• Question: Hello everyone, I don’t know who to choose to ask a question because there are so much people! The question is... What is your favourite experiment

    Asked by anon-255567 on 20 May 2020.
    • Photo: Mary Gagen

      Mary Gagen answered on 20 May 2020:

      I love this question! My favorite classroom experiment is called ‘clouds in a bottle’ because it is such a great way to see so many different science laws in action and we can learn so much about weather and climate, just with a plastic bottle, some liquid and a bicycle pump!

    • Photo: Sylvia Soldatou

      Sylvia Soldatou answered on 20 May 2020:

      Couple of days ago I did some kitchen chemistry experiments for my nephew who lives in Greece. He loved the bouncy and transparent egg experiment! All you need is raw egg and white vinegar. You let the egg soak for 24 and 48 hours and at the end you will see that the vinegar has dissolved the eggshell. You can see the yolk moving around and if you want to take the risk you can check how bouncy the egg is! Be careful though! Some of my eggs weren’t very bouncy and I ended up making a mess in my kitchen!

    • Photo: Jamie Purkis

      Jamie Purkis answered on 20 May 2020:

      That’s easy – the screaming jelly baby. It turns my favourite sweets into things that scream and fizz and, sometimes (if we’re really lucky), explode. A chemical called potassium chlorate (an oxidiser, similar to hydrogen peroxide that’s used to bleach hair) sees the sugar in the jelly baby and gives off a lot of gas and a brilliant orange-white flame. I’ve done the experiment several times myself and never looked at a jelly baby in the same way again!
      Here’s the experiment in action:

    • Photo: Alice Pullen

      Alice Pullen answered on 21 May 2020:

      Hiya! I really enjoy any experiment where I get to work with sea anemones. I study animal poop and feeding, and anemones are very well behaved because they eat whatever you give them! And also their poop comes in very neat packets (like a little ball of poo sealed with mucus/snot), which means it is very easy to collect.

    • Photo: Daire Harvey-Carroll

      Daire Harvey-Carroll answered on 21 May 2020:

      Before lockdown I was growing plants in transparent soil so I could see how their roots grow and interact with bacteria – I thought it was the coolest thing ever!

    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 21 May 2020:

      I don’t really do experiments in my research, but back when I was a science teacher one of my favourite practical classes was all about metal reactions. You use a Bunsen burner to heat a metal oxide (maybe copper?) in a test tube with charcoal powder until the tube is nearly melting. Then you put it into water, which shatters the tube, gives a puff of charcoal powder and reveals the metal you’ve made! Very cool. I also used to demonstrate the thermite reaction in this class, but one time a technician tried to spice it up using a different combination of chemicals. We were the only people in my lab, I was working on my computer, and all of a sudden he lit the fuse and ran to hide behind my desk! Slightly scary for me..! It did make a cool green flame, but apparently was too dangerous to be allowed…

    • Photo: Kirsty Pringle

      Kirsty Pringle answered on 21 May 2020:

      Ooh, so many to choose from!!

      I like experiments that really clearly demonstrate something to help understand, which aren’t always the most exciting ones to watch though.

      My kids like the one where you drop Mentos (mints) into a bottle of Diet Coke.

      The bubbles in Diet Coke (and other soda) are formed of carbon dioxide, normally bubbles of carbon dioxide are released gradually when you open the bottle of Coke. But! if you drop a few Mentos in they cause a chemical reaction that releases the carbon dioxide much faster and the gas escapes so fast you end up with a soda fountain, like a volcano errupting!

      It’s very messy!

      Maddie and Greg did it on their “Lets go Live” show on You Tube

      The experiment start at 8 minutes 46 seconds in:

    • Photo: Ana Filipa Palmeirim

      Ana Filipa Palmeirim answered on 21 May 2020: last edited 21 May 2020 11:39 am

      My favourite experiment is to capture wildlife in tropical forests. I usually deploy traps that I bait and then check it everyday. It is so nice to hand the animals, in particular rodents and marsupials which are my favourite animals, and looking into their morphology taking notes of that.

    • Photo: Emily Goddard

      Emily Goddard answered on 21 May 2020:

      The iodine clock experiment — by using different quantities of chemicals you can control how long it takes a reaction to start. You can do it so precisely, it can be used as a clock! Here’s one set to music:

    • Photo: Helen Roy

      Helen Roy answered on 21 May 2020:

      So many exciting experiments to chose from – but perhaps I would go for those that explore complex questions such how different species interact with one another to fulfil particular roles – there have been some amazing experiments looking at excluding certain pollinating insects from flowers and seeing what happens to seed set …so-called exclusion experiments. We use a protocol called the flower-insect timed count to monitor pollinating insects – you could take part https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuTiPEJI8rQ&feature=youtu.be – what is really exciting is that we tested this approach with schools across the country first through a project called the Big Bumblebee Discovery

    • Photo: Jessica Gomez-Banderas

      Jessica Gomez-Banderas answered on 22 May 2020:

      I love any experiment involving colour! This video is a good example of how different oxidation states of metal ions can change the colour of the solution

    • Photo: Lauren Graham

      Lauren Graham answered on 22 May 2020:

      What a fun question! My favourite experiment in school was burning different elements to see the flame colour (potassium is a really pretty colour). One of our instruments at the lab uses this concept to detect metals in waste water samples. It uses ‘optical emission spectroscopy’ which is similar to the flame experiment where each element will have a unique optical emission/colour.

    • Photo: Steve Wroe

      Steve Wroe answered on 25 May 2020:

      Thank you for a very thought provoking question. I’m going to give two answers to this question.

      Answer 1. I don’t have a favourite experiment yet because science (and therefore experiments) are constantly changing. Let me give you an example. When I was living and working in the Antarctic, many of the experiments and work that I did, is now carried out by satellite. So the science moves on.

      Answer 2. When working in Antarctica, I worked and travelled away from the base where I lived for periods of up to 6 weeks (imagine a 6 week camping trip). At the time, we used husky dog teams (9 dogs per team). My job was to map the shape of the solid land underneath a 1 mile thick glacier. So when travelling over the surface of the glacier it may appear to be flat. Beneath it were hidden mountains and valleys. It was these that I was mapping. I hope that this has been of help.

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