A pretty spectacular science experiment: how to make an Incredible Egg Geode.
Your egg geode is formed through a process called sedimentation. The heated alum solution contains suspended particles of alum powder and as the solution cools, these particles of alum begin settling. When the alum particles settle towards the bottom of the beaker or glass, they begin crystallizing. With the alum-covered egg at the bottom, the alum particles from the solution begin attaching themselves to the egg. Covering your egg in alum powder beforehand gives the suspended alum particles a surface to which they can more readily attach themselves. The particles that settle onto the surface of the egg crystallize, and you will also see crystallization on the bottom and sides of the beaker or glass.
How do you make a cloud? On her show, Head Rush, Mythbuster’s Kari Byron demonstrates how clouds are formed by making one in a bottle.
For this experiment, you can use a bicycle pump with a rubber stopper attachment, rubbing alcohol and a clear 1 liter bottle. Don’t forget goggles and some adult supervision! Steve Spangler’s Science has more:
The reason the rubbing alcohol forms a more visible cloud is because alcohol evaporates more quickly than water. Alcohol molecules have weaker bonds than water molecules, so they let go of each other more easily. Since there are more evaporated alcohol molecules in the bottle, there are also more molecules able to condense. This is why you can see the alcohol cloud more clearly than the water cloud.
Clouds on Earth form when warm air rises and its pressure is reduced. The air expands and cools, and clouds form as the temperature drops below the dew point. Invisible particles in the air in the form of pollution, smoke, dust or even tiny particles of dirt help form a nucleus on which the water molecules can attach.
From the archives: clouds and experiments.
Update: Here’s an even more simple version of the experiment! Thanks, @nicolasdickner.
Rotating Saddle (and the science behind it) from the NatSciDemos team:
A playground ball finds stability in a saddle when the saddle is rotating at the proper speed.
Mechanical analog of a “Paul Trap” particle confinement—a ball is trapped in a time-varying quadrupole gravitational potential. A large saddle shape (attached to a plywood disk) is mounted on a multi-purpose turntable. The saddle shape is essentially a quadrupole gravitational potential. Rotation of this potential subjects the ball to an alternating repulsive and attractive potential, much like the time-varying electric quadrupole potential of a Paul Trap used in trapping single ions or electrons.
The plastic ball used here is about 25 cm in diameter and was purchased at a toy store. The saddle consists of many layers of fiberglass and was hand-made with help from Justin Georgi. The turntable is driven at about 110 rpm with a DC motor. We have observed this ball at this speed remaining stable for over 2 hours.
