18/54 How To Make A Folding Egg

 This is the last experiment for this chapter of “Kitchen Chemistry”. We will be doing the same chemical reaction as our “Naked Egg” experiment but with a little twist. I am going to remove the yolk and egg white!! I grabbed the unsuspecting egg and, using a thumb-tack , I poked a hole on the top of the egg and the bottom.

After I had successfully made holes big enough, I took a skewer, stuck it in the egg, and scrambled the contents of the egg.

Now here is the gross part, I need to blow out the contents of the egg. Taking a cloth I cleaned the top of the egg so that I will not get raw egg in my mouth.

 With a deep breath I told myself, “For science!”. I put my mouth on the egg and began to blow.

 It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be! But I did feel the need to rinse out my mouth afterwards. Then I immersed the egg in vinegar. It bubbled, filling up with vinegar.

  

  Now here is the hard part, we have to wait for the vinegar to dissolve the egg shell. In 24 hours I will replace this vinegar with a fresh batch. Then it will be about 10 days before the shell will dissolve. I do not know why but it will take longer than the previous experiment. Now all we have to do is wait! I will keep you posted. 

17/54 Naked Egg- Day 8 – The Reveal!

I know the past two days I did not post a picture of the egg. The main reason was that the egg was not noticeably changing The first two days the egg had the most dramatic, visible changes. But after that, it was kind of hard to notice anything new. But here was the egg this morning.

See. No change, at least nothing that is noticeable.

Today is the day where we take the egg out and examine it! After giving it a good rinse, this is what the egg looked like.

The egg is soft and slightly translucent! The shell is no longer there! It is just the inner membrane of the egg, called a semipermeable membrane. It felt almost like those disposable blue rubber gloves. It was a brilliant feeling!! Not only does it feel cool, it looks cool too! Look at the wondrous egg when I shine a light through it.

 

 You can see the yolk casting a shadow inside the egg! Check this out, you can squeeze the egg just a little.

What happened, then, to our egg? The acetic acid (vinegar) reacted with the calcium carbonate (the shell) dissolving it. What we have left is calcium acetate, water, and carbon dioxide. For those of us (including me) have a hard time visualizing this reaction, Mr. Spangler provides us with the reaction equation.

2 CH3COOH + CaCO3  -> Ca(CH3COO)2  + H2O + CO2

Acetic acid + Calcium carbonate –> Calcium acetate + Water + Carbon dioxide

Remember all of the bubbles that formed around the egg? Those were carbon dioxide bubbles!!  Everything becomes so clear, except one thing… didn’t we notice that the egg got bigger? Good news, we weren’t crazy! Mr. Spangler addresses this aspect and it turns out the egg really did get bigger by the process of osmosis! Right now most of you are saying “Huh?”. Let me help you clear it up a bit.

Vinegar is 4% acetic acid and 96% water. The concentration of water in the vinegar was higher than the concentration of water in the egg. So the water passed through the membrane to make the concentrations even. That is osmosis. I remember learning about it in Biology, it is cool science!

After many days of waiting, all mysteries are solved. Before I go I want to show you how fragile this membrane is. After I sealed the egg inside a plastic bag, I went outside. Raising the bag above the ground about a foot high, I dropped it.

  

Aren’t you glad we have shells to protect our eggs? Me too.

17/54 Naked Egg- Day 5

Here is our patient egg on day five.

17/54 Naked Egg – Day 4

I have the need to say only one thing…… DAY 4!

But I really do think that the egg has gotten bigger. Maybe it absorbed some of the vinegar. I am just not sure. Maybe Mr. Spangler will have the answer. At the end of the experiment, I will let you know.

17/54 Naked Egg- Day 3

This morning there was a dramatic change in the egg.

Behind the blanket of bubbles you can see that the egg has taken on a yellowish color. This is the beginning of seeing the inside of the egg! I think something else has happened. Take a look at the first day and now.

Before                         &                             After

I think the egg has grown in size! Just a little. It may be that the bubbles are making it look bigger. I am not entirely sure. We will have to see on day 7!

A Tasty Chemistry Table

  Tomorrow is my last day at my Chemistry class, so I decided to make a special cake. After nearly 6 hours of baking, planning, frosting, and decorating, I think I made a masterpiece.

