Episode 14: Lonely Nights No More

Picture the scene; it’s a dreary Friday evening before payday, nothing on TV, everyone’s busy and your wardrobe and shoes are already ordered and colour coded... what could you possibly occupy your time with?

 Think of a dorky way to amuse yourself.

 ANYWAY being stuck in a book hangover* I couldn’t delve in my normal direction for solitary entertainment. This never happens to children. Ever. They always think of some way of having fun because they are so much more in tune with their imaginations than adults.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
~Albert Einstein

What would say an 8-year old budding young geek do? Make a mess first and foremost! So here are my ingredients;

If you have never tried any of these experiments when you were younger then clear your plans for next Friday because it’s fun AND tasty AND magical;

Chubby Gummy Bears

Well that’s lies, it’s not magic it’s just science J. EVEN better I'm sure you’ll agree. This is pretty basic science but I like to see things in action for myself, never take anything for granted!

Equation: Gummy bear + Glass of water + 12 hours = One chubby chewy bear

 

Procedure:  Put chosen gummy bear in a glass of water and leave overnight.

ITS ALIVE!! Nah, it’s just swollen because of Osmosis. Gummy bears are just sugar, water and gelatine. The sugar content means the concentration of water inside the gummy bear is lower than outside, the molecules of water then move in to try and balance this out and create an equilibrium. Normally you would expect this to dissolve in the water but the gelatine keeps it all together so we get giant sweeties! You actually don’t technically have any more gummy bear than when you started but at least you get your money’s worth in entertainment.

Starburst Gobstoppers

In my day these were opal fruits gobstoppers but sure we’ll just move with the times...

Equation: 4 starburst + rolling + freezer = homemade fruity gobstopper

 

Procedure: Squish up as many starburst sweeties as you like (I used 4, one of each flavour), roll them into a ball and leave overnight in the freezer.

Freezing stuff is always fun. Unless you’re one of those creeps that keeps their dead pet in the freezer, but we certainly aren’t doing that here. It’s pretty clear what’s going on, the yummy sweeties are warmed in your hands so they get soft enough to squish together into a nice ball. The freezer then cools them enough to go hard so they turn into a hard gobstopper. If you leave them to come back up to room temperature they return to their original state of molecular integrity. This works because your hands reach the right place between solid and before melting point to make them soft and the freezer temperature (~-20degrees Celsius) is cold enough to make the gobstopper hard but not brittle. 

This wouldn’t work with fruit pastilles for example because you would need to heat them to melt enough to combine into a ball, although maybe that’s an option for future! One of my favourite things was to make homemade ice lollies in ice cube trays with lemonade J.  

Coke Fountain

This is self explanatory. Fountain of Coke.

Equation: Diet Coke + Mint Mentos = *mini volcano*

Procedure: drop 3 mint mentos into a bottle of diet coke. (also prepare for mess)

I’m sure a lot of people have actually heard of this but never done it. It’s actually more impressive than my pictures make it look, its difficult to drop the mentos in, get away and take a picture. As I mentioned I was by myself or clearly I wouldn’t even have been doing it! I also bought a small bottle of Diet coke, rookie mistake BUT that’s what experimenting is about.

Luckily for me other people have studied this more extensively, although it does work with other drinks, Diet Coke gives the most impressive spurt of foam. I’ve read the optimum materials for this are a 2ltr bottle of Diet Coke and 6 mentos. DO THIS OUTSIDE, its eruption is more impressive than you probably imagine!

My scaled down version follows the same principle though.

The television show Mythbusters (A-MAZING) was actually the first team to really investigate what components caused this. The rapid formation of foam is caused by the potassium benzoate, aspartame, and CO₂ in the liquid and gelatine and gum Arabic in the sweets. Specifically the mint mentos are integral to the reaction as their surface area is porous therefore giving a bigger surface area for the reaction to take place quickly.

After this, a physicist at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, Tonya Coffey had a team of scientists there investigate it. They found that the speed at which the sweets fell through the liquid also contributed to the jet of foam. All of the original theories like basic acid reactions or caffeine components were de-bunked.

Read the details of the study here in an article from New Scientist Magazine (aka The-Greatest-Magazine- Available-In-The-World-Ever.)

And you’ll have lonely nights no-more with science in your lifeJ.

(*Book Hangover: Inability to start a new book because you’re still living in the last book’s world)