Home experiment 3

Today I will be showing you how to make litmus indicator. This special vegetable is quite rare in the supermarket and sometimes you have to wait till it's in season. The vegetable i'm talking about is - red cabbage. No, it's not red but purple in colour because of a pigment called flavin.

You need:
2-3 cabbage LEAVES
1 pot
water
1 container

Steps:
1) wash the cabbage leaves and place them neatly into the pot.
2) Fill the pot with water until it just covers the leaves

3) Boil it for about 10 minutes or till the water turns a rich purple colour

4) Let it cool and pour the liquid into a container and use it when needed.

Note:
-When the sample you're trying on is an acid, the indicator turns pink.
-When the sample you're trying on is an alkali, the indicator turns blur-green.

Tried and Tested:
I tried the indicator with a little bit of lime juice and guess what colour it turns. Yes, pink!!!

Chromatograph

I did a chromatography experiment today with filter paper and the result was beautiful. I think it would be better to use filter paper instead of kitchen towel because it's more, how to say, "specialised" kind of thing. Here's the photo:

Home experiment 2

I did about 2 to 3 experiments today and I'll post one here(I even took the pictures for it):
You need:
-1 dish or petri-dish of water
-a little bit of talcum powder
-a few drops of dish-detergent

Steps:
1. Sprinkle some talcum powder over the surface of the bowl of water. The talc will settle on the water surface like this:

2. Now drip two to three drops of detergent into the middle fof the bowl and watch.
3. The detergent reduces the water's pulling power near where it lands. As a result, the talc is pulled outwards by the water with greater pulling power and even sinks to the bottom:

This is serious

I've read an online science article about the ozones level in the world as in those produced by human activities which is formed when sunlight interacts with emissions from cars and power plants - such as nitrogen dioxide - and is generated in greater quantities when air temperatures are high.
Here's is part of the extract:
Death records for 95 US cities - representing about 40% of the population - over 14 years. They found that a person is 0.52% more likely to die on a given day when ozone levels during the previous week rose by 10 parts per billion. That figure is slightly higher - 0.64% - when the researchers looked only at deaths due to cardiovascular and respiratory problems.

If ozone levels were decreased by 10 ppb, about 4000 lives would be saved each
year in these 95 urban centres.

"Ozone is clearly a problem, particularly for those that spend a lot of time outdoors, for those exercising, for asthmatics, and maybe others," says Bart Ostro, chief of the air pollution epidemiology unit at the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment in Oakland, US. "Moving to ever-cleaner cars and controlling some of the large stationary sources of nitrogen dioxide, such as power plants, are important steps."
Bell agrees: "There are a lot of things we can do on an individual basis, such as taking the bus to work or carpooling. We can also look at the exposure to ozone - if high ozone levels are anticipated, people can stay indoors or not exercise outdoors.""

Interesting Experiment

Here's an interesting experiment:
"Sit in a Dark Room for about five minutes, then look briefly toward the sun or a bright light. Did you feel a tickle in your nose? Did you sneeze? If so, you belong to the 18 to 35 % of the population who suffers from a medical condition known as ACHOO (autosomal dominant compelling helioophthalmic outburst) syndrome. ACHOO, also commonly called the sunsneeze response – is an inherited disorder in which sensory impulses from the optic nerve spill over into the trigeminal nerve in the nose. A strong visual signal causes itching in the nostrils, which triggers the sneeze reflex."

The Hottest and Coldest place on Earth

I've read an interesting fact from a small article in a science magazine and this person asked a scientist where is the hottest and coldest place on Earth and here's an extract:
"The most frigid spot know on earth’s surface is at the Vostok Ice station in Antarctica, where in 1989 the temperature hit -128.6 Fahrenheit. It was so cold that when scientists there poured water from the kettle, the water froze before it hit the ground. At the other extreme is El Azizia, Libya, where the hottest temperature recorded was 136 Fahrenheit in Sept 1922. High in the atmosphere or deep underground, temperatures are even more extreme. In the noctilucent clouds that form 50 miles above the north and south poles, temperature fall to as low as –220 Fahrenheit. And in the Earth’s solid iron core, 4000 miles beneath us, temp may reach 13,000 F hotter than the surface of the sun." Cool.

Home experiment 1

Here's an interesting chromatography experiment which you can do it yourself at home.
You need:
A piece of filter paper or Kitchen Towel
A bowl or flat plate of water
Some felt-tip pens

1. Put some spots of ink about 3 cm from the bottom of the paper

2. Hang the paper over a bowl of water so that the water touches the paper but not the ink spots.

3. The paper absorbs the water. As the water reaches the blobs of ink, the dyes in the inks dissolve and are carried upwards. The dyes that dissolve most easily travel furthest.