Cafe Experiments

Fast food generally doesn't look anything like its ads, so YouTuber Greg Benson decided to head to fast food chains to see if they could actually make food look like the pictures. You will be surprised they did so well on the second try.

Gav sets up a chain of 150 mousetraps. Dan sets them off bravely.

In this video I attempt to lift a 19kg (42 lbs) wheel over my head one-handed while it's spinning at a few thousand RPM. This replicates an earlier experiment by Professor Eric Laithwaite. He claimed the wheel was 'light as a feather' and could not be explained by Newton's Laws. I wanted to find out for myself what I really felt like.

In the Leidenfrost Effect, a water droplet will float on a layer of its own vapor if heated to certain temperature. This common cooking phenomenon takes center stage in a series of playful experiments by physicists at the University of Bath, who discovered new and fun means to manipulate the movement of water.

The effect that you are seeing can't be seen with the naked eye. The effect only works through the camera. However, there is a version of the project you can do where the effect would be visible with the naked eye.

This is what happens when a coke can meets some flowing lava.

At high enough speeds, solids aren't actually that solid. The force of an impact can create waves in hard objects that are as big as the objects themselves... thus making a golf ball look like jelly.

This is a classic chemical reaction. It's called the iodine clock reaction. There are several variations of how this chemical reaction can be performed using different chemicals than the ones I used in the video. You can order clock reaction kits from several science related websites. You can also use simple store bought chemicals like vitamin C, iodine, hydrogen peroxide and starch. A quick internet search will turn up multiple ways of performing the experiment.

How high can you hear? Take this 'test' to see how old your ears are!

So this experiment is the Chladni plate experiment. I used a tone generator, a wave driver (speaker) and a metal plate attached to the speaker. First add sand to the plate then begin playing a tone. Certain frequencies vibrate the metal plate in such a way that it creates areas where there is no vibration. The sand "falls" into those areas, creating beautiful geometric patterns. As the frequency increases in pitch the patterns become more complex.