Materials
An apple
A knife
An almond
A match or lighter

Procedure
1. Cut the top and bottom of the apple off
2. Cut the almond into the shape of a wick
3. Stick wick in the apple
4. Light the candle
5. When you blow it out, eat it!

What Happened?
For a fire to occur there must be three things: energy (usually heat), oxygen and fuel. In a wax candle, the wax vapor is the fuel while the fuel in the edible candle is the almond. Almonds contain proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Lighting an almond on fire releases the stored chemical energy in these fats, proteins and carbohydrates as heat. Because almonds contain a high percentage of fat and fat contains a lot of stored chemical energy, the almond can burn for quite some time (just like a candle wick!)

Materials:
A glass
½ cup water
1/3 oil
Food coloring
Table salt

Do it yourself:
1. Pour ½ cup of water into a glass
2. Add 1/3 cup of oil to the glass
3. Add a couple drops of food coloring
4. Shake salt on top of the oil while you count slowly to 10
5. Watch science in action!

What’s happening:
Because salt is more dense than water, when you add it to your mixture, it sinks. Blobs of oil attach to the sinking salt grains and are dragged down to the bottom of the glass. When the salt dissolves, the oil drops rise again to the surface of your mixture, because oil is lighter, or less dense, than water.

Check out another Kitchen Chemist video:
Magic Milk

In this video, George Washington University Biology Professor Hartmut Doebel and his student Heidi Wolff share their passion for urban beekeeping. They raise their own bees on a rooftop in downtown Washington, DC and collect the honey for the nearby restaurant Founding Farmers.

In this TalkingScience video, three New York City urban planners discuss their vision and ideas for New York's sustainable future.

Ernest Hutton is a Principal at Planning Interaction and Hutton Associates. He is also on the board of directors for the American Institute of Architects New York chapter (AIANY). He has been involved in urban planning and urban development for over thirty years.

Ilana Judah is the Director of Sustainability at FXFOWLE, a major New York based architecture firm. She is a LEED Accredited Professional and has years of experience in designing green buildings. She is also Chair of AIANY COTE (Committee on the Environment).

James Wright is an Associate Principal at Lee Haris Pomeroy Architects. There he specializes and urban transportation systems. He has worked on transportation projects all over New York. He is also on the Urban Design Committee of American Institute of Architecture.

This video is part of the Sustainable NYC, a multimedia project providing an inside look at efforts all around New York that are transforming the city into a green and sustainable place.

For more Sustainable NYC, check out:
What is sustainable food?
Cleaning the Gowanus
The 1.45 Mile Long Recycling Project

In this video, TalkingScience's own kitchen chemists demonstrate the emulsifying properties of dish soap.

What you need:
Shallow dish
Food coloring
Milk
Dish soap

What's happening:
The food coloring allows us to see the separation of fat from liquid. Dish soap has both polar and non-polar properties, meaning it can separate the polar water from the non-polar fat in milk. Whole milk has the highest fat content out of the various milks, so it works best for this demonstration. The soap acts as an emulsifier, essentially chasing the fat in the milk away from the water in the milk, making magic milk!

 

Links:
Tremblay Apiaries
New York Beef Company
Roaming Acres Farm

This video is part of the Sustainable NYC, a multimedia project providing an inside look at efforts all around New York that are transforming the city into a green and sustainable place.

Why is science cool?

How did you get interested in science?

Why are so few people interested in science?

Eleven year old Ethan Brown is a young apprentice of Dr. Arthur Benjamin, AKA the Mathemagician. Using methods described by Benjamin in his book, Secrets of Mental Math: The Mathemagician's Guide to Lightning Calculation and Amazing Math Tricks, Brown entertains crowds with his feats of calculation. Faster than a calculator, Brown mentally multiplies enormous numbers and calculates squares. TalkingScience video producer Jesse Medalia Strauss caught up with him at the 2011 World Science Festival.

For more, see our interview with Dr. Arthur Benjamin.
 

