Tom Kuntzleman's blog

Summertime means doing chemistry experiments with flowers found growing in the yard...

Some explorations and explanations regarding superconductors and the quantum levitation (also known as quantum locking) experiment.

Beautiful, metallic mirrors of copper or silver can easily be formed in test tubes. Simply add the appropriate metal salt to a test tube, and heat! These reactions should be performed in a fume hood. 

This post describes a simple way to generate blue, green, orange, and yellow copper complexes, and to use these complexes to introduce students to the effect of temperature on chemical equilibria. The protcol avoids the use of caustic agents, allowing the experiments to be conducted by students as a laboratory-based investigation.

Have you seen the rainbow candy experiment? It's a very simple experiment that involves pouring water into a plate that has M&M's candies or Skittles arranged in a pattern. Very curious shapes of sharply divided regions form spontaneously. How does this happen?! 

Learn how to give pennies a beautiful, silvery-colored plating. 

Tom Kuntzleman tests to see if Powerade can be used as a source of reducing sugars in the classic silver mirror demonstration, and reminisces about Christmas days past when doing so.

What is the pressure inside a bottle of soda pop? Read this short article to find the surprising answer to this question, and also to learn how to do an experiment to answer this question for yourself!