Cool Sciency Stuff You Did As A Kid

TheRaisin · #1 03-05-2005, 10:26 AM

Did anyone ever do cool sciency stuff as a kid? Like, grow seamonkeys or buy a chemistry set or something? Or make something really cool with an erector set? I did.

I used to grow these things called triops. You could send away for this box and it came with the eggs and the food and the tank and everything you needed. Triops are these cool little things with three eyes that look kind of like miniature horseshoe crabs. Here are some pictures of them: Triops! Neat, huh? They could get like an inch long, and the bigger ones would eat the smaller ones. Eventually they would die off and you had to drain them out, at which time their bodies fell apart. So cool.

I had a chemistry set once, too. I made cool "polymers" (that was what the book called them, I still don't know much about them, I think their molecules are really long chains or something). Anyway. I made one that was really cool. You could punch it and it would be rock-hard and you'd hurt your knuckles. But if you set something on it, like a piece of paper, it would sink in like quicksand. Seriously cool.

So. What did you do?

Dino · #2 03-05-2005, 10:35 AM

Polymers are hydrocarbons, which means that they are oil based. They are usually plastics. IE polyurethane, polythene, polystyrene, etc.

I'm taking chemistry at college.

When I was at school, I made fireworks, explosives, and various other things...

Alpha · #3 03-05-2005, 10:41 AM

I had a sea monkey set once but after a while I stopped carining for them....

TheRaisin · #4 03-05-2005, 11:58 AM

One of my friends apparently makes small incendiary devices by draining out raw eggs and filling the shells with flour. Apparently flour can explode. Heh heh. That's so cool.

Cyber-Slig · #5 03-05-2005, 12:27 PM

TRIOPS! I had those. Only problem is they didn't grow. I thought they died, so I poured the water down the sink only to find tons of small little things puring out from the bottom. I couldn't see the them 'cos the water was too murky.

. Then again, anything I own is filthy.

Dino · #6 03-05-2005, 12:50 PM

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One of my friends apparently makes small incendiary devices by draining out raw eggs and filling the shells with flour. Apparently flour can explode. Heh heh. That's so cool.

That's a really old rumour/urban myth. I kept hearing it at my old school, and it really struck me how people could make up and believe such illogical shit. Flour actually doesn't explode, it's simply ground wheat! Flour does burn reasonably well, but that is simply because it is made of carbon, and has a tiny surface area, therefore it reacts quickly.

About the only effect you would get from putting flour in an empty egg shell and throwing, is you would have a pretty neat little flour bomb...in other words, you'd make a mess.

If you want a reasonably good explosive, try mixing Petroleum Jelly with matchstick heads and weedkiller (of the oxidizing variety). That should make a nice bang.

MojoMan220 · #7 03-05-2005, 12:52 PM

I had a crystal growing set. For some reason I loved it so much, no idea why. I think it was ruined after I made only two crystals, once again, no idea why.

I also had a creepy crawler set. Those things were awesome!

There was a... hm. I don't really know what it was called. Let's see if I can word this correctly. I owned a spooky candy experiment making set, I have no idea what it was called, but it had some delicious stuff to make. I think I'll look this up, I wonder if this is still made.

Rich · #8 03-05-2005, 12:56 PM

I had seamonkeys. Eventually they got really big. Then I ran out of the food...

Oddish · #9 03-05-2005, 03:27 PM

I had a microscope set, it was ok I guess.

TheRaisin · #10 03-05-2005, 05:41 PM

MojoMan, dude I remember those things! I still have one of the sets in a corner of my bedroom! The candy tasted like rubber, but the texture/colors/shapes were cool so it didn't matter. And I made it myself, and it was the brain of the creature, so nyeh!

Dino, then wouldn't flour dust burn even more quickly, because the particles are even smaller? Couldn't it theoretically burn so quickly that it seemed to explode? There's gotta be some truth to the myth.

Dino · #11 03-05-2005, 06:18 PM

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MojoMan, dude I remember those things! I still have one of the sets in a corner of my bedroom! The candy tasted like rubber, but the texture/colors/shapes were cool so it didn't matter. And I made it myself, and it was the brain of the creature, so nyeh!