Arthur Benjamin is a professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. He uses his highly developed understanding of math to perform feats of calculation in a fun, engaging, and magical way. In his performance, Benjamin demonstrates and explains his secrets for performing rapid mental calculations faster than a calculator. Watch as he mentally multiplies enormous numbers and figures the day of the week of anyone's birthday.
 

In this video, TalkingScience video producer Jesse Medalia Strauss talks with participants in the FIRST Robotics Competition. The competition organizes teens into design teams that compete to build a robot that can best perform tasks and games. The teams came to the World Science Festival street fair to show off what their bots can do.

For this video, TalkingScience video producer Jesse Medalia-Strauss interviewed participants in the New York Iridescent Technovation Challenge -- a program designed to help high school girls understand what it takes to be a high-tech entrepreneurs. In small teams, mentored by female technology professionals, the students designed a mobile app prototype using the Google App Inventor for Android. They then presented their app before a panel of venture capitalists and industry leaders at a "Pitch Night" held at AOL Ventures in NYC.

The Technovation Challenge is a program of Iridescent, a non-profit which provides STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education for underserved and underrepresented youth.

In this video, recorded at World Maker Faire in New York in 2010, Irish roboticist and inventor Pete Redmond talks about RuBot II, aka "The Cubinator," who is the world's fastest Rubik's Cube solving robot according to the 2010 Guinness Book of World Records.

Become a fan of Rubot on Facebook

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Kristie Reddick and Jessica Honaker are The Bug Chicks. They each have Masters Degrees in Entomology and love to teach people about insects and spiders. They also run Solpugid Productions where they are involved in all sorts of entomological endeavors including the popular Bug Bytes podcast, produced in collaboration with the Texas A&M University Department of Entomology. For more from The Bug Chicks, check out their website at http://www.thebugchicks.com!

At the International Public Science Events Conference in February, TalkingScience's Washington D.C. correspondent Jesse Medalia Strauss caught up with Tim Bailey, CFO and assistant director of Yuri's Night World Space Party. Bailey is a space enthusiast who, among other things, teaches people how to maneuver in microgravity during parabolic aircraft flights that create a "weightless" environment. In this video, he talks about Yuri's night, an international celebration that commemorates the first human space flight, by Yuri Gagarin, who flew the Vostok 1 spaceship on April 12, 1961.

We'll be publishing more video interviews with Tim Bailey in the next week or so. Stay tuned!

Anyone attending a Yuri's Night event this evening? Let us know in the comments!

Tip of the Iceberg

Icebergs are huge floating islands of ice that float in the ocean. When you see an iceberg you are only seeing about 10% of the whole thing. The rest of the iceberg is floating below the surface of the water. How is that possible?

Water is weird. Unlike most liquids, it expands when it freezes. Because of this expansion, ice floats in water. You can see the expansion with this experiment.

What you need
• A plastic pop bottle
• Water
• A sharpie pen
• A freezer

What you do
1. Fill the pop bottle about ¾ full of tap water and mark the level on the outside of the bottle with the pen.
2. Stick it in the freezer and let it sit for a few hours.
3. Pull out the bottle. Check out where the level of the ice is in comparison to where the water was.

What’s going on?
To do & notice
The ice expanded when it froze. Most liquids shrink when they freeze. As the temperature drops, the molecules slow down and pull tighter together. This makes the substance more dense. Denser objects sink in less dense fluids. Solid lead sinks in liquid lead and solid steel sinks in liquid steel. If this were true of ice and water, ice would be denser than water and would sink rather than float. But it doesn’t.

With water, the solid form, ice, is less dense than the liquid form, water. So it floats. How can this be? As water is cooled, it does become denser and denser, but only until it reaches a temperature just before freezing. At this point, the molecules line up with spaces in between. It expands to form crystals that are in fact less dense than liquid water. So ice floats.

Oil and Ice

Oil and water don’t mix. Oil will float on top of water. It’s less dense. But what about oil and ice?

