What is your favourite science experiment?

Miriam O'Duill answered on 27 Feb 2021:

There are so many! I extracted DNA from a banana last week, which was awesome. I also love chemistry experiments that change colour, like the iodine clock reaction or the traffic light reaction. (Look them up on YouTube!)

Amy Sanders answered on 27 Feb 2021:

When I was a school, on my last day, we found out that our teacher was a bit of a pyromaniac. One of the experiments we did that day involved jelly babies. In a boiling tube you can heat potassium chlorate until it liquifies, then drop a jelly baby into the tube. The sugar of the jelly baby oxidises, “screams”, and jiggles up and down the tube until it’s done.
Except ours, ours got so angry it shot halfway across the class room!

We don’t call the work I do experiments as such, but I find the way our analysers work out the different type of white cells in a blood sample super cool!

Zahra Rattray answered on 27 Feb 2021:

My favourite science experiment is looking at what proteins change in cancer cells and using dyes that glow in the dark to see them under a microscope. It is really fun and looks very pretty. We use the results from these experiments to design new cancer chemotherapy.

Michael Walford answered on 28 Feb 2021:

I think my favourite science experiment at school was the flame tests, where you would get a different coloured flame depending on what metal ion was present. This actually became useful at University, where one of our lab projects was to determine an unknown compound, and the flame test came in very handy.
At work, my favourite experiment is probably the cone calorimeter. This is used to determine heat output from a burning sample by measuring oxygen reduction and carbon dioxide production. It`s also the experiment I do that has a nice balance between data analysis and actually watching the sample burn.

Paul O'Nion answered on 28 Feb 2021:

I used to do an experiment we had named the Sulfur Hubbly Bubble method, which involved extracting sulfur from coal & then forming Barium Sulfate which we could weigh & so determine gravimetrically how much sulfur was in the coal. Now adays I do more on instruments but I love seeing the chromatogram of different flavours. I recently did some work on Rum & got some fantastic patterns out.

Matt Foulkes answered on 28 Feb 2021:

Great question! There are lots of great science experiments I used to love seeing (and still do!). The ‘screaming jelly baby’ is a classic, as is the iodine clock. I personally really like watching the ‘elephant’s toothpaste’ experiment though – search online for a video of it if you’ve never seen it before! I have to say, I would NOT like to be the poor person that has to clean it up though! It also makes an appearance in the TV show ‘The Big Bang Theory’, if you watch that!

Philip Camp answered on 28 Feb 2021:

My favourite type of experiment involves firing X rays and neutrons at materials. The way X rays and neutrons are scattered, diffracted, or reflected tells you about how the atoms and molecules are arranged in the material. There are not many other ways of ‘seeing’ what happens at the atomic scale! It’s also exciting to visit the facilities used for cutting-edge experiments, which include particle accelerators hundreds of metres in length, and neutron sources that make water glow blue.

Nikita King answered on 28 Feb 2021:

My favourite experiments are to do with experiments where things change colour. There is an experiment I like watching where they spray different metals (sodium, potassium etc) mixed mixed with alcohol, and then light them – the result is flames of different colour. We don’t do many of those at work though. At work I like to do different things with plants.
There was once we had a fun day at work where ice cream was made with liquid nitrogen, that was fun and delicious!

Mickella Dawkins answered on 28 Feb 2021:

The ‘Whoosh Bottle Rocket’ experiment

Chris Thomson answered on 1 Mar 2021: last edited 1 Mar 2021 6:42 am

I love crystals, so my favourite part of any experiment is crystallising my final compounds to purify them. There are so many different types of crystals, and they are beautiful.

Phil Thorne answered on 1 Mar 2021: last edited 1 Mar 2021 7:54 am

A chemists favourite experiment is when the desired product crystallises out of the reaction in 100% yield and 100% purity. Sadly this experiment does not exist!

There are a few reactions you can follow by colour which are nice, for example the Mitsunobu reaction. The azidodicarboxylate is deep orange and when the reaction is done it is colourless.

From the 16 year old me I remember my chemistry teacher asking what colour is copper sulfate. Everyone said blue or cyan. The teacher said no it is white. We then took boiling tube of copper sulfate hexahydrate and heated it in a bunsen flame to drive off the water. Indeed copper sulfate is white. The hexahydrate is blue/cyan.

Fabio Nudelman answered on 1 Mar 2021: last edited 1 Mar 2021 8:20 am

My favourite type of experiments is to look at samples and materials with an electron microscope. It is very exciting to see things that we cannot with the naked eye, especially when it is the first time.

