More on Tornadoes and fun summer science

Tornadoes:
Natural disaster or natural phenomena?. Tornadoes [videorecording]  J DVD-ED 551.553 NAT674
Tornadoes! / by Gail Gibbons E 551.553 GIBBONS
Tornadoes : the science behind terrible twisters / Alvin Silverstein J 551.553 SILVERS

All about meteorology [videorecording] J DVD-ED 551.5 ALL37
Weather kid Sid [videorecording] J DVD WEA376
Easy genius science projects with weather : great experiments and ideas / Robert Gardner J 551.5078 GARDNER
What is weather? / by Ellen Lawrence E 551.6 LAWRENC 

Local Summer Science:
Chemical Reactions with a Bang! by Raven Science at Lynnwood Library June 27th @ 11am.
Mad Science: Dream Big, Read and Experiment at Lake Stevens Library June 23rd @ 11:30am.
Reptile Man at Mukilteo Library June 23rd 2pm.

Raven Science: http://www.ravenscience.org/
Mad Science: http://www.madscience.org/
Reptile Man: http://www.reptileman.com/home.html
Mercer Slough Environmental and Education Center: http://www.bellevuewa.gov/mseec.htm
Mt. St. Helen's http://www.fs.usda.gov/mountsthelens

Celebrate Science!
Science EXPO Day, June 2 at Seattle Center
10 a.m.-6 p.m. 

 http://seattlesciencefestival.org/Science-EXPO-Day/science-expo-day

Travel Science:
If you have a membership to the Pacific Science Center and you are travelling, your membership may allow you free or reduced admission to other science museums.  http://www.astc.org/members/passlist.htm
Below are links to some cool science museums that currently honor Pacific Science Center memberships, but there are many more...
Arizona Science Center in Phoenix  http://www.azscience.org/
Exploratorium San Francisco, California http://www.exploratorium.edu/
George C. Page Museum La Brea Tarpits and Natural History Museum of LA County http://www.nhm.org/site/
Chicago, Illinois Museum of Science and Industry  http://www.msichicago.org/
                         Adler Planetarium   http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/
                         Field Museum  http://fieldmuseum.org/
Boston, Massachusetts  Museum of Science Boston http://www.mos.org/
Sunriver, Oregon  Sunriver Nature Center http://www.sunrivernaturecenter.org/
Portland, Oregon Oregon Museum of Science and Industry http://www.omsi.edu/
Washington State  Burke Museum http://www.burkemuseum.org/
                            Museum of Flight http://www.museumofflight.org/
Vancouver, B.C. Science World British Columbia http://www.scienceworld.ca/
London, England National Museum of Science and Industry http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/

Tornado in a Bottle

                                                                                                             
      Spring is time for some truly awesome weather.  Some of the most amazing (and frightening) events are tornadoes.  We don’t get those around here so much, and maybe that’s good.  We can still appreciate them and enjoy them in a bottle.  Here’s how to make one with stuff you have around the house.

What you need:

    Two plastic soda bottles (same size)

       Duct Tape

    Food Coloring

What you do:

1.    Fill one of the bottles three quarters full with water.  Add a few drops   of food coloring, any color you like.

      2.   Pull off a strip of duct tape about 10 cm (4 inches) long and place it on the edge of a table, where you can reach it.

      3.   With a dry towel, make sure the neck of the bottle is very dry.

      4.     Put the empty bottle on top of the full one, neck-to-neck, and tape them together with our short strip of tape so that they stay toegether and they’re straight.

      5.     Now wrap them with a long length of duct tape.  The more neatly you wrap, the better it will work.

      6.    Turn your tornado twister upside down and give it a swirl.  Try it again, without giving it a twist.

What’s Happening?

Gravity pulls the water down into the empty bottle.  But the empty one isn’t really empty.  It’s full of air.  When the water swirls through the necks of the bottles, an open space forms in the middle.  It’s a whirlpool.  The air in the lower bottle can flow up through the open center of the whirlpool into the upper bottle.  The spinning water holds a steady shape.  Without the whirlpool to let the air go by, the water burbles its way through.  The flow is not smooth and it’s often much slower than the whirlpool’s flow.