What Do You Need?
• A 2 liter pop bottle with the top part removed
• Cooking oil
• An ice cube

What Do You Do?
• Fill the bottle about half full with cooking oil.
• Drop the ice cube in, and watch what happens as the cube melts.

What’s going on?
An ice cube looks more solid than oil, but its molecules are a lot less densely packed together. When the ice melts and turns to liquid water, the molecules become denser. You can see that happen when the melted drops fall in perfect little spheres down through the oil, coming to rest at the bottom of the bottle.

Want to Get Technical?
The next time your friends or parents have iced water, you could give a fancy explanation for floating ice. Casually mention that ice floats because it has a density of 0.8 grams per cubic centimeter while water has a greater density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter. They’ll be amazed!

You’re spinning. We all are. Even as you read this we’re whipping around with the Earth as it rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. You may not feel it, but that spin is putting some real force on the Earth’s water—mainly its oceans.

How do we know this? Because of tides. The water on Earth is pulled toward the moon creating a bulge of water. This bulge is high tide. As the Earth rotates, the position of the bulge on the earth moves. But here’s the thing, there isn’t only ONE high tide a day. In most places there are TWO high tides a day, which are about 12 hours and 25 minutes apart. This means there are two bulges.

So how the heck does that happen? It has to do with the spin. When the Earth spins it throws the water out away from the center of the spin. So there are two bulges -- one toward the moon and one away from the moon.

You can recreate this spin and fling water about, just like the Earth does, right in your own home.

What You Need
• A paper or plastic cup
• String
• Hole punch
• Water

What You Do
• Punch two holes about ½ inch from the rim of your cup on opposite sides.
• Thread your string through the two holes and make a knot about 4 inches above the mouth of the cup. It should form a triangle.
• Fill your cup about ¾ of the way with water.
• You may want to do this part outside so you’ll have enough room: Start to swing the cup back and forth until you build up enough momentum to swing the whole thing around in a circle like a Ferris wheel. Swing hard and fast and eventually you can even swing the water above your head as if you’re doing a lasso trick.
• To stop, slow down and let the cup swing to a slower circle before stopping so you don’t get a shower.

What’s Going On?
Gravity and inertia. When the cup of water is just hanging, it is pulled toward the center of our planet by a force called gravity. This is the same force that pulls the water toward the moon. The moon‘s gravity pulls on the water closest to it and makes a bulge. That bulge is high tide.

There’s another force in motion called inertia. You might expect the water to fall out of your cup when the mouth of the cup is pointing down. But when you swing the cup in a circle, you are essentially pushing the water—and the water will want to keep going in the direction you have pushed it because of inertia. The water keeps moving in the direction you've pushed it until it encounters the bottom of the cup which stops the water from flying away.

When you swing the cup, you exert a force on the water which is stronger than gravity. This is like what is happening on the side of the Earth away from the moon. On the side closest to the moon, the gravitational pull of the moon is stronger than inertia and you get a bulge. But on the side opposite the moon, inertia is greater and you get a bulge there.

Tide Talk
Ever been to the beach one day and the water level is way high up on the sand? Then come back the next day to see that the water is way down on the beach? Where did all that water go? Here’s an experiment you can do on the kitchen counter to show you.

What You Need
• Glass rectangular casserole dish
• Water
• Blue food coloring (optional)
• Pencil

What You Do
1. Fill the dish about 1/3 of the way with water. Add food coloring if you like.
2. Place the pencil under one end of the dish so the water sloshes to the other side.
3. Which side is low tide? Which side is high tide?
4. Tilt the pan the other way. Now which side is high tide? Low tide?

What’s Going On?
When the moon pulls on the water closest to it, the water bulges out toward the moon. That bulge is a high tide. The part of the Earth that is under the pull of the moon experiences a high tide while the parts of the planet where the water has been pulled away experience low tide.

