No, this is not a story about kids setting off a 2-liter soda bottle bomb or a mad scientist brewing up an explosive mixture in his garage. This is the story about a senior citizen living in Windsor, Colorado who awoke to the sounds of a loud explosion coming from her garage… and you won't believe what happened.

It is 2:00 o'clock in the morning and I awoke to this terrible loud exploding sound. I didn't know if it came from outside or inside of my house. My dog started barking, and I quickly turned on all the lights.Since I live alone I was scared, I thought someone broke the window. I ran around in the house checking, but couldn't find anything. Then I thought someone broke into my garage. I grabbed my dog and carefully opened the garage door to find a big mess of ice thrown everywhere. First I thought the roof caved in under the snow, because all the white crunchy stuff that was all over my car, all over on the wall in one corner above a table, all over the cement floor. Things were knocked down, it looked like a war zone. What could have happened???

Then I saw a mangled piece of plastic on the ground, and suddenly it hit me what expired in my cold garage. During the day, when I carried my groceries from the car, one of the bags was about to tear from the weight, so I took a bottle of Canada Dry carbonated water out of the paper bag and put it on the table in the garage, and I completely forgot about it. During the night the contents froze and the bottle exploded with a big bang, throwing the frozen carbonated water all over everything that was nearby. Even the top of my garbage bin that was at the other end of the garage was covered with the frozen remains of the soda.

When I first saw the pictures, I thought that someone was sending me a photo of the aftermath of a dry ice bomb. But the story checks out… and it wasn't even Diet Coke or a flavored beverage. So, you know the first thing I had to do, right? I bought a bottle of Canada Dry carbonated water and stuck it outside during this recent cold spell that brought below zero temperatures to Colorado. I'm please to report that the bottle froze rock solid, but no explosion. Maybe I got a bad bottle. So, I headed back to the store to get one of everything I could find in hopes of recreating the experience (just for scientific proof, of course). I'll let you know what happens.

Anything like this ever happen to you?

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The always curious people over at technoHOLIC recently purchased a neodymium magnet and a few other supplies from our online store for a demonstration on liquid body armor. They wanted to show that a magnetic field could cause certain liquids to behave as solids. Okay, I have to admit that I knew nothing about liquid body armor before clicking on the link, but technoHOLIC's article on magnets is very, very good. We tell people that our neodymium magnets are "super strong," but sometimes they just have to experience it for themselves (as they point out in the article).

The magnet didn't just transform our iron-and-oil fluid into a solid — sometimes, its pull on the fluid cracked the petri dish holding it. Once, the magnet unexpectedly flew out of a videographer's hand and into a dish full of dry filings, which required considerable ingenuity to remove. It also adhered itself so firmly to the underside of a metal table that we had to use a pair of locking pliers to retrieve it. When we decided it would be safer to keep the magnet in a pocket between takes, people wound up momentarily stuck to the table, a ladder and the studio door.

If you're doing a science fair project on magnets, this technoHOLIC article on magnets is a must read.

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