Active Science Experiments Posts

News: Rocket Power Your Lazy Boy

Since the days of Archytas, rocket propulsion has been the Holy Grail of aeronautics. Thanks to Galileo's inertia, Newton's laws of motion, and the "father of modern rocketry," Goddard, space is not a complete mystery anymore. Rocket-powered aircrafts have evolved from the first liquid fuel rocket in 1926, to the Soviet R-7 which launched Sputnik, to NASA's Saturn V that propelled Apollo 11 to the moon. Today, even billionaire tourists can enjoy space, like Microsoft's Charles Simonyi and Cir...

How To: Make glowing water

This video tutorial will show you how to make glowing water. You can use as an ingredient to make other science projects glow in the dark, such as crystals and slime. All you need is a highlighter pen and some water. Check out this how-to video and go make some glowing water.

News: The Silver Egg Illusion

This requires a dry hen's egg at room temperature. Hold an egg near a candle flame to cover it with soot. It will need to be completely covered. This is tricky, because if the egg is a tiny bit damp the soot will easily flake off on to your fingers as you turn the egg. Once the egg has a nice black sooty coating, gently immerse it in a bowl of water.

How To: Make Slimy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Ooze at Home

It's been a minute since Michael Bay released his tragedy of a remake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As a huge fan of the cartoon and the movies from the '90s, I have made it a point to not watch the latest this franchise has to offer—I'm certainly not in the business of ruining my childhood. But the awfulness of the remake aside, the TMNT resurgence means I'm celebrating the comeback of everybody's favorite teenage reptiles. Thankfully, Todd's Kitchen has a tutorial for mutant ooze that's ...

How to Be Your Own SpaceX: Design, Build & Test Liquid-Fueled Rocket Engines

Move over NASA— SpaceX is taking over. Well, not really. But today, the privately funded spacecraft company broke all expectations when their Dragon capsule fell to a soft landing in the Pacific Ocean, completing an undoubtedly successful demo flight of nearly two full trips around Earth. It was the first re-entry of a commercial spacecraft ever, bringing commercial space transportation closer to reality.

Classic Chemistry: Colorize Colorless Liquids with "Black" Magic, AKA the Iodine Clock Reaction

Want to make boring old colorless water brighten up on command? Well, you can control the color of water with this little magic trick. Actually, it's not really magic, but a classic science experiment known commonly as the iodine clock reaction, which uses the reactions between water and chemicals to instantly colorize water, seemingly by command. You can use different colorless chemicals to produce different colors, and you can even make the color vanish to make the water clear again.

How To: Make manganese dioxide electrodes

Various electrochemical reactions requires that anodes do not degrade when used. Carbon is cheap, but degrades easily and platinum is extremely expensive. In a previous video, you learned "How to make cobalt and manganese nitrates", and you saw that titanium could be used as a cathode, but not as an anode due to an effect called passivation.

How To: Make a homemade hot air balloon

Think a hot air balloon is something you can only read about in books? Think again. In this six-part science based tutorial, learn how to make your very own hot air balloon using science & the following easy to find materials: plastic bags, plastic drinking straws, thin candles, aluminun foil, tape, and scissors.

How To: Make glow sticks with DEP, TCPO, sodium acetate & dye

If you prefer glow sticks over candles during a power outage, then this how-to is for you! Although glow sticks are used as temporary light sources, there are other applications for them. Divers use them for night diving, fisherman use them to catch swordfish, and the military uses them for light markers, along with infrared versions used in conjunction with night vision devices. But with all these handy uses for glow sticks, the most popular is — recreational use, like dancing at raves, some...

How To: There's Metal Hiding in Your Pepto-Bismol and Here's How You Extract It

Got an upset stomach or a little heartburn? America's favorite pink pill will cure it right up. But did you know that there's actually metal hiding in those chewable Pepto-Bismol tablets? Yes, metal. Technically, it's a poor metal, but metal's metal, right? Well, we do tend to eat a lot of iron in our diets, because it carries oxygen throughout our bodies, so consuming metallic minerals isn't anything abnormal. But you'd never think that Pepto-Bismol is actually made up of metal.

How To: Experiment the law of inertia

Newtons proposed the concept of inertia. According to him an object at rest tends to stay at test and an object in motion tends to continue in motions unless acted up on by an external force. This is the principle of inertia. The tendency of the body to continue to stay as it was is called its inertia. You can demonstrate this principle with a simple experiment. As shown in the video when the hoop is pulled out the pen cap falls in to the bottle. Here the hoop is acted upon but the cap is not...