Tornadoes work the same way.  When huge air masses move across the ground, they start to roll like a carpet.  If one rolling air mass runs into another rising warm one, the rolling mass gets tipped on end and the rising warm air rushes up through the whirling middle.  Tornado wind speeds are often over 400 kilometers per hour, often more than twice as fast as winds in a hurricane!  And, you’ve got a whirling tornado in a bottle.

Experiment courtesy of Bill Nye (www.billnye.com)

Have a science experiment or event you want to share?  Contact Amy Oliver (amyroliver@gmail.com).

Bubbles with Holes

I hope you were able to come to the science fair and try out all the really cool demonstrations.  Here is one that you can try at home. 

What you need:

Bubble solution (store bought or homemade, you choose)

Glycerin or corn syrup

Thin wire

Thread

Toothpick

Wide container

What to do:

Bend your thin wire around a small to medium sized pot to create a circle.  Make sure you have a handle so you can keep hold of your circle.  Tie about 6 inches worth of thread so you have a loop; then tie this to your circle of wire away from your handle.  Now you have a home-made bubble maker!  Next fill your wide container with bubble solution (make sure your container is wide enough to allow the whole of your wire circle in all at once).  Add about 1tsp of glycerin or corn syrup to your bubble solution and stir gently (stirring vigorously will make it hard to get the solution to coat your wire—too many bubbles!).  Dip your wire circle into the soap making sure the thread gets coated as well.  GENTLY remove the circle from the container making sure the film is suspended between your wire with the thread hanging inside the film.  Now using your toothpick gently poke a hole in just the thread.  Watch what happens. . .

What is going on:

Your thread probably wasn’t a circle before you poked your hole, but became one quickly.  Why did it do that?  Soap film likes to take up the smallest area possible.  Being in a circle means the forces pulling on the soap are minimized.  The soap will pull on the thread to create a circle, thereby reducing the force within the film and taking up the smallest area.

Think this is only child’s play?  Physicists are finding that soap films mimic behavior seen in black holes agreeing nicely with Einstein’s theories.  Not only that, but mathematicians are finding soap films can help them solve and understand complex problems.  What will you discover with this seemingly simple soap bubble?

Bubbles and Black Holes

More on Bubbles:

Books:
Pop! : a book about bubbles / by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley 
E 530.4275 BRADLEY    

The ultimate bubble book : soapy science fun / by Shar Levine & Leslie Johnstone  J 541.33 LEVINE

Solids, liquids, and gases : from ice cubes to bubbles / Carol Ballard  J 530.4 BALLARD

Amazing science tricks for kids and parents / Michio Goto ; translated by Tom Gally.
TEEN 507.8 GOTO

Websites:
Wiki  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_bubble

San Francisco's Exploratorium
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/bubbles/

Scifun.org
http://scifun.chem.wisc.edu/homeexpts/soapbubl.html

Bubbles to help explain Black Holes:

Websites:

Education.com

http://www.education.com/science-fair/article/physics_gravitational-field-demonstrated-soap-bubble/

Physics.org

http://phys.org/news66408910.html

Books and videos about Black Holes:

Black holes and other bizarre space objects / David Jefferis

 J 523.8875 JEFFERI

Monster black holes [videorecording] / produced by Thomas Lucas

 DVD-ED 523.8875 MON5350

A black hole is not a hole / Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano

 J 523.8875 DECRIST

Greatest discoveries with Bill Nye. Astronomy [videorecording]

 J DVD-ED 520 GRE190

The mysterious universe : supernovae, dark energy, and black holes / text by Ellen Jackson

J 523.8446 JACKSON

Black holes / by Dana Meachen Rau

J 523.8875 RAU

How the universe works [videorecording]

DVD-ED 523.1 HOW8086

Through the wormhole [videorecording] : with Morgan Freeman

DVD-ED 523.1 THR7894