ADVENTURES IN SCIENCE

Here are two fun science projects that you can do at home!

THE TORNADO EXPERIMENT

Needed Materials:

1. Two plastic soda bottles
2. Duct tape
3. Food colouring

What To Do:

1. Fill one of the bottles three-quarters full with water. Add a few drops of food colouring, any colour 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 your short strip of tape, so that they stay together 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 centre 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 it’s 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 kilometres per hour, often more than twice as fast as winds in a hurricane! And, you’ve got a whirling tornado in a bottle. Make your own tornado in a bottle!

This experiment can be found at BIll Nye, The Science Guy^©.

WATCH THE LIFE CYCLE OF A BUTTERFLY!

Ever wonder where a butterfly comes from? It comes from a chrysalis (KRIS-uh-liss) which is also called a pupa. A chrysalis looks like a tiny leathery pouch. You can find one underneath some leaves in the summer. Some animals don't change much as they grow up. Think about it: someone your age looks a lot like a grown-up. Grown-ups have more wrinkles and gray hair. But they still have two arms, two legs and one head - just like you! We're going to meet an animal that's very different - the butterfly. Butterflies go through four life stages, and they look very different at each stage.

Needed Materials:

1. Toilet-paper tube
2. Tongue depressor or ice-cream pop stick
3. Heavy paper
4. 6" (150 mm) piece of pipe cleaner, folded in half
5. Markers or crayons
6. Scissors and glue

What To Do:

1. Cut out and color a butterfly from the heavy paper. Use any colours, but make both halves look the same. Put a small hole at the top of the butterfly's head.
2. Colour the toilet paper tube to look like a chrysalis. (A monarch butterfly's chrysalis is green, but you can use any colour.)
3. Take a piece of pipe cleaner and shape it like the letter "V". Put one point through the little hole in the butterfly's head and then twist it to look like antennae. Butterflies use these "feelers" to learn about their environment.
4. Glue the butterfly to one end of the tongue depressor or ice-cream popsicle stick. Let the glue dry.
5. Curl the butterfly's wings and slide it into the chrysalis.
6. Pull the stick to make the beautiful butterfly come out of the chrysalis.

Now fly your butterfly like a real one!

What’s Happening?

Butterflies go four stages of life, but they only look like butterflies in the final stage. Birds, frogs, snakes and insects also change as they grow.

1. An adult butterfly lays an egg.
2. The egg hatches into a caterpillar or larva.
3. The caterpillar forms the chrysalis or pupa.
4. The chrysalis matures into a butterfly.

Taken from Cool Science for Cool Kids