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You Asked: How do party snaps work? — Boris, New York, N.Y. Marshall Brain Answers: The video shows you party snaps, also called snap-n-pops, in action: Here’s what happens if you snap one in your mouth: Of course, most kids immediately imagine making a bomb out of them, by unwrapping the paper and combining them [...]
The chemical reaction you can see in the following video is called Pharaoh’s serpent, and it is both bizarre and amazing to watch…
Making Babies in Space May Be Harder Than It Sounds – “According to Japanese biologists, defects in their microgravity embryos suggest that “fertilization can occur normally” in space, but standard Earth gravity may be needed for embryo development…” ‘Air shower’ set to cut water use by 30 per cent – “Small-scale experiments using the aeration [...]
Here’s a really good idea for anyone in charge of public spectacles and festivities in a war torn and jumpy area: don’t schedule a fireworks display. You’ll find it terrifies more than amuses. Shooting off fireworks amid an entire population racked with PTSD is tantamount to the Little Albert study. We know this for a fact now, thanks to an unfortunate natural experiment conducted in the village of Goma in Congo, as Reuters tells it. When the display began, the villagers used Occam’s Razor and decided that likeliest explanation was that the six-year-old peace had collapsed once more rather than it being just, you know, fireworks, and headed for the hills. One can imagine a local bureaucrat trailing after the rest of the town with a clipboard shouting, “Hey guys! Where are you going? Guys?”
Thermite is a metallic mixture used for various chemical reactions — everything from railroad tracks to fireworks displays call for thermite. Learn about the chemical properties of thermite in this HowStuffWorks podcast.
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