science – Page 3 – Beyond The Kitchen Sink

Fizz it yourself

Have a hankerinâ€™ for milk and Pepsi but hate Pepsi? Well, if youâ€™ve been suffering through the ultra sweet taste of that suspect combination just to get bubbles in milk, itâ€™s time to let science lead you to better living. The U-FIZZ Drink Carbonation Kit consists of little more than a couple of plastic tubes and a hose (luckily with a $6.99 price tag to matchâ€”good job ThinkGeek), but manages to turn any beverage into a bubbling fountain of nose-tickling goodness. Whether it be juice, coffee, tea or the aforementioned milk, your favorite beverage can now be made better. How? Science. By using baking soda and vinegar to produce carbon dioxide, the gadget captures the escaping gas and puts it into your drink. Better living through chemistry, indeed.

The chemistry set you eat

This is the chemistry set of today. Those semi-dangerous labs-in-a-box are a thing of the past. Nowadays, they arenâ€™t going to pack anything remotely dangerous into those learning kits, so you might as well look elsewhere for real fun. Since Junior no longer has the capability to produce searing acid baths for his action figures, the modern chemistry set might as well produce something useful: food!

Continue reading The chemistry set you eat

Mysterious Russian nesting dolls measure accurately

It must be by some prescient force of Russian magic that Sergei Maliutin and Vasiliy Zvezdochkin created Russian nesting dolls. How else would they have been able to know that over 100 years later, the toy would be discovered to be an actual tool? Whether you call them nesting dolls or matrioshka, matryoshka, babushka dolls, or stacking dolls, the fact remains: they accurately act as measuring cups.

Okay, so well, you need the M-Cups from Fred & Friends to actually use the nesting dolls as measuring cups, but the fact remains that this set is just as home in the kitchen as it is on the tchotchke shelf. At least in the case of this set, they accurately measure 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3, 3/4 and 1 full cup. How? We may never know. Like how the moon can be just the right size to cause the occasional perfect solar eclipse, some things may never well be answered.