Wire that can remember its past...

 Have you bent a metal wire to a particular shape you want and heat it up slightly only to find the wire goes back to its original shape?  Can you imagine the metals we use everyday doing this?  impossible to have a pan in the shape we want and cook!!!

This wire is amazing... Its called NiTinol wire.  It remembers its original shape and goes back to it when heated up.  Before explaining it all, lets do the experiment first.






Here's a piece of NiTinol wire.  Almost straight in shape right...










Bend it into any shape you want.  Here's the same NiTinol wire bent into a waveform.













Take the piece of wire to a heat source.  Make sure you are holding the wire with some device that will protect your fingers/hand from heat.

You can even use a hairdryer to do this.









Keep watching the wire as it changes the shape quite quickly.

Keep the heat source on till you see the wire almost straight again (the shape we started off with!!!)

And here's the wire at the end of the experiment..isn't it cool...







Yes, ofcourse you can bend the wire and keep it in that shape with a little patience and teaching the wire to remember the new shape too but that's another experiment for another day.


What's happening?

NiTinol is an alloy of Nickel and Titanium.  Unlike other alloys, this one has two different crystalline structures.  One of them called Martensite phase is the structure that the alloy prefers while at low temperature and at high temperature, it prefers the phase called Austenite.  During Martensite phase, the crystal structure is such a way that it can be deformed in any direction.  But when its heated to Austenite phase, the structure reverts back to the original form.

Scaring the pepper away...

For this week's experiment in class, I told the kids we will scare some pepper.  Ofcourse questions like how can you scare pepper as its not live to what can scare pepper came up.  I asked them to try making scary faces to see if they could scare the pepper that way.  I told them they cant blow or move the setup to scare but can try anything else that doesnt involve touching/blowing etc... Although by this time the kids know me enough that they didnt agree that maybe we are doing some magic.

But first, here's the experiment.

Take a plate and pour some water (maybe half a centimeter deep).  Sprinkle some powdered black pepper.  Let it rest for a few seconds.  You see that the pepper floats (yes, a few grains that are big enough might sink to the bottom but most of it should float.  








Take a cotton swab, dip it slightly in dishwashing soap.  Now touch/dip the tip of the swab in the middle of the plate without disturbing too much.  What closely while doing it to see what happens to the pepper...

What's happening?

At the top of the plate, all the water molecules are close together (since there are nothing else above them to stick to) thus forming what we call "Surface Tension". When we introduce soap in the middle of the plate, the soap breaks the surface tension as the water molecules now can stick to the soap molecules as well...And it starts radiating outwards with the water molecules trying to pull from the rim of the plate but there is nothing to pull back from the center....so the pepper gets pulled to the rim of the plate soon.  Now that surface tension is broken, you will also see that the pepper starts sinking down as well.

Can you think of another experiment you can do using the same principle?

Eggsperiment with a twist

So we boiled an egg tonight originally to be part of dinner salad.  While peeling the shell, I was thinking aloud that if only we had a glass milk bottle we could do the experiment of getting the egg into the bottle.  Promptly, my husband reminded me that I did bring a bottle from Finland.

So I got the bottle out and put the egg on the mouth of the bottle and ofcourse the egg wouldnt fit into the mouth and was sitting there pretty.

This is what we did to get the egg into the bottle.

Great!!! Now that the egg is inside, how do we get it outside?...one way is to use baking soda and vinegar but wanted even simpler one.  So, borrowed the idea from our film canister rocket experiment and used Alka-Seltzer tablets instead....

Scientific innovations do not know "age-ism"

Have you read bout Jack Andraka?  He is a regular 15yr old attending school..What makes him not so "regular"?  He is an innovator...He came up with a test for cancers such as Pancreatic, lung and ovarian cancers that costs only pennies and is almost always accurate.  The test can be done from home or anywhere and much faster than the tests that are available today (which cannot be done from home either).

Here's an interview in Forbes on him.  Encouraging him to "figure out" things and experiment to get answers is how he says he got interested in Science....Never fails to play with Science right...

Nano technology and Hydrophobic

I was getting ready to write another experiment in the blog when my hubby dear sent me this video to watch.  Its just so cool that I decided to write about this instead.

Nano technology and Nano science are relatively new fields and there is a lot to learn but are also very fascinating subjects.  To get an idea about the scale of Nano-technology, imagine this:  a single human hair is approximately 80,000 - 100,000 nanometers wide!!!  So, we are talking about how things can be manipulated at that minute scale.

A company called UltraTech came up with a new product called Ultra-Ever Dry..A liquid/spray that can be sprayed on almost any surface (or they claim) and it will repel water, oils, atleast limited number of acids!!!.  Imagine a car coated with this would never need a wash again:)

Here's a cool video of how the product works.  Wish I could get more info as to how it works but ofcourse it would be their secret not to share right...The only info I could find is that the nano-coating relies on a barrier of oxygen/air to form the barrier on the surface of the material it is coating.  Meaning the surface does need to be exposed to air (and so cant be used inside a pipe which is under the ground?).

Here's a video that shows how it works....

Disclaimer:  I am not promoting or advertising for the product....just a cool video showing how nano technology is being put to use for practical uses....

Instant snow...

Unless you live in a place where there is snow all around you right now, wouldn't it be fun to make some snow in the warmth of your home and play with it without it melting away?

This "instant snow" comes in a powder format.  Just add water to it and it almost instantaneously expands upto 100 times its original volume.  It is spectacular to watch it puff up.  It feels like real snow to touch and you can dry it up and make it puff again and again...You can't eat or make snow cones with it unfortunately.

What is "Instant snow"? - Its a super absorbent polymer called sodium polyacrylate.  You find this in baby diapers!!  yes, you can open up the baby diapers (before they are used ofcourse) and get the powder out and use it as instant snow too....  or you can order it from various sites including Amazon and try it out.

Slimey Slime....

Our son joined a new school which has a lot more of parent participation.  I started volunteering in his class.  Working with the class teacher, I am doing more science experiments in class with the kids.  Decided to post the experiments we are doing in class here with the recipes (ofcourse)....

Last week we did Slime.  Something about slime is soo appealing to all kids.  Girls and Boys were equally excited to make it.  Some took it back home to play at leisure, some couldn't wait and played in class. 

Slime is one of the things that are so easy to make that they can make it any number of times and its exciting every single time.

Ingredients to make slime: 

3-4 tablespoons of white school glue (Elmers glue)
a couple of drops of food color

1 tablespoon of Borax powder
Half a cup of water.
a craft stick or a plastic knife to mix

• Mix the Borax powder into half cup of water and stir it.  This is the Borax solution we will use.
• Pour 3-4 tablespoons of glue into a disposable cup or bowl.  You can add a little water if desired.
• Add the food color to the glue and mix
• While mixing the glue, add a few drops of Borax solution.  Keep adding a few drops and mix till the slime forms.  Once all the glue is mixed and formed into a big blog, slime is ready to play.  The more you play the harder it gets..
• Enjoy....