Thursday, October 29, 2015

Sweet Science

So perhaps, come Nov. 1, you have a lot of candy laying around. Maybe the kids didn't eat it all, or maybe you didn't have any trick-or-treaters, or maybe you never give candy away but used the season of Halloween as a cover for some extra purchases.

Of course, you could eat all of this candy and make your stomach sad and your dentist wealthy. But even more fun could be some of these ten experimental uses for your remaining treats.

Some of them are familiar standbys, like the wintergreen sparks or the Mentos-Coke fountain. Others may have more silliness than science, like the M&M Duels. But a couple of others have some intriguing scientific content, like observing the different design possibilities presented by mass amounts of M&Ms, because of their shape. Any job that involves studying how many M&Ms can be put into a container and how they sort themselves out according to space in that container can't be all bad.

2 comments:

fillyjonk said...

When my parents first got a microwave (~1980, so I would have been 10 and my brother 5), I remember one afternoon they told us we were old enough to stay in the house alone while they went shopping.

We had a GRAND time putting uneaten Hallowe'en (and other) candy in the microwave and watching what happened to it (Gummi bears are particularly entertaining, as are marshmallows).

The really funny thing is I remember sort of a sense of dread of "we are being so bad, if our parents came back now we'd be in giant trouble." But we continued to microwave stuff....(we knew enough to remove any foil wrappers first!)

Friar said...

I didn't actually have a microwave until I'd moved out, but I definitely managed to experiment on some foodstuffs.