LIQUIDS ON A PENNY BY MATT, REID, AND NOAH For the four experiments, we used four liquids. The liquids are (in the order of which we did first, second, third, and fourth): SPRITE MELTED MARGARINE BLUE GATORADE SKIM MILK Sprite We did the Sprite on a penny experiment first. It wasn’t our most favorite one, but it was fun just the same. One of the cool things about it was that you could always see Mr. Lincoln through the Sprite, and sometimes if you had enough on the penny, you could see bubbles. Which just strikes me as cool. Look at the bubbles. It’s just a great, closeup picture that all three of us like. Melted Margarine We did the Melted Margarine Experiment second. It was thicker than water, Sprite, Gatorade, and milk, and was a golden yellow color. There were some whitishclear little bubble spots in it, and if we don’t shake it for a while, the top thickens and turns whitish and a bit clear. If you put about 5 drops on a penny, you’ll probably see small yellow chunks, and where the margarine is thinnest, a pearly white-brown color because the copper of the penny shows through. Gatorade Well, we have a TON of Gatorade pictures, and I deleted half of them. It is unknown why in the world we have so many, but some things will just have to stay mysteries. We found that in the bigger Gatorade bottle, the Gatorade is a very dark blue. In the smaller vials and droppers, it is a more translucent, lighter, blue. This is because the more Gatorade you have together, the darker it is and the harder it is to see through it. This also applies to water, and many other things, I’m sure. This is a great photo of surface tension at work. The tiny rim of the penny provides a bit of room for the Gatorade, but the large blue bubble on top of the penny is only capable of keeping it’s shape because of… surface tension. Isn’t it amazing? The penny before it touches Gatorade… The penny with Gatorade on it. Any ideas on why this BLUE Gatorade looks green? Because the brown paper showing through the blue Gatorade makes it look green? Because the camera, flash, and lighting did something funky? Any others? MILK PICTURES The three of us did the skim milk experiment last. It was a fun one. Matt got some skim milk from breakfast, and he put it in the fridge in the teacher’s lounge with Mrs. Loucks, until we needed it in Science for the experiment. Milk Continued: Aren’t these pictures awesome? The extremely close up one shows how surface tension affects liquids by letting the liquid round out and get bigger like a filled bubble before it has to spread out over the penny. This same principle applies to how liquids hold their shape when they cover all of the penny and are higher than the rim. We had a lot of milk pictures too. Surface Tension of Milk BEHIND THE SCENES Noah and I found that the thicker a liquid is, the greater the surface tension it has. All of this info here is based on our experiments and findings: Sprite is apparently thinner than water because it doesn’t fit as many drops on a penny. Then milk is the next thickest, because it has the second to least drops that fit on a penny, now Gatorade (it has the third to least), and finally, melted margarine, the thickest of the four liquids that we used. But what is weird, is that water fit as many drops on a penny as melted margarine and Gatorade, not like we thought. In the beginning, we thought that water is thinner than Sprite, which we found was totally wrong. Sprite’s average droppage was 10, and for my (Matt’s) water on a penny experiment, I got 28-31 drops of water on my penny. Our favorite experiments were the Gatorade and melted margarine one.