Have you lost your marbles?

Sound surrounds us all the time. You may awaken in the morning to the sound of an alarm clock or Dad snoring. During the day you may hear the cacophony of auto traffic or the hustle and bustle of city life. But all sounds have one thing in common. They are formed by the movement…

Sound is actually nothing more than moving air and the way we perceive that moving air with our ears. Now you may be saying “Wait a minute Geek Slop… sound is made by moving air?”. Sure. Think about it. Your dad moves a lot of air – right? And he makes a nasty sound when…

Here’s an interesting experiment. We promise you’ll be talking about this one at school the next day. Find a bottle with a long, narrow neck and set it on the table. The opening should be just small enough to keep the egg from falling inside.

Pressure – you feel it at school, your teacher feels it during class (yes, a room full of little scientists can be stressful for some teachers), and your dad feels pressure when Mom asks him for the tenth time to take out the trash. Here’s an interesting experiment that demonstrates a different kind of pressure…

What does a flying airplane and a pitcher’s curve ball have in common? Well, besides the fact that both travel through the air at amazingly fast speeds – both are based on a principle called Bernoulli’s principle. Bernoulli, (pronounced Burr New Lee) was a Swiss mathematician who liked to piddle around with these types of…

With this experiment we’ll cause marshmallows to make funny faces and demonstrate a scien-terrific principle called pressure.

One of the basic physics principles is that heat causes things to expand (get bigger) and cold causes things to contract (get smaller). Things such as air will contract and take up less room when cooled. Similarly, things will expand when they get hot.

Ivory soap differs from most other brands in that it floats in the water. The reason – there is air whipped into the soap which makes it lighter than water. The small air pockets in the soap make for a very interesting effect when the soap bar is heated up.

Riding a bicycle with no hands on the handle bars

The pushing force of air is called air pressure. The closer you are to Earth, the greater the air pressure. The farther away from Earth (in other words the higher your altitude), the less the air pressure. And remember, pressure is coming from all around us. Here’s an experiment to demonstrate the pressure of air…

Capillary Flow Experiment (CFE) in the U.S. Laboratory/Destiny

Even though we usually think of water as running downhill, it can indeed flow upwards using a process called capillary action. This is the very scientific principle that explains how water goes from the soil upwards into the stem of plants.