Birthday Science You Can Eat

  Today I did not do an experiment but I do want to share something that makes me giggle! Today is my 16th birthday and my mom offered to make a cool cake. Yesterday I spent a few hours baking and frosting delicious chocolate cupcakes!! This morning my mom and I worked together to make an edible deoxyribonucleic acid strand! Also known as a DNA strand!!!!!!!!

    It is SO COOL!!!!!! The Nucleotide strands (the colored bridges) are just Fruit Twizzlers with a stick through them. With the appropriate nucleotides paired correctly (The adenine with the thymine and the guanine with the cytosine).  The backbone is just Nerds Rope!! All put together to make a colorful and tasty cake!! Here is a close-up!

In the past, I have always enjoyed cake decorating and I had so much fun doing it again. This is too cool and I wanted to share it with all of you. Now I am taking it to training at Explora to share it with all of my fellow interns!!! Talk to you all later.

Bowties are cool.

13/54 Taco Sauce Penny Cleaner

I opened my coin bank and gathered all of the similarly tarnished pennies I could find and grabbed the taco sauce! It has been said that you can clean tarnished pennies with taco sauce. Lets test that, shall we?

Taking two pennies I poured a bit of sauce on them and rubbed them a bit with my fingers.

 

  After sitting in the taco sauce for two minutes, I rubbed them a little bit more, rinsed the taco sauce off, and look at them now!

  The top penny on the right picture is a penny untouched by the taco sauce so you really can see that there is a HUGE difference. So we know that taco sauce does clean tarnished pennies. But why? Here comes the fun part… we find out!

  The main components that make taco sauce are vinegar, tomato paste, salt, and water. Now I put two pennies in each of the substances. Then I did the same process with the taco sauce.

 

Rubbed the pennies in the substance, waited for two minutes, and rubbed them again. These were the interesting results.

    Compared to the taco sauce pennies, the rest of the pennies look almost nothing like them. They did a terrible job cleaning! The tomato paste did an okay job but nothing like the power of the taco sauce!!! So what is the active ingredient for getting the pennies super clean? The only explanation is that two or more of the ingredients are working TOGETHER to make a super cleaning agent! But which two? Ha-ha! Let’s get to work! I mixed together tomato paste+vinegar, salt+vinegar, and Tomato paste+salt and put two pennies in the mixtures and repeated the cleaning process and let the chemistry do its magic!

 

  As you may have already noticed, the salt and vinegar is already really clean. You will not believe this but as soon as i put the pennies in the solution it immediately started to take off the tarnish!!  Here are the results of the solution stage.

 

     Both the salt+vinegar and tomato paste+ salt did very well. So there we have it! These are the active cleaning ingredients in the taco sauce that cleans our very dirty pennies. Another mystery solved! Here are the complete results! Obviously the active ingredients alone work better than in the mixture of the taco sauce which makes perfect sense! Because the ingredients alone are at a higher concentration. HA HA!!! This is SO much fun!  

12/54 Eating Nails For Breakfast

    The title of this experiment made me scratch my head but it all became clear in the end. I first opened my box of Total cereal and crushed a few flakes on a plate.

 

Then I grabbed the strongest magnet we had in the house. Some people know them as Zingers! Anyway, I brought the strong magnet as close as I could to the cereal without touching it!

  

  The goal was to make the the cereal move or follow the magnet. This would show that the piece of cereal had iron in it. I tried and tried to see if I could get something to move but I could not. The next part was to literally stick the magnet in the cereal and carefully lift it up and see if pieces would be on the magnet. I stuck it in and nothing was on the magnet except some traces of cereal but I think it is just some cereal sticking to the magnet.

   After I cleaned the plate off, I put a little bit of water in the plate and put some large flakes of the cereal on the water so that it would float. Then I took the magnet and put it very close to the flakes. To my excitement the flakes started to follow the magnet!! The flakes definitely followed like little ducklings following their momma!

  

  This act of science points to the presence of iron! Ha ha! At this point I am getting very excited! This last part shows the existence of iron in this cereal. I measured out 1 cup of Total cereal into a plastic bag and filled it half way with warm water.

Shaking the bag, I mixed up the warm water and cereal. The cereal started to dissolve and made the water get a funky and gross color.