Zuzanna Konieczna answered on 1 Mar 2021:

Any new experiment is lots of fun! When I was on my industrial placement, I worked on getting my product out of a reaction mixture in a crystallisation. After slowly adding an antisolvent (solvent that my product was not soluble in), the compound would crash out of the solution as a white solid. It really looked like a snow globe, and was very exciting & satisfying!
I now enjoy working with colourful dyes – either making them, or using them to see proteins in the brain.

Ben Esse answered on 1 Mar 2021:

My favorite experiment is called the “Trashcano”! This is where you make a volcano in a rubbish bin filled with water and ping pong balls. Once you have your bin filled up, you pour some liquid nitrogen into a fizzy dink bottle and (gently!) put it in the bin. Liquid nitrogen is really cold to start with (almost -200°C!) but as it warms up it turns into a gas in the fizzy drink bottle. Gases take up much more space than liquids, so the nitrogen gas pushes out on the bottle with more and more pressure until… BANG. The bottle breaks and all the pressure is released in an explosion, firing the water and ping pong balls out of the bin and high into the air. This is great fun to do and is very similar to how natural volcanoes can erupt explosively when the gas released from magma underground is trapped until the volcano can’t hold the pressure any longer and it erupts! There are loads of cool videos of this online, check them out!

Isolda Romero-Canelon answered on 1 Mar 2021:

My favourite is when I do microscopy and get to see human cells very closely. I get to see their shapes, and sometimes I can even colour them…. different bits of the cell in different colours… the pictures are so pretty!

Jesko Koehnke answered on 1 Mar 2021:

I cannot pick one, there have simply been too many throughout history. On my list are experiments that are elegant, simple and powerful. Example? Dig three wells to show that the earth is a sphere and calculate how big it is. That is just awesome!

Marcel Jaspars answered on 1 Mar 2021:

When I was a PhD student I worked with pyrophoric materials, ones that burn as soon as they touch air. Mostly we worked very safely in the fumehood, but we had to get rid of the last few drops from the syringe we were using. You took the syringe to a empty fumehood and opened the syringe – it would burst into green flames (caution – do not try this at home!)

Mary Wheldon answered on 1 Mar 2021:

Its pretty simple and you can do it in your kitchen, I love the reaction between Lemon Juice and Bicarbonate of Soda! Its an example of an endothermic reaction, which means it absorbs heat during the reaction. So if you mix the two together in a plastic cup, you can feel that its cold on the outside! And it fizzes too! Thats pretty cool!
I also just like any reaction that changes colour, we do Nitro reductions quite a lot at work. Which is C-NO2 group, and we use Hydrogen to change the NO2 to a NH2 group. You know the reaction has worked when the mixture has changed from yellow to colourless! Thats very handy!

Jessica Higgins answered on 1 Mar 2021:

My favourite experiment involves irradiating chunks of uranium in a gamma radiation chamber to see if they corrode.
My most relaxing experiment involves looking at those chunks of uranium under a microscope to try and observe said corrosion.

Martin McCoustra answered on 1 Mar 2021:

I don’t have a particularly favourite experiment. Generally, I like experiments that have clear and easy to understand interpretations and tells us more about how the universe works. In terms of my own work, any experiment that works and advances our understanding but maybe goes a little bit against current models is always fun!

Andrew Parrott answered on 1 Mar 2021:

One of the great things about chemistry is that there are lots of fun experiments, as many have already mentioned ones with colour changes (e.g. the iodine clock, flame tests, or throwing potassium into water ) are pretty good. I also like the dry ice cannon/rocket as this demonstrates the strange behaviour that frozen solid carbon dioxide (aka dry ice) converts directly into a gas (sublimes) when it warm up at atmospheric pressure (no melting to a liquid between). The large extra volume that the gas takes up compared to the solid means that pressure can build up very quickly if the gas is not allowed to escape – perfect for making rockets. You can see an example at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDqEcrRY4nY, which also shows another (mostly fun) things about experiments – they sometimes don’t go to plan!

Soneni Ndlovu answered on 2 Mar 2021:

It’s hard to say because I enjoy being in the lab. However, in the last couple of years I have been involved with helping high school students to make and analyse aspirin. The cool thing for me is to watch the students make their own aspirin and take a sample to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to analyse its molecular structure, then to infrared spectroscopy (IR) to identify its functional groups and finally to mass spectrometry (Mass Spec) to measure its ions mass to charge ratio. All together, these tools help the visiting students to actually check if they made what they intended to make which is an essential skill for a chemistry student to have.

Question: What is your favourite science experiment?

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