The pull of the moon and the force of inertia make two bulges of water. Where there is a bulge there is high tide. Where there is no bulge there is low tide. Because the earth is spinning, a different part of the planet is under the bulges at any given time. The water never goes away; it just moves around the planet.

Tide Pool Exploration
If you’re lucky enough to be by the beach for awhile, you can explore how tides affect not only the landscape but the plants and animals that live there. Tide pools are amazing worlds to observe.

Bring along a notebook and some pencils and make drawings or write down descriptions of what you see. How does the tide pool change when the tide is high? How does it look when it’s low tide? How do the plants and animals look at each tide?

Even green leaves have more colors than you might think! See the hidden colors lurking in the leaf with this cool chromatography experiment.

What You Need:
• Coffee filter
• Scissors
• Green leaves
• Penny
• Rubbing alcohol
• Jar
• Pencil
• Tape

What You Do
1. Cut a 3-4 inch long/1-inch wide strip out of the coffee filter.
2. Cut one end of the strip to a point.
3. Place the leaf about ¼ to ½ inch up from the point and use edge of the penny to roll over the leaf and grind the juices into the filter paper.
4. Let the paper dry, and repeat the process with three different leaves. You want a good green smear.
5. Pour about 1/2-inch of rubbing alcohol into the jar.
6. Measure so that the tip of the point of the paper will be dipped but NO more and tape the strip to the pencil so that it will dangle. Make sure the green smear doesn’t touch the alcohol.
7. Leave it for an hour or so and check back frequently
8. What colors do you see?

What’s going on?
The alcohol is a solvent—it dissolves stuff. As the solvent moves up the paper, it mingles with the green smear and makes a mixture of molecules. Because leaves have different pigments, there are a bunch of different shaped and sized molecules that begin to separate when the alcohol passes through the paper. The heavier molecules are left at the bottom, while smaller ones get carried further up. You end up with a cool, rainbow-like effect.

The finished paper is called a chromatogram.

Bonus Activity: Ink Chromatography Challenge
Scientists use chromatography all the time to get a kind of color fingerprint of a chemical. Forensic Scientists can often solve crimes using this technique. Gather a few different pens and try to see if you can crack this mystery.

What You Need:
• Coffee filter
• Scissors
• Assortment of 4-5 different pens
• water
• 4-5 Jars
• 4-5 Pencils
• Tape
• Paper
• Stapler

What You Do
First make chromatograms of each pen/ink--You’re going to need a set-up for each pen sample.
1. For each pen, cut a 3-4 inch long/ 1-inch wide strip out of the coffee filter and cut each strip into a point at one end.
2. At the top, flat end, use a pencil to label each strip with the pen you’re testing.
3. Then place a strip of ink from that pen across the bottom, pointed end about ¼ to ½ inch up from the point.
4. Pour about 1/2-inch of water into each jar.
5. Measure so that the tip of the point of the paper will be dipped but NO more and tape the strip to the pencil so that it will dangle. Make sure the ink stripe doesn’t touch the water.
6. Leave it for an hour or so and check back frequently.If the ink you are testing does not spread out, re-test it using rubbing alcohol.
7. Let the strips dry and compare your results
8. Tape them on a sheet of paper as a record of the different pen types.
What colors do you see?

Next- The mystery!
1. Have someone write a secret message on a piece of coffee filter paper with one of the pens you tested. Don’t peek.
2. Cut out several individual letters from the note.
3. Staple each letter to the bottom of a strip of coffee filter.
4. Conduct the chromatography experiment above on all the strips.
5. Use the results from your previous chromatograms to determine which pen was used to write the secret note.

______________
Former science, English, and art teacher, author, illustrator, Emmy Award-winning writer and mother of two experiment-loving boys, Lynn Brunelle lives and writes on an island in the Pacific Northwest.

On October 6, 2010, millions of young people across the nation became scientists during the third annual 4-H National Youth Science Day. TalkingScience visited P.S. 5 in Brooklyn to watch kids learn about carbon dioxide and discover how we as a nation can reduce our environmental impact.

