Swans on Tea

Is coming from sciencegeekgirl’s Hands on Science Sunday: Feeling pressured?
All you need is a big trash bag and an industrial strength vacuum cleaner, and a willing victim (er, “faithful subject of science.”) The victim (aka “subject) gets inside the bag, and once you suck all the air out of the bag with the vacuum cleaner, [...]

Those who divide the people in the world into two types, and those who don’t.
Or, you can divide experiments up by classifying them as edible or inedible: Edible/Inedible Experiments Archive

17 cool magnet tricks
I’ve done several of these, including a version of the homopolar motor. The eddy current damping is fun, too — you can make nonmagnetic metals react to magnets by inducing current flow in them. Lenz’s law.

A few days ago I was relating the cans-in-a-blanket problem, and retelling the vacuum joke and story to someone who had not yet heard them. One of my colleagues commented on a problem he had been given during an interview, also involving cans of soda:
You have two cans, one filled with ice and the [...]

School kids measure distance to the Moon
The students analysed an mp3 recording of the conversation between Neil Armstrong on the surface and ground control in Houston in which he utters his famous “one small step” speech. The recording is available on the NASA website.
They noticed an echo on this recording in which sentences from Earth [...]

Rhett asks a straightforward question over at Dot Physics, in A blanket and cold stuff
Suppose you put take two identical cans of soda out of the fridge and place them on the floor in the middle of a room. One can you leave alone and one can you cover with a wool blanket. After an [...]

A UV LED flashlight. Just checking on what fluoresces. Among the more interesting, we have the security stripe of a $20 bill

A Mr. Clean bottle shows both the label and the cleaner fluorescing

and some vitamin B complex (I think the B-12 is the main culprit here), dissolved in some vinegar, and spilled on [...]

Pendulum Trajectory
[T]he trajectory of a pendulum, as seen from the bottom.
via

MagnetNerd
Hi, I’m Rob Gallagher and I’m a MagnetNerd.
[…]
Neodymium Magnets are just plain cool. It’s totally amazing how something so small can have such strong magnetic forces. I enjoy showing others the amazing things that can be done with Neodymium Magnets. So far I have created 53 Videos of my experiments and designs on YouTube and [...]

Kent’s Video Chemical Demonstrations

Balloon-powered boat
Which could be a DIY project, I’m sure. You could adapt the idea to a DIY hovercraft as well.

Life’s the same, except for my shoes
Stereograms! Make Your Own 3D Camera for $15 or Less
If you happen to have two digital cameras, you can skip some of the steps, like getting the film developed and scanning the pictures. I was able to get my hands on a second camera; I found that [...]