.
Several companies have entered the market to provide relatively low-cost space experiences for the common folk — by launching mementos, hair samples or even mortal remains to the final frontier.
For kids with xeroderma pigmentosum, sunshine is deadly. UV rays cause them to develop cancerous tumors. They stay inside and covered, except for rare occasions late at night. Patients travel to Camp Sundown in New York to meet others with the condition and enjoy activities designed to accommodate their needs. This year, those activities included a major league baseball game at Yankee Stadium.
ueue
If you recall the Diet Coke/Mentos phenomenon, you already know Fritz Grobe and Stephen Yoltz, even if you don’t know their names. They’re the geniuses behind the theater company Eepybird. 
You all know what happen if you combine mentos and diet coke on Earth, but what happens if you do it in zero gravity?
About 1,500 students participated in a Mentos/Diet Coke demonstration in Leuven, Belgium. Each wore a blue poncho and added Mentos mints to a bottle of Diet Coke for a simultaneous explosion! A new world record has been set. See more picture in The Telegraph. 
Artist Jeremiah Palecek of Net Surrealism, whom we’ve featured on Neatorama 
College student Trevor is currently doing a stint at the Mentos US Headquarter in Erlanger, Kentucky, as an intern – but not just any intern: a Mentos intern.
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