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Saltwater Pentacell
Make a battery by creating five simple cells from aluminum foil, copper wire, and saltwater, and connecting them in series. Use the battery to light an LED.
Salty Pits
Explore how different deodorants work and what that means for the bacteria in your armpit.
Scintillating Little Star
Why do stars twinkle? Have a scintillating experience by making your own “light twinkler.” Use a hot plate and laser to show that light can change direction and appear to twinkle.
Secret Bells
Create your own personal sound system with a coat hanger and a string, producing musical sounds that only you can hear.
Secret Codon
Write a message in DNA.
See Inside a Seed
Soaked in water, dried beans spring to life. Learn your way around a legume as you explore the various structures that protect and feed a developing plant embryo.
Seed Germinator
What goes on underground when seeds are sprouting? Make yourself a window onto the process of plant development.
Seeing Your Retina
A dim point of light will cast a shadow of the retina's network of blood vessels onto the retina itself. Try this activity and you'll be able see the blood supply of your retina—and your blind spot.
Self-Centered Globe
Place an Earth globe in sunlight, and you can align it so the patterns of light and shadow match those on real Earth
Sensitive Filament
The exposed filament from a 100-watt incandescent light bulb is wired in series with a flashlight bulb and a 9-volt battery. Blow on the filament and the flashlight bulb gets brighter.
Separation Anxiety
Color chromatography uses capillary action and the fact that different types of ink migrate different rates. Use this technique to discover the secret colors hidden in black ink.
Shaky Sediments
This Snack models ground failure in a phenomenon called liquefaction. See what happens when you shake up structures, loose sediments, and water in a simulated earthquake.
Shell Shifts
Increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are making the ocean water more acidic. See why this makes it harder for shellfish to build and maintain their shells.
Short Circuit
Current flowing through a wire heats the wire. The length of a wire affects its resistance, which determines how much current flows in the wire and how hot the wire gets.
Shrinking Spot
In this perception illusion, an automatic reflex causes light entering one eye to change what you see in the other eye, demonstrating one of your visual system’s many idiosyncrasies.
Single-Serving Volcanism
Simulate subsurface magmatism and surface volcanism by injecting a sweet sauce into a single-serving cup of gelatin.
Siren Disk
Sounds can be made in some surprising ways. Blowing air through a spinning disk full of holes can make a variety of pitches.
Size and Distance
By removing clues to the actual size and distance of an object, you can trick your brain into thinking that two similar objects of different sizes are really the same size.
Sizing Up
Discover some big surprises in the microscopic world.
Sizing Up Temperature
Discover the relationship between temperature and volume of a given amount of gas.
Skin Shield
Explore the body’s first line of defense against pathogens.
Skin Size
Work out the approximate surface area of your skin while also figuring out the approximate amount of atmospheric force pushing on it.
Skippy
Skippy is a mechanical creature that uses an off-center rotation, or eccentric motion, to produce interesting vibrational behavior.
Sliding Gray Step
Make one shade of gray look like two by putting it against two different color backgrounds.
Slinky in Hand
With just a Slinky and your hands, model transverse wave resonances as well as longitudinal wave resonances. Learn about nodes and antinodes of motion and compression.
Slow Your Roll
In this activity, you can investigate the motion of a slow-moving wheel on a track by using a timer, tape, and permanent marker.
Soap Film Interference Model
By experimenting with this model of light-wave addition, you can understand the behavior of light reflecting off soap films. Why do you see blue or red? It’s all a matter of phases.
Soap Film on a Can
Why do we see colors in oily water and soap bubbles? Experiment with soap film to observe the behavior and colorful appearance of different wavelengths of light.
Soap Film Painting
Under the influence of gravity, a thin soap film constantly changes thickness, creating an ever-shifting array of colors.
Soap-Bubble Shapes
Make three-dimensional geometric frames of different shapes, then dip them in a soap solution to form fascinating and colorful soap films.
Soda Can Mirror
Wrap a piece of Mylar around a soda can to make a cylindrical mirror. Then create your own anamorphic art to explore how curved mirrors reflect images.
Sonidos maravillosos
Haz un tocadiscos con materiales simples y escucha tu LP de vinilo favorito. No se requiere una fuente de electricidad.
Sound Bite
When you listen to a radio or music player, you normally hear the sound coming from the speaker or headphones. But in this Snack, you pick up sound vibrations through your teeth!
Sound Cups
This Snack encourages participants to ask questions, carry out investigations, and use their senses to find a person whose Sound Cup matches theirs, and then together recreate the sounds they hear.
Sound Sandwich
By making simple adjustments to this noisemaker, you can raise or lower its pitch and make different kinds of sounds.
Spaghetti Accelerometer
How does your phone know to rotate its screen when you rotate the phone? Make a model of your phone’s accelerometers, tiny sensors in your phone that detect changes in motion.
Spaghetti Resonance
If you shake an object or otherwise make it vibrate at its natural frequency, it will start to vibrate more and more, often violently enough to break.
Spherical Reflections
Round mirrored holiday ornaments packed together in a box create an array of spherical reflectors. Study the properties of spherical mirrors while you create a colorful mosaic of reflections.
Spinning Blackboard
When you draw on a spinning disk, you make unexpected patterns. If you try to draw a straight line, for instance, what appears on the disk is a spiral. The patterns you make result from adding the motion of your hand to the spinning motion of the disk.
Spinning Cylinder
A piece of pipe with a mark at each end is set rotating and spinning at the same time. In the blur of the moving cylinder, one of the marks appears three times, forming a stationary triangle.
Square Wheels
A square wheel will roll smoothly, with its axle at a constant height, on a surface with bumps of the right size and shape.
Squeeze Box
Compress layers of sediments in an easy-to-build deformation chamber to see folds, faults, and other geologic features develop in real time.
Squirming Palm
Stare at a waterfall for some time and then stare at the rocks nearby—the rocks will appear to be moving upward. This illusion is known as the waterfall effect, and you can recreate it—without getting wet.
Stereo Sound
Sound from a given source must travel slightly different distances to reach your two ears, which each hears the sound at a slightly different time. This lets you determine where a sound source is located.
Strange Attractor
Patterns of order can be found in apparently disordered systems. This pendulum—a magnet swinging over a small number of fixed magnets—is a very simple system that shows chaotic motion for some starting positions of the pendulum. The search for order in the chaos can be engrossing.
Straw Oboe
By cutting two “lips” into the flattened end of a soda straw and blowing with just the right pressure, you can make sounds resonate in the straw.
String Machine
By attaching a string to two small electric motors rotating in the same direction, you can create and play with a special class of waves called standing waves.
Stripped-Down Generator
In an electric power plant, steam or water power is used to move huge coils of wire past extremely strong magnets, generating megawatts of electricity to light whole towns. This Snack uses your muscles to move ordinary magnets past a small coil of wire, generating milliwatts of electricity—just enough to light an LED. The two generators work at very different scales, but they are both based on the same physics principles.
Stripped-Down Motor
A coil of wire becomes an electromagnet when current passes through it. The electromagnet interacts with a permanent magnet, causing the coil to spin. Voilà! You’ve created an electric motor.
Swelling Seas
Watch water swell and shrink with heating and cooling.
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Attribution: Exploratorium Teacher Institute