Dino, then wouldn't flour dust burn even more quickly, because the particles are even smaller? Couldn't it theoretically burn so quickly that it seemed to explode? There's gotta be some truth to the myth.

It doesn't really burn very well... try it for yourself. Get out some pocket fire (a lighter) and attempt to burn a small pile of it on a plate. You'll probably notice that it sort of singes and blackens, and you get the odd flame or two, but if you sprinkle some into a flame it burns up quite easily.

I'm going to try lighting it again, just to see if I've made an error somewhere along the line... but I'm pretty sure that I'm right here. It's certainly not the impact sensitive unstable organic explosive that your friend makes it out to be. God knows, we'd be a few hundred million short of old grannies baking pies if the stuff was explosive. If it really did burn like petrol, I for one certainly wouldn't be putting it in an oven.

Voodoo Hand · #12 03-05-2005, 06:40 PM

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It doesn't really burn very well... try it for yourself. Get out some pocket fire (a lighter) and attempt to burn a small pile of it on a plate. You'll probably notice that it sort of singes and blackens, and you get the odd flame or two, but if you sprinkle some into a flame it burns up quite easily.

I'm going to try lighting it again, just to see if I've made an error somewhere along the line... but I'm pretty sure that I'm right here. It's certainly not the impact sensitive unstable organic explosive that your friend makes it out to be. God knows, we'd be a few hundred million short of old grannies baking pies if the stuff was explosive. If it really did burn like petrol, I for one certainly wouldn't be putting it in an oven.

Dude, you have not made an error, what you have not done is reach the proper
concentration of dust particles and available OXYGEN. This is the same reaction you read about in the papers when a grinding mill or grain elevator get`s blowen to hell.

webmaster_dragon · #13 03-05-2005, 07:11 PM

I colect animal skuls, so when a friend's animal dies, or when I see roadkill, I will skin it, boil the skull and bleach it. my colection is at an outstanding 34 skulls...

*about the spelling I have dislexia*

oh ya and the "spooky candy making set" is calld Dr.Dredfull... why can no body ever remember that name? you are the 4th person I know. *not complaining*

TheRaisin · #14 03-05-2005, 08:48 PM

Collecting animal skulls? That is awesome.

Whee, somebody else knows about it! That thing was so cool. Heh heh.

AquaticAmbi · #15 03-06-2005, 05:31 PM

What an interesting topic. I'm sure there's an endless amount of sciency stuff I did (not sure if any of it was "cool" though), but I can only recall a few.

I, like most kids, had sea monkeys. Damn, those things were awasome. Unfortunately, I had no way of cleaning their little tank, so eventually they died.

I think they make all kinds of special tools to take care of them with now, including cleaning aids. Also like most kids, I had a "magic rock" kit that I loved muchly, and I always longed for a chemistry set. I tried using my uncle's old one from his childhood, but all the stuff was either too old or used up.

One of the most bizarre parts of my childhood involved "experimentations" and "observing the behavior" of insects, mostly ants. I'd do horrible things to ant hills, such as pretending to "clean their homes" with soapy water, or digging as deep as I could into their hills. Sometimes I was amused equally by doing them favors, such as putting a cheeto directly at the hole of their hill and just watching their reactions.

My favorite of these experiments was putting the bugs in water and waiting for them to give up swimming. Then I'd try to find ways to revive them... Pressing them lightly against the tv screen, as I recall, had great results.

SeaRex · #16 03-06-2005, 07:14 PM

Model rockets, foo.

TheRaisin · #17 03-06-2005, 07:18 PM

Oh yeah. I got into those in cub scouts, I think. I was really into those.

We had the button and the little launch thing and you connect the electrodes and turn the key thing and they go WHOOSH! Great stuff. Every kid should launch model rockets.

***Nate*** · #18 03-06-2005, 07:21 PM

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About the only effect you would get from putting flour in an empty egg shell and throwing, is you would have a pretty neat little flour bomb...in other words, you'd make a mess.

It's got to be a lot of fine dust in the air, doesn't even need to be flour at all. But flour silos need to be real careful about sparks 'cos there's a long history of them exploding. For extra research material, read Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett where one of the characters explodes a door out with a flour bomb.

I did lots of sciency stuff as a kid but I can't remember anything interesting now. Just a lot of second-rate crystal sets.

