Fun with corn starch. Simple experiment to show properties of matter
Hsien-Hsien sent this YouTube video my way last week. Okay the cuteness factor can be a little much, but the experiment is very cool and shows one of the weird science things that is also fun for kids: corn starch and water. Here’s the video:
Okay corn starch is just some wild stuff. In solution is has the property of when hit hard it acts like a solid, when pushed gently a liquid. You can add more water and make slime (little food colouring makes it even more fun) … I hear a little liquid soap in the mix makes for slimier slime.
Related to this are some unstable clays. These are awesome. I think those deserve another post on their own, but here’s the gist. There are clays (especially in San Francisco) where the clay crystals are arranged in a way to support stuff on top of them (e.g. buildings, bridges), but when jostled (e.g. earthquakes) the crystals re-arrange and lay flat and this also allows water trapped in the mixture to get out … making … mud! And also the buildings, etc collapse because there isn’t anything to really hold them up.
Truly amazing. Dr. Bob talked about an uber-messy demonstration of this he used to do, but I never got to see it. Oh well.
Tags: solutions, corn starch, quick clays, liquifaction
2 Comments
we just did this experiment in chem class and I was wondering, why is the mixture pressure sensitive?
why is the corn starch and water mixture pressure sensitive?