Here’s a great project for pre-K kids. They can cut the fish out of paper or foam, pour the water and put a drop of soap behind the fish to make it “zoom.”

My original post and written directions for zooming fish can be found by clicking here.

Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to get ketchup flowing out of a bottle, or why no-drip paint doesn’t drip?

Ketchup, no drip paint, liquid soaps and shampoos are all part of a really amazing category of fluids known as “shearing liquids.” These fluids are pretty thick when they’re sitting still, but they get thinner or more “liquidy” as they flow, because movement decreases their viscosity, or thickness, making them more slippery.

Back in 1963, an engineer named Arthur Kaye noticed streams of liquid shooting from the surface below a stream of shearing liquid he was working with. This strange, short-lived phenomena became known as the Kaye effect.

With a chair, tape, some dish soap and a plastic ziplock bag, you can do your own Kaye effect experiment at home and watch soap jets shoot like ski jumpers from the very slippery shearing liquid soap pile below

-Tape a plastic ziplock bag to a chair with one corner or the bag pointed toward a plate underneath. The bag corner nearest the floor should be around 20 cm (about a foot) from the floor.
-Fill the bag with liquid soap or dish detergent. We added a few drops of food coloring to ours.
-Cut off the corner of the bag closest to the floor with scissors to make a tiny hole for the soap to flow through (1mm.) You may have to make it a little bigger, but you want a very thin, steady stream of soap flowing to the plate.
-Watch for jumping streams of soap. If it’s not working, try changing soap and adjusting bag hole size and bag height! What happens if you put the plate below at an angle?

To learn more about the Kaye effect and other cool physics stuff, visit Dr. Skyskulls’ website. He’s the physicist who told me about this experiment and helped me work out the protocol.

If you’ve done an experiment where you drip water onto a penny, or made Tie Dye Milk, you know what surface tension looks like here on Earth. How does it look in space?

Here’s an amazing video demonstrating how the surface tension of water looks in zero gravity on the international space station. Fascinating!

Here are some of our favorite environmental science experiments. Click on the experiment name for directions and photos. I’ll post a new photosynthesis experiment on Monday!

Window Sprouts: Plant a bean in a plastic baggie with a damp paper towel to see how plants need only water and air to sprout roots and leaves.  Here’s a short video demonstrating how to make a window garden.

Homemade Solar Oven: Using a pizza box, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, and newspaper, you can harness the sun’s energy to cook your own S’mores!

Nature Walk Bracelets: Wrap some duct tape around your wrist (inside out) and take a walk, sticking interesting natural objects like leaves and flowers to your bracelet. It’s a great way to get outdoors and engage with nature!

Carbon Dioxide and Ocean Acidity: See for yourself how the carbon dioxide in your own breath can make a water-based solution more acidic. It’s the same reason too much carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere can be bad for our oceans.

Plant Transpiration:  See how trees “sweat” in this survival science experiment.

Greenhouse Effect Experiment: With a few jars, plastic bags, ice, and a thermometer, you can demonstrate how greenhouse gases can trap heat in our atmosphere.

Earthworm Experiment:  Do you know what kind of earthworms are living in your back yard?

Composting: Be a composting detective. Bury some things in your back yard (away from power cables) and dig them up in a few months to see how they look. Composting reduces methane gas emissions (a greenhouse gas) from dumps.

Diffusion and Osmosis: See for yourself how the chemicals we add to water, put on our streets to melt ice, and spray on our lawns and crops can move into our soil, ground water, rivers, lakes and oceans.

Solar Water Purification: This project illustrates the greenhouse effect and is a fun “survival science” experiment. Requires hot sun and some patience!

Citizen Science: Don’t forget about all the real environmental research projects you can participate in through Citizen Science programs all around the world!

For mores activities and games, check out NASA’s Climate Kids website, to see a kid-friendly diagram of the water cycle, click here,  or just get outside and enjoy the beautiful planet that sustains and nurtures us.

Between basketball games and homework this weekend, we stood barefoot on cartons of raw eggs and painted hard boiled ones with lemon juice and baking soda.

Why the eggfest? We’re making videos for some April KidScience app experiments!

Here are a few still shots of our lovely creations:

We soaked hard-boiled eggs in cabbage juice overnight. Then, we painted them with citric acid (lemon juice) and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda.)Click here for detailed directions and more about the science.

Whether you’re home or away, science can make any vacation more fun.  You can collect data for real citizen science research projects by searching SciStarter.com or do your own experiments.  KidScience app, based on the science projects on this website, puts fun science experiments at your fingertips on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, no matter where you are.