Mudokon Princess · #19 03-06-2005, 07:47 PM

I never had seamonkeys or grew crystals or anything sciency, well there was the time i tried to put a pincher bug in fire and see if it would grow wings...

TheRaisin · #20 03-06-2005, 08:34 PM

Nate, that's cool, that's what I was just thinking of.

Dino · #21 03-06-2005, 08:35 PM

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Dude, you have not made an error, what you have not done is reach the proper
concentration of dust particles and available OXYGEN. This is the same reaction you read about in the papers when a grinding mill or grain elevator get`s blowen to hell.

You're more or less correct there.

The entire "flour is explosive" argument is one which I will explain to you here, and hopefully clear up some of the myths surrounding it.

Flour is actually a very safe material in it's normal form - this is what causes a lot of the confusion. Common, uneducated people who have heard that flour CAN explode, but not how and why, will assume immediately that flour in every form is explosive. It is not. You can put it in an oven, you can smash it with a hammer, you can throw it at a wall, you can even burn it and put matches out in it without it exploding.

The situations in which flour can explode demonstrate how unexplosive flour really is. That is to say, flour only ever explodes, when it is in a state of particulate suspension with air in which ANYTHING containing carbon (anything organic) will explode if exposed to a naked flame or spark. So flour dust in the air is actually no more explosive than coaldust, charcoal dust, skin dust, sausage dust, pea dust, potato dust, cabbage dust, brain dust... the list goes on. You grind it, and you turn it into a powder, then you suspend it in air, and you'll get yourself a potentially explosive material.

The REAL explosive is not the flour, but the oxygen. The oxygen simply needs something to react with - in this case the flour fills that role.

The single most dangerous piece of equipment in any flour handling facility, is the pneumatic conveyor, which elevates the flour by achieving total particulate suspension in air while pushing it upwards using a fast moving upward current of air. Also, any poorly ventilated flour handling environment in which a lot of flour is moving around is a potential hazard.

So that should just about sum it up for you. Putting flour in an empty eggshell does not make an explosive.

***Nate*** · #22 03-06-2005, 10:36 PM

Unless you throw it at the ground near a flame.

Dino · #23 03-06-2005, 11:03 PM

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Unless you throw it at the ground near a flame.

Nah, the flour would put out the flame by splashing out as it hits the ground and smothering it, effectively acting like a powder extinguisher, unless it was a fire that you were chucking it near, in which case any flour particles floating around in the air would probably burn up in the fire and make the flames look momentarily larger, and the majority of it would just stay on the ground.

Either way, you wouldn't get an explosion. The flour/grain dust explosions happen almost exclusively in big mills, elevators, and silos where the air is full of flour and grain particles.

***Nate*** · #24 03-07-2005, 05:26 PM

Well there's only one way to find out. Everyone over to my place for milk, cookies and science!

***Alcar*** · #25 03-08-2005, 04:32 AM

Fireworks, or crackers, basically. Unless you count my futile attempts at making alcohol out of bananas 'sciency'

Alcar...

Teal · #26 03-08-2005, 10:34 AM

Yeah, ditto on the "flour isn't explosive" thing - flour burns really well if you light a dust-cloud of it, and you can get a fairly impressive fireball (for that matter any fine flammable particulate dust does the same - we got a better effect with custard powder), but it doesn't explode.

Mind you, we made a fairly nifty experiment to show the power behind the burning - you can explode the lid off a tin with a few grams of flour. Get an old custard tin, drill a hole in it and fit an old fashioned tobacco pipe into it. Connect up a plastic tube to where the pipe sticks through the outside (any old one - like the ones you can buy for winemaking) and either fit a big (and I mean 50-100ml, you can usually get them in your science dept at school) old plastic syringe to it like we did or else just blow through it. First put the lid on the tin and blow through the pipe - you might manage to blow the lid off, but it's not very impressive.
Then take the lid back off, and fill the bowl of the pipe (inside the tin) with flour or custard or something. Put a tealight into the tin and light it, then put the lid back on. Retire to a safe distance, and blow through the tube.
The custard will ignite into a fireball, and the sudden heat will blow the lid off the tin.

Just... don't do it indoors.

