With polarized light, you can make a stained glass window without glass. Using transparent tape and polarizing material, you can make and project beautifully colored patterns reminiscent of abstract ...

Build a paper-pencil-pin phonograph. In this classic activity, make a record player out of simple materials and listen to your favorite vinyl LP—no outlet required. Starting in one corner, roll the ...

Polarizing sunglasses cut road glare better in some positions than in others. When light reflects from water, asphalt, or other nonmetallic surfaces, it becomes polarized—that is, the reflected light ...

Discover why the sky is blue and the sunset is red. When sunlight travels through the atmosphere, blue light scatters more than the other colors, leaving a dominant yellow-orange hue to the ...

Our Institutional Review Board has asked that the videos be shown in non-public spaces, which we call “educational settings.” Such settings have an educational purpose and require invitation or ...

Dark-colored materials both absorb and emit energy more readily than light-colored materials. Using a card or strip made of temperature-sensitive liquid crystal material, you can monitor temperature ...

Make a simple mini-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 ...

Create your own personal sound system with a coat hanger and string. Create your own personal sound system with a coat hanger and a string, producing musical sounds that only you can hear Cut two ...

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. Note: Electricity can really ...

Throw one hundred coins, remove all those that come up tails, place them in a pile, repeat—you've got yourself a hands-on model for radioactive decay. The piles graphically show the meaning of the ...

Iron filings trace out the lines of a magnetic field in three dimensions. Iron filings will line up parallel to a magnetic field, making the pattern of the field visible. This is a simple Snack to ...

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