Science While You Dine

   Some Other Food Experiments to Try   

Did you enjoy the Science While You Dine Activities?

Here are two more fun activities for you to try at home!

Print the activities, collect the materials, and enjoy the activities.

Tricky Olives             Rising Raisins

Tricky Olives

Here’s an opportunity to play with your food in the name of physics!

The Materials

Four olives; a soup bowl

The Preparation

Place the olives in the center of the bowl. Put bowl flat on tabletop.

The Challenge

Without touching the olives in any way, make the olives move to the outside edge of the dish so that they are roughly equidistant from each other.

The Solution

Sharply spin the dish and watch what happens.

The Science

Centrifugal force is the center-fleeing force that causes the olives to move to the outside of the bowl as it spins. According to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, a moving body travels along a straight path with a constant speed. If you carefully watch the olives as the bowl begins spinning, you will see that the olives do indeed travel in a straight line from the center to the outer edge of the plate. The whirling motion keeps the olives more or less evenly spaced around the perimeter, equaling distributing the mass.

RISING RAISINS

The original dancing raisins!

What You Need

A handful of raisins; clear glass; light colored soda (Ginger Ale, 7-Up, Sprite, Slice)

What You Do

	Place four or five raisins in the bottom of the clear glass
	Fill the glass with soda
	Watch what happens!
	The raisins, after a few minutes, will begin to rise and then sink in the glass.

What You Learn

	Soda is full of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide, a gas which is added to the liquid drink. This is why soda is said to carbonated.
	As bubble surround and cling to the raisins, they create buoyancy (an ability to float). The raisins go up toward the surface. Think of the bubbles as forming a kind of life jacket around each raisin.

Sources:   Marshall Brain’s How Stuff Works website

                The Book of Bread, by Judith and Evan Jones © 1982 Harper & Row