And don't stand too close for fear of flying lids.
(you can get a nifty little fireball if you do it without the lid on, too. Just ditto on the "don't do it indoors" malarky.)

For a technicality, "polymer" simply means "many units" - plastics are polymers, but starch is a polymer molecule as well. It's one of them ambiguous can-mean-what-it-likes sort of word. :b

TheRaisin · #27 03-08-2005, 03:27 PM

Ooh, thanks Teal, I do believe I'll try that.

Ant farm! I can't believe I forgot about that. Along with seamonkeys, another classic childhood "sciency" thing. Ant farms are so cool. Did anyone else ever have an ant farm?

I've had a lot of science teachers who didn't focus so much on science as they did cool things you can do that somehow seem to have something to do with science apparently in some way. I'll never forget the time I took a summer science class and the teacher had like a bucket of soapy water and some sort of flammable gas, and he put a tube from the gas tank into the water and made this huge bubble, like a foot in diameter, and he took it and sort of tossed it up and it floated to the ceiling and stuck there. Then we lit a match and taped it to the end of a meter stick and lit the bubble on fire. And there was like this huge red wave of fire that spread out across the ceiling like a ripple in water. And it disappeared within a second and didn't leave a trace of ever having been there. That was great.

sligster · #28 03-08-2005, 04:36 PM

Triops! I had those! I loved em.

O, gawd, I had so much, I can't remember it all..... what I remember most are my Fire Ant "Hive" >:) Those guys were awesome. I would feed them live insects and watch them shred it. I would make little clay sculptures and put it in their tank as scenery(i didn't use an antfarm). Sometimes I would make damaged buildings and such. A little city for the fire ants to roam around in, and little hiding spots to put the live insects and watch the fire ants try to find it. I miss them :( Then a few years ago I bought Starcraft and the Zerg reminded me so much of them (in a mindless, ruthless swarm eradicating all in their way, way.)

I had Creepy Crawlers and all that.

I was a huge fan of Dinosaurs and Insects and Reptiles and Deadly Creatures when I was a kid. Dinosaurs, not so much now, but everything else I still have a strong passion for. I bought all kinds of models and experimentations of them.

I even had these little rubber insects that came with goo. You would insert the goo through a hole in their side with a plastic serynge (sp) and mess with em.

I had a T-Rex that came with a little guy, and the T-Rex was made so you could make it "eat" the guy. Shove it down it's throat, then it had an opening in it's stomach where you could take him out.

and that's just scratching the surface. gawd, I miss those days..... and my fire ants.....

TheRaisin · #29 03-08-2005, 05:43 PM

Suh-weet.

Once upon a time, on a camp-out from hell at summer camp, I saw fire ants. I guess that's what they were. They were vicious. We put our sleeping tarp (yes, that's right, a sleeping tarp) down next to a tree, not knowing that it contained a colony of them. We spent quite a while pulling up the edges of the tarp, kicking at them, trying like hell to keep them from swarming all over us. In retrospect, we could have just moved the tarp...

But it was pretty awesome watching them devour other insects. There was this weird metallic purple beetle thing, and they bogged it down, and then one of them chewed right through its body and poked its head through a big hole in its abdomen. Boy that was great.

I just missed the things-you-can-fill-with-goo revolution. They started coming out when I was too old to play with toys anymore (in retrospect, maybe I just stopped playing with toys before most kids). I also wished they had come out a few years earlier though. They look pretty sweet.

sligster · #30 03-08-2005, 06:00 PM

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But it was pretty awesome watching them devour other insects. There was this weird metallic purple beetle thing, and they bogged it down, and then one of them chewed right through its body and poked its head through a big hole in its abdomen. Boy that was great.

I once gave em a decent sized moth, and they chewed through it in about 5 minutes. A few legs and scraps of the wings were all that was left

although it was a serious pain if one got out and started biting me

Those things hurt!

Or if the insect jumped out before i could close the lid (which happened a few times with crickets & grasshoppers).

But probobly the best time I had watching the ants devour live insects whole was when i somehow caught a full grown Praying Mantis. The thing was about the size of my finger, and put up a damn good fight (it killed quite a few ants itself before succuming to the wrath of the scourge!)

..... scourge? god, I play too many video games....

sounds like I was running my own Gladiator Arena, eh?