Hey there! Welcome to my science blog! I will be posting new info and stories weekly, as well as fun labs and projects that you can try at home. Certain pieces of information with be displayed in different colors. Cool projects with displayed in this color green. Materials will be displayed in this color yellow. Procedures will be displayed in this red and the end result in this purple. Everything else, unless an article from a magazine which will be in orange, will be in black.


Cool things from the first day:

• Potato gun using density and air pressure
• Seeing which type of soap floats: ivory or normal soap
• Melting ivory soap in a microwave to see how gases expand

Those are several things you can try at home! Heres how to start the potato gun lab.

You will need:

• A clear plastic tube
• 1 or 2 potatoes 
• One slightly smaller tube

Procedure:

• Stick one end of the tube into the potato
• Take the tube out of the potato, and make sure the opening is full of potato.
• Stick the other end  in, and repeat the same process as last time.
• After both ends are filled, put the slightly smaller tube up to one end.
• Push the piece of potato up the tube. You will start to feel more pressure.
• Once the other piece of potato you are pushing gets to a certain point, the other will shoot out of the end.

What you just witnessed:

• You demonstrated air density. As the space between the two pieces of potato got smaller, the air became more tightly compact, and once it got to a certain point, the other piece had to get shot out.

The ivory soap lab:

What you will need:

• 2-3 bars of ivory soap and 2 bars of normal bar soap.
• A microwave(Kids ask for permission)
• A bucket of water.
• a glass dish.

Procedure:

• Place the bucket of water on a porch or in your backyard
• Make a prediction. Which will float?
• Place both bars of soap in the bucket at the same time.
• Was your prediction correct?

Procedure for part two of this lab:

• Place the bar of normal soap inside one of the glass dishes.
• Place the glass container containing the normal bar soap inside the microwave
• Make a  prediction as to whether or not it will grow.
• Turn the microwave on, and watch.
• After two minutes, what happened to the soap?
• Next, do the same to the ivory soap. What was the same between the two soaps? What was different?

What just happened:

• You just demonstrated the different levels of air in the two soaps. The ivory soap has more air trapped inside of it, which makes it more buoyant so it floats, while the normal soap is more dense, and sinks. Also, gas expands. Soooo... when you put a bar of regular soap into the microwave, since it hardly has any trapped air in it, it hardly expands. On the contrary, ivory soap has lots of air trapped inside it, so it expands quite a bit.