Demonstrations

Time for a new chemical mystery! Watch the video below and see if you can use your chemical knowledge to figure out how this experiment is done.

Bill Hammack- never heard of him, right? I love his videos as he dissects the physics and chemistry of how things work. Nothing fancy or gimmicky. Just good ol' experimentation, acute observation, rational deduction, and contagious curiosity.  

Did you know there is a simple test you can do to see if an alkaline battery is fresh or dead?^1,2 All you need to do is bounce the bottom of a battery onto a hard, flat surface. If the battery is fresh it won’t bounce very well. If the battery is dead, it will bounce very high. Check it out in the video.³

With Earth Day approaching, you might want to try out the experiment published in the Journal of Chemical Education.¹ It outlines a fantastic way to demonstrate the warming influence that atmospheric CO₂ has on our planet. I followed the procedure and offer a video of the results.²

In Chemical Mystery #14, neutralization reactions were used to cause some interesting color changes. See the two videos below:  

Here’s a fun demonstration I did for my students on Valentine’s Day:  

The June, 2018 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education contains an article tha

In Chemical Mystery #13, the contents of a "magic" cup were poured over a blue-colored cleaner. As a result, the color of the cleaner immediately changed from blue to white. In another case, the color change occurs when the magic cup is simply held over the cleaner.

This chemical mystery is very easy to perform. Figuring out how this trick is done is also easy...if you know your chemistry!