 I did not do the two bottom rows. I only had the resources and energy to do the main body. It is not the prettiest of periodic tables but I am proud of it! This is just so much fun. I can’t wait to show my classmates!

17/54 Naked Egg Progress

   I have selected 8am every morning to be our set time. Let’s see how our egg is doing after an overnight soak in the vinegar.

Whoa! That thing is in bubble heaven!! Now it hasn’t been 24 hours yet so I haven’t changed out the vinegar. I will do that later this afternoon.

Later today I will post something special that I am cooking up for my chemistry class. It is going to be so awesome!

17/54 Naked Egg

   The next two experiments will take time, most of them do. It is because these two experiments involve the same slow reaction. All right then, let’s get to it! The preparation is quick and easy. All we have to do is take a raw egg and cover it in vinegar. Then set it on the shelf.

 The spoon’s purpose in this experiment is to keep the egg from floating. This is so cool, we can see the reaction already taking place!

 

This is a close-up picture of the surface of the egg. What do you notice? Bubbles!! The “deshelling” process has BEGUN!!!

In 24 hours I will dump the vinegar and submerge the egg with fresh vinegar. Then I will leave the egg sitting in the vinegar for 7 days. I will take a picture every day at the same time and post it so that you can see the changes. Stay tuned!

16/54 Egg In The Bottle Trick With A Modern-Day Twist

   Nearly everyone has done this wonderful experiment at some point of their lives. If not, you are missing out, you poor deprived person! But I do have to say I have never done this experiment with a balloon. I filled the balloon with a bit of water, blew it up slightly, and did the usual procedure. For the poor deprived people, I will fill you in. You take a wide-mouthed glass bottle, light a piece of paper on fire, and quickly stick it in the bottle. Then your partner quickly puts the balloon over the mouth of the bottle. Check out the results!

Whoowee! Look at that beautiful balloon! What happened? Well the flame from the burning piece of paper used up all of the oxygen in the bottle. Since the flame could not get any more oxygen because the balloon was on top, a vacuum was created sucking the balloon downwards. Cool right? Now I have a problem, I need the bottle for two more demonstrations. Mr. Spangler thought of that and gave a solution. You take a straw and stick it along side the balloon and blow. This puts more air behind the balloon causing it to pop out!

 

Now for the classic egg in a bottle. After hard-boiling a few eggs, I reset the experiment and repeated.

 

 The egg was supposed to completely go in the bottle, so I got my straw and reset. We had an incredibly hard time getting the paper to light because a breeze picked up. We went inside my home and succeeded in our task.

Waahaha! Look at that smoke! It is hard to see but the egg is in the bottle. Right about now you may be asking, “What is new here?” Well here is the modern-day twist that Mr. Spangler is known for in his experiments. I will do this experiment with the bottle inverted!! Taking a freshly peeled hard boiled egg, I stuck two birthday candles into the egg and lit them on fire.

 Then I placed the bottle over the egg and voila!

 Hee hee! I just love science!!

15/54 Seven-Layer Density Column

   Yesterday, I made a scientific and beautiful column of liquids which showed us a little bit about density. If you look back at the previous post you can see that the water and dish soap mixed a little bit. Out of pure curiosity I covered the column and let it set over night because I wanted to see if the dish soap and the water would separate more cleanly.Take a look at the results.

Before                     &                      After

                      

Wow! I did not see this coming. As you can see from yesterday’s picture, a little bit of rubbing alcohol got under the vegetable oil (probably because of my sloppiness). So the rubbing alcohol must have mixed with the water and made a gross color. Another observation is that if you look between the vegetable oil and the rubbing alcohol in yesterday’s picture, you can see the rubbing alcohol has a bend in it. A lot like the effect we had between the honey and the corn syrup. Even though the corn syrup just took a few minutes to settle, the rubbing alcohol took all night. Furthermore, the corn syrup and the honey decided to hang out! So their colors are not very pretty either. I love it when experiment results come out differently than expected. Surprises make me happy.

15/54 Seven-Layer Density Column

   Turns out this is the perfect experiment to show someone what density is. So let’s hop to it! First I took one of my large graduated cylinders (tall beaker) and labeled it according to the experiment procedure.

