If you’ve had fun reading about Steve Spangler’s science adventures in this blog, you should check out his extensive experiment library. SteveSpanglerScience.com offers hundreds of ever-changing, ever-growing free experiments!
From floating, growing Ivory Soap to finding the iron in a dollar bill, you are sure to find just the right experiment that uses materials you have right in your home. This library represents all of Steve’s most amazing, most requested experiments from his 9NEWS television segment as well as other appearances throughout his career.
This experiment takes a little karate and an understanding of air pressure. If you lay a yard stick down on a table and hit it with your best karate-chop, what will happen to the stick? Will it break? Most likely it will flip off the table and wing someone in the eye. So how do you hold down the stick so you can break it with your all powerful Hiyah? All you need is a piece of newspaper and air.
Clean air is an important part of Colorado…fresh, clean mountain air. But by the 1970s Denver had a lot of pollution hanging over the city. Pollution so bad it could be seen from all over just hanging over the downtown area. The dirty cloud was dubbed “the Brown Cloud.” Denver’s location at the foot of the Rocky Mountains make it prone to temperature inversions in which warm air traps cooler air near the ground, preventing pollutants from rising into the atmosphere. Denver has done a lot to clean up it’s bad air and brown cloud in the winter time, but it can still be seen on cold days. I had two special guests help me do a simple experiment to explain temperature inversions and Denver’s brown cloud.
It’s been freezing in Denver over the past week. We are surrounded with snow and ice. Here’s a little activity for the kids. Take a bowl of ice cubes and set it in front of them. Tell them you want them to go fishing for the ice cubes. Their challenge? Pick up an ice cube with a piece of string.
We all know that sprinkling a little salt on ice will melt the ice. But how does it work? Salt dissolves in water easily. The salt molecules sodium ion and a chloride ion (sodium chloride) disassociate in the water and break apart. They confuse the water molecules so they can’t freeze as easily. To start your fishing trip, start with a wet string and a little salt. Lay the string over the ice cube and sprinkle it with the salt. Wait for a few minutes while the reaction
Some people do crazy things to kick off the New Year, like jumping in a frozen lake or walking on hot coals. I celebrate the New Year with my own crazy stunt – walking on glass. This isn’t for the weak and not an activity for anyone to try at home. But with a little science know-how and a lot of sharp, broken glass, this is my way of ringing in the New Year.
