Juice a fresh fruit, or open a bottle? Can we tell the difference?
Author Archives: alguth
Purple Potato pH Palette
Frankentini
or, how we changed several wet martinis into dry martinis. If you are a martini purist, please don’t read this. If you do, please don’t judge us harshly.
Vermouthiness
Vermouth. A fortified & aromatized wine that didn’t enter our kitchen (err… Primary Testing Facility) until we became interested in classic cocktails. But, now that it has entered through our doors, which variety is worthy of coveted space in the box-of-cooling? We shall taste test several, “For Great Science!” of course.
Snow to Boiling
Drip-pan or Reflector? What is the purpose of the under-element pans on the stove? In the spirit of science, and wanting the snow to go away, we will run some tests to see how long it takes to go from snow to boiling with both old and new “drip pans”.
Qualitative assessment of chicken breasts
For some reason, we ended up with a large number of chicken breasts in the house over the weekend. Not to waste the opportunity, we did additional science to them.
Egg-speriments
’tis the season of hard cooked eggs in the shell, and there seems to be a variety of cooking methods! Now, if the main recognized purpose is festive food coloring, the insides don’t matter too much. However, if anyone other than the resident pet is going to eat them, perhaps there is a “best” method?
Fun with band-aids
Unlike our previous posts, this is simply a fun observation. I knew about the wintergreen-life-savers-in-the-dark trick, but I learned this morning that pulling open a band-aid wrapper produces a beautiful bluish glow for similar reasons. This lovely light production is due to triboluminescence, and I likely only noticed because I was too lazy to turn on the bathroom light this morning.
The blue color is due to excited nitrogen in the air. In theory, opening a band-aid wrapper should produce a different color if you could open a band-aid under an atmosphere with a different dominant gas. The air we breathe is 78% Nitrogen, which is why the glow is due to that gas, but if we could change the proportions to have a different dominant gas, other colors might be possible similarly to why auroras can be different colors!
Below is a video showing this effect if you aren’t inclined to open band-aids simply for the fun of it:
Cheers!
A note on pie plates
I have always assumed that pie plate labeling was relatively straight forward, with only one dimension (the diameter) generally being given on the label. The main exception is if the plate/pan is of the deep-dish variety, in which case the depth is often given as well. However, standing in the dreaded Walmart, trying to find a pair of pie pans for the Pi-day pie crust experiment, I noticed something a bit peculiar; pie vessels that claimed to be the same size, did not appear to be the same size.
Green things!
Many things are dyed green in honors of Saint Patrick’s day, and here we will (casually) examine the best method for turning Irish Whiskey green.
Doing Science To Stuff 