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring!

It’s that time of year when some days are beaming with sunshine one minute and the next there’s a big black cloud dropping rain overhead. So what’s that all about? The water cycle. It’s all about the water cycle. Check these experiments out. You can make a cloud and make it rain right in your own kitchen.

Make it rain inside

Why does it rain? You can make it rain right in your own kitchen and see for yourself.

What You Need

• A pop bottle
• Scissors
• Hot tap water
• Ice

What You Do

• Get a grown up to help you cut off the top part of your pop bottle at the shoulder, leaving the cap screwed on tightly.
• Fill the bottom part of the bottle half full of hot tap water.
• Turn the top part of the bottle so it’s upside down, and fill it with ice. Set this into the bottom part of the Pop Bottle and wait.
• What do you notice?

What’s Going On?

You made a miniature water cycle--evaporation, condensation, and precipitation-- right in your bottle.

Heat causes the water to evaporate. Liquid water turns into a water vapor gas that rises into the air. When it rises it hits the ice and cools down. The cooling water vapor molecules start to stick to each other and make a cloud. This is called condensation.

Clouds collect water droplets until all the droplets are too heavy to float in the air. Then water falls from the sky as rain. This is called precipitation. In your bottle, the droplets get heavier and heavier until they fall back down into the bottom part of the bottle.

The water cycle happens every day over and over all over the Earth, on a much bigger scale.

Cloud in a Bottle

What are clouds made of? More than you think. Try this and see.

What You Need

• Black construction paper
• Hot tap water
• A pop bottle
• Matches—and a grown up to help out

What You Do

• Prop up the black construction paper on your kitchen counter. You will use the paper as background later on.
• Dribble about 2 inches of very hot water into your bottle—but don’t melt it!
• Quickly cap the bottle.
• Shake the bottle for about 1 minute.
• Put the bottle on the counter. Have a grown-up strike a match. Let it burn for about 2 seconds. Blow out the match. Quickly uncap the bottle, and drop in the match and cap up the bottle again.
• Put the bottle on its side in front of the black paper so you can see what’s going on inside the bottle more clearly. Push on the side of the bottle as hard as you can for about 10 seconds to pressurize the inside. Let go and see if you have a cloud. If not, repeat this until you see a cloud form in the bottle.
• After you get a cloud. Put the bottle right side up and uncap it. What happens to your cloud?

What’s Going On

Clouds are made of more than just water vapor clinging to itself. The water vapor needs a little something to hang on to. Something like particles of dust. In this experiment, the cloud began forming in the bottle when the water vapor in the air attached themselves to the particles from the smoky, sooty, match.

Interviewed by: Rosalee Washington, Betty Diop, Ann Marie Cunningham
Edited by: Aloisia Staffa and Austen Saltz

Introduction

Introduction to the video series. How much do today's youth know about the climate change and how do they think that the media affects them and their peers?

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Making a Difference

Are today's youth doing enough to make a difference? How does their education about climate change affect how much they do to try and stop it?

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Are We Doing Enough?

Despite the attempts of young people today, may it already be too late to stop the effects of climate change?

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Produced, directed, and written by Jesse Medalia Strauss and Julian Cohen-Serrins.

Konstantine Ouranitsas shows off his self-sustaining farming system.

What is Aquaponics?

Aquaponics is a bio-integrated system that links recirculating aquaculture with hydroponic vegetable, flower, and/or herb production. Recent advances by researchers and growers alike have turned aquaponics into a working model of sustainable food production.

More Information on Aquaponics:
Wikipedia Entry | Aquaponics.com | On YouTube | PDF Document

Produced, directed and written by Jesse Medalia-Strauss, Julian Cohen-Serrins, and Austen Saltz.
Special thanks to the Churchill School, Raul Hernandez, and Konstantine Ouranitsas.

