Top 10 Science Experiments

Make Plasma in Your Microwave

This interesting experiment shows you how to make plasma using a microwave, cork, and a match.

Plasma typically takes the form of neutral gas-like clouds or charged ion beams, but may also include dust and grains (called dusty plasmas). They are typically formed by heating and ionizing a gas, stripping electrons away from atoms, thereby enabling the positive and negative charges to move freely

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Potato-Powered MP3 Player

“Kipkay” shows us another way to power your MP3 player. Basically, the potatoes provide phosphoric acid, which enables a chemical reaction causing electrons flow from copper to zinc — each potato generates 0.5 volts and 0.2 milliamperes.

Sulfur Hexafluoride Experiment: Floating Ship

This interesting experiment shows a ship floating on sulfur hexafluoride gas.

Get enchanted by a aluminium foil ship floating above ground on hexafluorid (gas significantly denser than air) at the Physikshow of the University of Bonn. It’s 5.11 times as dense as air. It’s non toxic, although it’s byproducts can be extremely dangerous

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Toriton Plus: Water Surface as Music Controller

Put simply, Toriton is a laser-based system that uses water as a music controller. This project is looking very promising to say the least and could lead to more innovative uses in the world of science.

A slightly more complex version of using a water surface as a music controller featuring five lasers instead of just the one. Please note that this is a prototype version, and as such does not represent the variety of output for the finished thing

Tesla Coil Music

Steve Conner created this visual instrument for a Danish art group and it’s basically “an adaptor board that [is] connected [to] internal tone generators on a Roland JX-8P synth”.

The board converted the volume envelope to burst length, so the harder you pounded the keys, the bigger the sparks got. Hitting a high pitched note hard would blow the fuses, and the MIDI arrangements had to take this into account

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Zero-G on Water

For this entry, we bring you an interesting video titled: “Effects of Zero-Gravity on Water”.

Protrude Flow – Amazing Ferrofluid Demonstration

Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno show us what Ferrofluid — a liquid that becomes strongly polarised in the presence of a magnetic field — is really capable of with this amazing demonstration.

A black fluid reacts to sounds and voices, and assumes organic, three-dimensional shapes that grow counter to the force of gravity. An interactive installation in which fluid movements of physical materials evoke surreal impressions

LN2 Ice Cream

For those who’ve always wondered how to make ice cream using liquid-nitrogen, check out this demonstration.

To make liquid nitrogen ice cream you start with an ice cream base in a metal mixing bowl. Fire up the mixer (Kitchen-Aid was in use here) at low-med speed. Pour the liquid nitrogen into the bowl a bit at a time as the mixer is running

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LN2 Overclocked Project

Tom’s Hardware — which was just recently sold — “set out to squeeze at least 5 GHz from the selected Intel P4” in this classic test.

Finally, by gradually increasing FSB speed from 200 MHz (factory setting) to 309 MHz, we achieved a record speed of 5255 MHz. At full load, taking into account a maximum CPU heat dissipation of just under 175 watts, we recorded a temperature of approx. -190°C on the CPU cooling head

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Swimming Pool Experiment

This is what happens when you dump a bucket of liquid nitrogen into a swimming pool.

Those wild Linux party animals had a conference last week. Part of their festivities included making liquid nitrogen ice cream and mentos and coke fountains, but the fun didn’t stop there. They made a video of what happens when you throw liquid nitrogen into a swimming pool

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