Materials: 1. Water 2. A Clear Plastic Bottle With A Cap 3. Dish Washing Soap 4. Glitter

The simple discovery that a piece of wire mesh can stop a flame in its tracks saved the lives of thousands of miners.

This demonstration shows how a simple lamp made of gauze could contain the open candle flames that miners used before 1815. With the safety lamp, any potential explosions would stay contained and never escalate to dangerous levels (although mining remained an extremely dangerous occupation).

Watch the whole demo and hear the full story here.

Coke cans in acid and base. Destroying things with science!

Rub your hands on the handles of a Chinese resonance bowl and you can generate a spray of tiny droplets. The key to this, as the name suggests, is vibration. Rubbing the handles vibrates the bowl, causing small oscillations in the bowl’s shape that are too small for us to see. But those vibrations do produce noticeable ripples on the water in the bowl. When you hit the right frequency and amplitude, those vibrations disturb the water enough that the up-and-down vibration at the surface actually ejects water droplets. The vibration of the bowl affects water near the wall most strongly, which is why that part of the bowl has the strongest reaction. It takes even larger amplitude vibrations to get droplets jumping in the middle of the bowl, but you can see that happening in this video of a Tibetan singing bowl. (Image/video credit: Crazy Russian Hacker, source)

In a just single teaspoon of soil there are around 5 million single celled organism!

Watch: A hydraulic press causes a piece paper folded 7 times to explode into pieces.

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I’ll say it again: Scientists have created a synthetic stingray that’s propelled by living muscle cells and controlled by light.

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But the ultimate goal isn’t a cyborg sea monster - it’s a human heart.

“I want to build an artificial heart, but you’re not going to go from zero to a whole heart overnight,” says Kit Parker, a bioengineer and physicist at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. “This is a training exercise.”

Full, fascinating story here.

Materials: 1. Water 2. A clear plastic bottle 3. Vegetable oil 4. Food coloring 5. Alka- Seltzer Steps: 1. First, pour water into into the plastic bottle until it's one quarter full 2. Next, pour vegetable oil until the bottle is nearly full. 3. Then, wait until the oil and water have separated. 4. Next, add 12 drops of any food coloring of your choice into the bottle. 5. Then, watch as the food coloring falls through the oil and mixes with the water. 6. Finally, cut a Alka-Seltzer tablet into 6 smaller pieces and drop one of them into the bottle. Lesson: Oil and water do not mix, so the oil stays on top because it has lower density than water. The piece of Alka-Seltzer tablet releases carbon dioxide gas that rises and takes the colored water to the top. The gas escapes and, thus, the colored water falls down. Alka-Seltzer fizzes because it contains citric acid and baking soda, which are reactive with water creating sodium citric acid and carbon dioxide.

We grew some cress in box with a lid on it, that had one small hole for light. The result: a beautiful example of phototropism, plants growing and moving towards a source of light.

This is a great activity to try at home with the kids.

Cat Fact

Cats have relatively few taste buds compared to humans. Domestic and wild cats share a gene mutation that keeps their sweet taste buds from binding to sugary molecules, leaving them with no ability to taste sweetness. Their taste buds instead respond to amino acids, bitter tastes, and acids.

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This is a large-scale demonstration of the interaction between period and pendulum length, using 16 bowling balls hung from a wooden frame.