The Kid Should See This.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her three four year old co-curator.
Tip Jar: Curating this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.
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The classic Naked Egg experiment… just get a drinking glass, some vinegar, a raw egg, and some time. What exactly will happen?
When you submerge an egg in vinegar, the shell dissolves. Vinegar contains acetic acid, which breaks apart the solid calcium carbonate crystals that make up the eggshell into their calcium and carbonate parts. The calcium ions float free (calcium ions are atoms that are missing electrons), while the carbonate goes to make carbon dioxide—the bubbles that you see.
Okay, now what do you do with your naked egg? Osmosis!
Kids, remember Gallium from this video? Then let’s watch this spoon stir.
This spoon made from 99.998% pure gallium metal melts at 86F/30C! Great for demonstration purposes (chemistry/physics classes). After the spoon is reduced to a liquid puddle on the bottom of the cup, the gallium can easily be made solid again to make new gallium spoons (with the DIY kit), over and over!
Wolfram Research co-founder and author Theo Gray has made the most amazing Periodic Table table for his collection of elements! And he’s collected so many in a variety of forms over the years… liquids, solids, bottles of gases, crystals, and cheeky substitutions. What a great, hands-on way to experience what could otherwise just be a bunch of memorized letters and numbers.
via SwissMiss.
The first 3/4 of the video are a chemistry experiment breakdown of what goes into a glow stick and what each of those ingredients is meant to do. But at the end, all of this coalesces into a fine explanation of the difference between light-absorbing dyes and fluorescent dyes. Come for the glow-stick “how to”, stay for the better understanding of how light works and how it influences what you see!
via BoingBoing.
You’re made of carbon, you’re made of oxygen, there’s iron in your blood. All of those things had to be generated inside the core of a star. There’s no other way to get them. So when you think about star stuff, look around you. Everything that you’re made of, everything the world around you is made of had to come from the belly of a star that blew up a long time ago.
The last five minutes of Extreme Stars, an episode from the Discovery Channel’s How the Universe Works. (Can’t wait to watch all of these with the kids.)
Boing Boing Video teams up with PopSci and Theo Gray (in 2009) for an eerily beautiful science experiment — how to cast solid, if fleeting, shapes from normally liquid mercury — just keep it at 320 degrees below zero, with liquid nitrogen.
We love seeing examples of the elements’ different freezing and melting points. Because of Mercury’s toxicity, this one is especially interesting.
It’s not magic, kiddo. It’s science!
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is a colorless, odorless gas that is more dense than air at 6.12 g/L (at sea level). This density is why you can pour it into a glass container and float a light-weight aluminum “boat” on its gas “sea.” Watch this demonstration at the Physikshow of the University of Bonn!
via Quora.