 

  As you may have assumed, I am going to add all of these substances to the cylinder in order. But I must do a little bit more work than that. Lamp oil, rubbing alcohol, corn syrup, and water are all relatively the same color. So I must color them with food coloring to see the difference easily. For a smooth transition I measured 50ml of each substance, poured it into a small foam cup, and then colored it. Even with the substances I didn’t need to color, I still measured 50ml and put them in a foam cup.

After successfully pouring, measuring, coloring, and all that mumbo-jumbo I was ready to pour our first candidate--the honey. The foam cups were easy to bend so I had control over the slow stream.

     That icky-sticky stuff is for heffalumps and woozels! (I am a big Winnie the Pooh fan)

  I had to be careful to not let the stream of honey hit the side of the cylinder. The next layer is the corn syrup.

As I added the corn syrup it got this weird but cool shape to it! After just a short time, it settled into a nice layer. Here is the dish soap.

 

Now I will skip to the end and show you all the layers.

 TA-DA!!!

Each layer is comfortably sitting on top of each other! Why aren’t they mixing? Well, they each have different densities! The honey is more dense than the corn syrup, the corn syrup is more dense than the dish soap, etc.

I hope you found this very interesting. The water and the dish soap mixed just a little because they are close in their densities. So I covered the cylinder and I will let it set overnight. I want to see if they will separate more cleanly. I will post and let you know tomorrow night.

14/54 Sinking Soda Surprise

   What did I want to do on a windy Sunday afternoon? Put several cans of soda in a big bucket of water! Sounds fun right? Maybe not to you but for me, it was an adventure! Allow me to explain. I filled my big bucket full of water and gathered the various kinds of soda we bought.

 

      I put my test subjects into the water. Why? Bear with me, I’ll explain later. Observe, then learn. Now, observe what you see when I put the sodas in the water.

                              

These pictures are just a little fuzzy but at least you can tell what is going on. In the picture on the top right, the background is my t-shirt! So as you can see some of the cans floated and some did not. Why? Well notice the ones that are floating Diet Coke, Coke Zero, and Dr. Pepper Cherry. The Coke Zero and the Diet Coke have sweetener, not tons of sugar like the ones that sunk which are Dr. Pepper, Cream Soda, and the Root Beer. I will make a note that I tilted the cans so that the air bubble under the can escaped.

The Dr. Pepper Cherry, however, I cannot explain! I was TOTALLY expecting it to sink. But NO! It wanted to float even though it has more sugar and sodium than the regular Dr Pepper! Because of the strange anomaly I grabbed two more cans of Dr. Pepper Cherry to just see if that one can was being a weirdo! I placed them in the tank of water and looked at the bizarre results.

      I HAVE NO WORDS!!!!!! Except one……. WHY?!?! 

Moving on, Mr. Spangler challenged his readers to then add salt to the water and see if it changes the results. I added salt in 1/2 cup increments. I added the first 1/2 cup to the tank and stirred. I had kind of a evil villain moment….

  

     After I put the cans in, this was the result.

   The Dr. Pepper is floating, though the root beer and the cream soda are still at the bottom of the bucket. Lets look at the results when I added another 1/2 cup, 1 cup total.

   So no new cans floated but one of the cool aspects that we cannot capture in pictures is that each time I added salt, the cans sank to the bottom  more slowly. Okay another 1/2 cup salt, total 1 1/2 cups (let’s see if I can persuade the root beer and cream soda to float, they were so close!)

The cream soda gave in! The root beer wanted to float but gave up. Let us see if some more salt will help the poor darling. Total-2 cups of salt.

   WAHAHAHA!! I was really excited to see the two cans floating… So happy I felt like dancing!

     Now lets get to the science of it! I mentioned at the beginning that this is a density experiment. The reason some of the cans sunk is that the cans are more dense than the water. The cans that floated were the same or less dense than the water. Now when we added the salt, we were making the water more dense. By raising the density of the water the previously sunk sodas became less dense than the salt+water and rose to the surface!! That is SO cool. The only thing that I am confused with is that rule-breaking Cherry Soda!!! ONE DAY I will know (queue dramatic music)……