  

For all the little gross pieces to get really soggy and mushy we waited 20 minutes. While waiting, I played a little bit of Wii with my little brother.

Once the timer let us know it was time, I took the bag and placed the magnet on top. Then I flipped the bag over so that the magnet was on the bottom. I swished the bag around, moving the gross contents inside. Swish, swish, swish, (I loved how warm it felt), swish, swish, swish. 

 

   After lots of swishing, I carefully flipped the bag over and looked under the magnet and a sense of WOW came over me! Take a look!

Look at it! You are eating that! Well, it is also in your blood. What about the first part of the experiment? I think the problem was friction or there just wasn’t enough iron in one of the little pieces to be attracted to the magnet.

I wish the saying “You are what you eat” were true…… Then we could really have an Iron Man!!

11/54 Red Cabbage Chemistry Part 2

  Now to satisfy all of your curiosity! I set some white paper underneath the line of seven glasses, the purpose of the paper is just so you can see the colors easier. In each of them I evenly distributed my indicator, the red cabbage juice I made yesterday. Then I labeled the glasses with the material I was going to add to the glass. This is how it all looked in the end.

I know the labels are kind of hard to see in that picture, so here are the close-ups.

   Vinegar, laundry detergent, soda, alka-seltzer, baking soda, and washing soda are the substances i will be adding to the selected glasses. The cabbage juice is just to represent neutral. I will be adding nothing to this glass. First I added some vinegar to the selected glass and stirred. This is what happened.

  It turned a reddish-pink!! In his book, Mr. Spangler tells us that this is an acid, thus I labeled it “Acid”. Next was the laundry detergent. I mixed it in and it turned an ALIEN green! Mr. Spangler said that the green indicated it is a base.

  Now these are sort of our standards for comparison. When we add the material to the cabbage juice (the indicator) depending on the color it turns into (green or red) we know if the substance that we added is a base or an acid. Now let’s look at our other subjects.

  The soda was the next one in line. At first glance it looks like it did not change at all but look to the right in the other glass. I have yet to put in the alka-seltzer. So it is still cabbage juice. As you can see it turned towards the pinkish side. Thus, soda is an acid.

   Next, alka-seltzer! This one had a fun reaction. We all know alka-seltzer fizzes.

 

  As you can tell from the foam alone, this is an acid!

    The next one is the baking soda. Unfortunately we accidentally did not get any pictures of our baking soda reaction. Except with the next reaction with the washing soda. Because I don’t want to spoil the washing soda reaction we, we will come back to baking soda in a minute. Here is the reaction with the washing soda.

As you can see it turned just as green as the laundry detergent! This is definitely a base!

Now I will show the line of glasses and look at the baking soda.

With close examination you can see that the baking soda turned green! Base!

Well that ends our experiment for today but I learned a whole lot! If you want to, you could test other chemicals in your house! See what you can find!

11/54 Red Cabbage Chemistry Part 1

  First of all I would like to apologize for not getting an experiment done in a couple of weeks. Between moving my sister, school, and getting really sick, I had a hard time trying to find the time. Believe me when I say that I was dying to get an experiment done!

  I am doing this experiment in two parts. For those of you who are familiar with Chemistry, you know that when you need red cabbage you are most likely going to test acids and bases. But first you need to make your indicator, that is where the red cabbage comes in. For those of you who are not familiar with what an indicator is, (for this kind of experiment) it is just a substance that reacts and indicates whether something is a base or an acid. How does it react? We’ll have to see tomorrow.

  Boiling a few red cabbage leaves in a pot with water is the way I have always known how to make a indicator with red cabbage but Mr. Spangler surprised me with a different and faster way to make it.

I took about four red cabbage leaves and put them in a blender. Then i filled it up about half way with water.

Then I ground and chopped the leaf and water mixture and finely as I could.

 

  

Ah, look at that beautiful blend of science! Anyway, I then took a strainer and I filtered the juice. Look at the pieces in the strainer, not a lot left!

Look at how purple that juice is! So now that liquid is our indicator for the rest of our experiment tomorrow! SO excited to see this! I would like to thank The Bockisch Family for letting me have their left over red cabbage for my experiment.

I hope you are all just as excited to see what happens as I am! See you tomorrow!