Chem Lab!

Well, we didn't get a single deer. Very sad. So, deer season ended last Wed. This Saturday we did a chemistry merit badge at Whitman college. It was a great deal of fun and although Jon did most of the stuff at home, he did get to do some hands on experiments. We also got to see some pretty cool demonstrations of chemistry. Unfortunately, I am not very adept with my new camera yet and many of the photos were blurry. Sad, but true. So, here is what I got today.

These are of the mento and soda pop blow ups. They used these specially made doo hickey things to drop the mentos in the soda. It worked VERY well. The last two frames are of Jon's soda pop. The worst part of this was the boys were told they could NOT drink the leftover soda as the mentos had been in the chem lab. It is very bad to eat things that are stored in the chemistry lab. That rule made the Scouts very sad.

In this first photo the guys are making mini marshmallows grow and shrink with vacuum.
Here Jon was doing something with combining chemicals, they had to record their results in pen. It appears that pen is the preferred method of recording chemistry data and it is recommended that you use ball point as some other forms of pen react badly to certain chemicals. One young chemist told us about a lab partner he had who actually lost all his data when a chemical spilled on his paper and the ink vanished! (So much for the dog eating your homework!)

These last photos are of a couple of the experiments. The goo in the tube is called elephant's toothpaste and the young lady had already moved when I turned the camera to see what the boys found so amazing! The young man in the background is Nathan, the chem lab professor. The balloon has hydrogen in it and when it was lit on fire it well..exploded. The boys were VERY impressed with that one. The last one almost didn't work. The plant container on top had thermite in it. When it was lit on fire with magnesium the stuff melted and turned into molton iron that flowed into the bottom containers. It melted the top clay planter, too!

An amazing day in the world of Science!