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 ...

Gelatin can do much more than just wiggle and jiggle. Gelatin can be used for much more than a sweet treat. It can also act as a smoked lens—which allows you to view total internal reflection—or as a ...

The distribution of the mass of an object determines the position of its center of gravity, its angular momentum, and your ability to balance it. Place a lump of clay about the size of your fist ...

Discover why your favorite cat videos don't leak out of optical fibers. A transparent material, such as glass or water, can actually reflect light better than any mirror. All you have to do is look at ...

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 ...

See yourself as others see you. Two hinged mirrors create a kaleidoscope that shows multiple images of an object. When you set the hinged mirrors on top of a third mirror, you create a reflector that ...

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 ...

A bicycle wheel acts like a giant gyroscope. A spinning bicycle wheel resists efforts to tilt it and point the axle in a new direction. Any rapidly spinning wheel exhibits this gyroscopic property—and ...

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 ...

Make beautiful music with sticks, straws, and rubber bands. By making simple adjustments to this noisemaker, you can raise or lower its pitch and make different kinds of sounds. Stretch a wide rubber ...

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 ...

You’ve probably seen an ice skater spinning on the tip of one skate suddenly start to spin dramatically faster. A diver or gymnast may also suddenly flip or twist much faster. This speeded-up rotation ...