I showed Kare11 viewers three of our favorite KidScience experiments: Red Cabbage Litmus Paper, Fizzy Balloons and Marshmallow Slingshots (using stuffed animals like Angry Birds to learn a little about the conservation of energy. Click here to watch the TV segment.

How will you mix a little science into your spring break?

How would you safely land a spacecraft on a planet with no atmosphere if you couldn’t use rockets? A parachute wouldn’t work, since there’s no air resistance.  You’d have to design your craft with a protective shell so the impact wouldn’t destroy it.

Pretend a raw egg is your spacecraft and Voila: you have a science experiment.  Besides being lots of fun, an egg drop experiment is a great way to try your hand at engineering and is a fantastic STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) project for kids and adults alike!

The kids and I dropped holiday decoration-encased eggs from a crane in the Kare11 studio on Kare11′s Sunrise News to test our own engineering skill. Click here to see what happened.

The law of motion says that the faster you change the speed of an object, the greater the force applied to the object will be.  We demonstrated this concept with our egg-throwing experiment  by smashing eggs against a table, which stopped them fast, and watching them survive being hurled against a hanging sheet, which slowed them down.  This same law explains why, if you drop an egg on the floor, it will break.  When you change the speed of the egg slowly,by suspending it or surrounding it with material that helps absorb or redirect the force, less force is applied to the egg and it may remain intact. Can you design a container to protect an egg?

Why not have a holiday egg drop competition with your out-of town cousins, or other friends and family?  Here are the rules we came up with.  (We have a no parachute rule, but if you’d really like to design a parachute for your egg, that would be fun too!)  I’m thinking an egg nogg carton might be a good place to start.

-Container made up of 100% holiday material like wrapping paper, bows, cardboard, tinsel, food, glue, toothpicks, wood, tape, plastic and string. No Styrofoam, bubble wrap or packing peanuts are allowed.

-Container must contain one RAW egg.

-No Parachutes (defined as any material attached to your egg craft in such a way that it will expand outward as it falls, catching air.)

-Container should be no larger than 20 inches in any direction

-No tape or glue must touch the egg.

Drop your egg from different heights to see how well it survives.  (Make sure you’re supervised by an adult when you do your egg drop!)

You can calculate the force of gravity on your egg and container by multiplying its weight in kilograms by 9.8meters/second (the acceleration due to gravity.

If you live in the Twin Cities, I’ll be on Kare11 Sunrise on Tuesday morning Dec.18th with Kim and Tim. We’ll be dropping our containers from a studio crane.  Should be fun!

Salt lowers the melting/freezing temperature of ice, which is the solid form of water.  Here’s a fun experiment you can do to see for yourself how Sodium Chloride (table salt) makes ice melt and water refreeze on a string, allowing you to “magically” lift an ice cube from a glass of water.

Click here for detailed instructions and more about the science.

This video will soon appear on KidScience app‘s Premium version, which allows you to easily search for experiments and videos based on kids’ ages, type of science, what you have on hand, or how much time you have.

Today, Target shared three of our favorite Halloween science experiments on abullseyeview.com. 

Halloween brings out the kid in everyone, and there’s no better way to celebrate than with some goulish science experiments.

Here’s a list of our favorites. Just click on the name of the experiment to go to the instructions, see photos of what to do, and learn a little science.  Most have links to videos or TV segments where I demonstrate how to do the experiments.

Shocking Machine Make an electrophorus and Leyden jar to shock your friends! Here’s how to do it. We demonstrated it on Kare11 last week!
Frankenworms Gummy worms soaked in baking soda and water come to “life” when you drop them into vinegar! Click here for directions and a video.
Goblin Goo (All you need is cornstarch and water. Here’s a video on how to make the goo.  You can add a little food coloring to the water if you want, but it may stain your hands!)
Bag of Blood (If you have ziplock baggies, water, red food coloring and skewers, you can do this experiment!) Here’s the video.
Fizzy Balloon Monster Heads (After we made Goblin Goo, I demonstrated how to make Fizzy Balloon Monster heads. Click here to watch.)
Magic Potion (Bubbly, stinky Halloween fun: I made a short video on how to make magic potion. Click here to watch it.
Mad Scientist’s Green Slime (To see a TV segment where we made Mad Scientist’s Green Slime, click here!) Here’s another video.
Apple Mummies (Here’s a link to a TV segment where the kids and I demonstrated how to make Apple Mummies.  Click here.)
Alien Monster Eggs (These make a great centerpiece for a Halloween party, when you’re done playing with them.) I demonstrated how to make them on Kare 11! Click here to watch the video.
Creepy Critter Slingshots Lob Marshmallow eyeballs and spiders at a pumpkin or another target in this fun physics experiment.