1. New York Hall of Science

Avenue of Science
New York, NY 11368
(718) 699-0005
www.nyhallsci.org

New York Hall of Science has renovated its space exhibit, the outdoor Rocket Park. It features two icons of the United States space program: an original Titan II booster with a replica of the Gemini capsule and an original Atlas booster with a replica of the Mercury capsule. You can climb inside the Mercury capsule allows visitors to climb inside and play astronaut. You can even play miniature golf and launch a space ship. Indoors, you’ll find over 400 hands-on exhibits.

2. Sony Wonder Technology Lab

550 Madison Ave
New York, NY 10022
(212) 833-8100
www.wondertechlab.sony.com

The  Wonder Tech Lab combines technology and creativity in order to make learning entertaining. A visit to the Lab is free, and you can perform virtual surgery, build a game, make a movie -- even animation. A section called “how devices work” details the the inner workings of a cell phone, a PSP, and a digital camera.

3. Lucy's Legacy

226 W. 44th St
New York, NY 10036
(866) 987-9692
www.lucyexhibition.hmns.org

Lucy’s Legacy helps you understand evolution. Lucy is the oldest and most complete human ancestor retrieved from Africa. Visitors will be able to see her skeleton and the other earliest known members of our species --- along with many relics of the rich heritage of Ethiopia, where Lucy was found. There are fossils, historical manuscripts, paintings, musical instruments. , and so much more featured in the exhibition.

4. Bodies... The Exhibition

11 Fulton Street
New York, NY 10038
(888) 926-3437
www.bodiestheexhibition.com

Bodies….The Exhibition features actual human bodies and displays that go beyond anything you would see in a textbook. It is divided into different sections based on body systems. One of the most popular exhibits, in the Respiratory section, shows a good lung versus a lung damaged by smoking – and a bin of discarded cigarette packs. Even very young children find Bodies engrossing. Also see our separate review of the exhibit.

5. American Museum of Natural History

Central Park West
New York, NY 10024
(212) 769-5150
www.amnh.org

The American Museum of Natural History has dinosaurs and “extreme mammals” – the biggest, smallest, and most amazing mammals of all time. But don’t miss the Rose Center for Earth and Space, the place to visit to learn about the universe and its origins. The all-new space show, Journey to the Stars, is intensely enlightening, revealing lots that you never knew about the universe. The show is not only educational, but usually stunning, giving you a realistic experience you won’t soon forget.

Produced, directed, and written by Jesse Medalia-Strauss, Julian Cohen-Serrins, and Austen Saltz.
Production assistants: Timothy Chen, Betty Diop, and Rosalee Washington.

Women in Science is a 5-part web series which examines the amount of women across a range of scientific fields. Throughout the series, we interview a range of women involved in the field of science. Meredith Fischer is a biologist and Harvard graduate. Erika O'Bannon and Cassandra Augustin work at Science Club for Girls, an organization dedicated to educating the young women about the wonders of the scientific world. In addition, we interview Kate Lawrence, a future women in science who is already inventing helpful inventions for fisherman through Lemelson-MIT's InvenTeams program.

Can you name any women in science?

How many prominent scientists can you name? How many prominent women scientists can you name? This was the question posed to passerby in Times Square. Their answers serve as a prelude to the problems discussed during the rest of the videos.

Why should there be more women in science?

In part 3, we examine why there should be more women in the field of science. What can women bring to the field that their male counterparts lack? The answer may actually lie in science...
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Are women encouraged enough to go into the sciences?

Perhaps the reason why there aren't enough women in science is because of the way society brings girls up and what we impose upon them. Should they be encouraged more?

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What is the future for women in science?

In the final part, we speculate on the future of women in science. It seems likely that womens' role in science will increase, but at what rate and how soon?

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Produced, directed, and written by Jesse Medalia-Strauss, Julian Cohen-Serrins, and Austen Saltz. Researched by Timothy Chen, Betty Diop, and Rosalee Washington.
Special thanks to Marilyn Cohen, Kathe Gregory, MIT-Lemelson Foundation, Bob Nesson, and Science Club for Girls.