Hot Science Experiments How-Tos

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: Make an Alternative Way to Cook Food

There is always an easier way to do something whether you want to clean, organize, freshen the smell, get water into a bucket that won't fit in your sink. The same principle applies when cooking. Sure you could cook food in an oven, microwave it, boil it, fry it, cook it with a solar cooker, but there is an easier and inexpensive method.

How To: Make Water Droplets "Levitate" on Water (Using Vibrations)

You can take some really awesome photos of water droplets if you've got a fast enough camera (and flash), but water drops aren't just spectacular as photographic subjects—you can also make them a part of the photographic process by using a water drop as a DIY projection microscope and even a macro lens for your iPhone. But as useful as a water drop can be, it's still way cooler when they're in front of the camera (as the subject). Recently, researchers from the National Autonomous University ...

How To: Make Trippy Triboluminescent Crystals That Glow Red or Blue When You Smash Them

If you're a Breaking Bad junkie who can't wait for the next episode, satisfy your craving with a little at-home chemistry and make some blue DIY smash-glow crystals! No, this is not Walter White's so-called "Big Sky" or even the subpar cringe-worthy product of his competitors. It's not even the same kind of crystals, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this. This is totally legal, even kid-friendly if you play it safe, though it actually requires more safety precautions than the potassium nitra...

How To: Improve Water Head

An experiment was carried out at our laborataries to investigate the flow through two pipes of same diameter fitted at the same height from water level inside of a water tank as shown. It is found the longer pipe line inside the water tank generates a higher speed resulting more powerfull flow. Flow in this pressure pipe develops due to gravitational accelaration on a horizontally flowing water column also, when it is an enclosed stream of flow. If this length is short it is not possible to d...

How To: Launch a Cork Rocket with an Ultraviolet LED Flashlight

Science is most marvelous when it's creating an explosion, even at the tiniest of proportions. In the video below, Daniel Rosenberg from Harvard's Natural Science Lecture Demonstration Services reveals the secret to shooting a cork rocket over twenty meters using a little chemistry and an ultraviolet LED light. Rosenberg, who's a research assistant and lecturer for the Natural Science division at Harvard, demonstrates what happens when hydrogen and chlorine are explosively "burned" together t...

Printable Tactile Astronomy: How to "See" Outer Space if You're Blind

Have you ever felt the desire to reach out and touch a galaxy? Or "feel" those stunning nebulas and planets you see in Hubble photos? As alluring as it sounds, it's safe to say the odds of your whim coming true are nonexistent. You'd have to travel about 6 earth years and spend millions of dollars building your own personal spacecraft to get close enough to actually wave your hand through one of Saturn's rings. But in an attempt to help the blind "see" what they're missing, some semblance of ...

How To: Play Music With Your Mind

Tired of getting calluses from incessantly strumming along to 'No Woman No Cry'? Just hook up to the brain-music system and use your brain power to play a tune instead. I'm not talking—humming along in your head. The machine, created by composer and computer-music specialist Eduardo Miranda of the University of Plymouth, UK, is composed of electrodes taped directly onto your skull that pick up tiny electrical impulses from neurons in your brain and translates them into musical rhythms on a co...

How To: Get Rid of All that Space Junk

How about a laser? One that is strong enough to nudge debris out of earth orbit. That's what NASA contractor James Mason wants to do, and his lab simulations suggest that the idea is possible. Mason wants to use a 5kW ground-based laser and a ground-based 1.5 meter telescope to spot potentially hazardous space waste and shove it off, by about 200 meters per day of lasering. It's kind-of like air traffic control for near earth orbit.

How To: Control a Movie Plot with Your Emotions

Not in the mood for a sappy ending? Well, strap in because "Emotional Response Cinema Technology" lets your own body physiology control the movie music, the special effects, and even the movie ending. A collaboration between BioControl Systems, Filmtrip, and the Sonic Arts Research Center at Queen's University Belfast, the technology was recently showcased at the SXSW film festival in Austin, TX, where the newly minted horror film Unsound interacted with the audience through wires connected t...

How To: Prevent Post-Earthquake Nuclear Meltdown in the US

After getting slammed with a crazy-big earthquake/tsunami, the Japanese nuclear plant Fukushima Daiichi might be on the brink of meltdown. Not as bad as Chernobyl, but maybe as bad as Three Mile Island. Nobody wishes such a disaster on anyone...anywhere in the world. In the US, there are about 100 nuclear facilities, about 8 of which are located near hot beds of seismic activity.