Weird Science with Dr. V

FAIL

2009-12-01T10:23:00.002-10:00

Well, this is first blog entry about an experiment fail, although we've had more than a few. Some did work, but they just wouldn't look good for TV. We were testing out an experiment on buoyancy in which you place ten paper clips in a foot square of aluminum foil and crumple it up into a ball. Then you take an identical foot square of aluminum and fold up the edges to make a little aluminum raft and place your ten paper clips in this raft. So the thought is that the crumpled up piece of aluminum will sink and the raft will float. Well, they both float. We even tried doubling the number of paper clips, shrinking the size of the aluminum sheet, crumpling into as small a ball as possible, and even folding the sheet into a little flat shape; none of these efforts got the aluminum to sink. Oh well, as Dr. V said, it's a good thing we tried it out!

Making Music

2009-11-18T16:53:00.002-10:00

For this show, we had special guests Evan and Jason, an Oceanit co-worker's children on the show. They helped Dr. V and Taizo make sweet music for this show. They had lots of fun and were VERY good at playing the straw oboe.

Floating Ping Pong Balls

2009-11-18T16:50:00.004-10:00

This is such a fun experiment and you don't need much to do it. This experiment also looked wonderful on TV and Taizo had a great reaction to it too! Luckily, they have many hairdryers in the studio to keep their staff looking wonderful. We borrowed Steve Uyehara's hairdryer for the show as we only brought one. Thank's Steve!

Candy Blood

2009-11-18T16:39:00.003-10:00

The experiment for this show was one of the activities we had at Pearlridge. The kids loved it! And more than a few of them were brave enough to try it out. In this show, Taizo takes a pretty large spoonfull at the end of the show, maybe a little too large! As you can see, the show is in the new studio as KGMB9 merged with KHNL and K5. They are still in the process of getting things in order, so in the meantime, Dr. V has a small table in the middle of the desks to work with. Hopefully soon, he'll get to work in a bigger space with a little more elbow room.

Dr. V at Pearlridge

2009-11-18T15:47:00.004-10:00

Dr. V did a show for the kids at Pearlridge as the mall offered parents an alternative for kids on their first Furlough Friday. There was a variety of offerings including crafts, Hawaiian culture activities, and SCIENCE!

Ice Castles

2009-11-17T16:41:00.003-10:00

This was a fun show! I'm glad it worked. The thing that made it difficult was that when ice freezes, it doesn't freeze in a nice flat surface, or maybe I should have used flat bottomed glass bowls instead of plastic. So it was hard to get a good connection between the surfaces of the pieces to stick together. But it was fun, and super easy to do!

Make your own Caldera

2009-11-16T17:15:00.002-10:00

This was a really great experiment. The only minor problem was that the camera person never got close up to the flour mountain, so you didn't really get to see the structure of the caldera! Luckily, the flour eruption was cool enough on its own.

Fun with Liquid Nitrogen

2009-11-16T17:11:00.003-10:00

This was our tribute to Gallagher show. We got some onions, apples, lettuce and some flowers to smash after freezing them in a bowl of liquid nitrogen. The more denser objects needed a longer time to freeze, like the onion and apple. So those didn't have quite the effect we were going for, but the flower and the lettuce shattered very nicely!

Bending Bones

2009-11-16T17:04:00.004-10:00

For our Thanksgiving show, we thought we'd try keeping some turkey bones in vinegar to soften them up. This didn't quite work as planned. Even though the bones were left in vinegar for a week, they didn't soften up much at all. I believe if we had kept replacing the vinegar, it may have worked. But it worked with the smaller bones, like the wish bone. We also demonstrated the power of vinegar on an egg shell. Within a day or so, the egg shell dissolves and your left with a soft, squishy egg inside the membrane that houses the egg. Very cool!

Vermicomposting - The Worm show

2009-11-16T16:51:00.005-10:00

Oceanit, the company Dr. V works for, tries to be environmentally conscious by minimizing waste and recycling. Part of this effort includes a worm composting bin. So we thought we'd share this composting process with the kids and families that watch the show, since this is something that you can also do at home. We invited Mindy Jaffe of the Waikiki Worm Company to the show and she brought a bunch of her friends!

Here Dr. V gets up close and friendly with one of the worms. Please visit her site to learn how you can build your own worm composting bin to recycle your food waste and turn it into compost gold.

Tornado in a Bottle with Roz Savage!

2009-06-02T23:43:00.006-10:00

This was such an exciting show to do. Not only is it a great experiment that's easy to do at home, we had the honor of having Roz Savage, Ocean Rower, as a guest on our show! The experiment went really well, except that our reused 2-liter soda bottles still had some of the label on it, which I should have taken off. Lesson learned! I'm glad this one is an easy one to do, with not that many items needed to build it and kids can easily start the tornado in motion.

Roz was really great to work with, very down-to-earth, and very petite for someone who is rowing across the Pacific. She was really excited to be able to wear Dr. V's labcoat on the show! She is rowing to raise awareness about climate change and urging people everywhere to take as many steps a day as she rows per day, about 10,000!
On May 24th, at sunset, Roz launched her boat, the Brocade, from the south shore of Oahu, Hawaii. You can follow Roz on her adventure across the Pacific Ocean on the RozTracker as well as follow her posts on Twitter at @rozsavage. We wish you the best Roz!!

Smoke rings

2009-03-02T10:09:00.004-10:00

This was a neat show. You can buy so many cool products on the internet, like at this store, where we got our smoke-maker stick (the Wizard Stick!). It's a good thing the studio has the black curtains. I think it really helped show off the smoke rings, although, the camera person didn't really get a great angle. If you watch the show, he catches the smoke rings from the side. It still looked pretty cool.

Money to Burn

2009-03-02T10:00:00.005-10:00

So this is what happens when you experiment with burning money! The sacrifices we make for the show! This was a fun show. We practiced this before the show and worked beautifully.

I'm not sure what we did differently but when Dr. V and Jeff burned the money on the show, the alcohol was dripping down onto the plate below. So there was a fire burning in the plate as well. Then, even after the alcohol on the dollar burned off, a small corner of the dollar caught on fire and was burning. Ah, the fun of LIVE television...

Foggy Fun

2008-10-28T14:59:00.004-10:00

This was our Halloween week show! This is a great experiment and relatively safe for kids to have fun with. For those of you wondering, the dry ice is from Airgas Gaspro Hawaii. Their address is on Kamehameha, but it seems like they're located at the end of Dillingham, right before it hits Nimitz Hwy going Ewa bound. Dry ice is relatively inexpensive and 10 pounds will last approximately 24 hours if kept in a cooler. If you're going to be making fog for a party, five pounds would be good for a few hours of foggy fun! WARNINGS: Do not touch dry ice with your bare hands, do not inhale the fog, and please do not place in an air tight container!

The prep for this show was mostly carving the pumpkins, so I got some practice for Halloween. One of the pumpkins actually had soapy water, but I'm guessing that the soap sank to the bottom and when the dry ice was added, it bubbled up and didn't really mix up the soap. But that is also a cool effect, when the bubbles pour out of the pumpkins face! So it works better when you add the soap on top of the bubbling dry ice. When Dr. V did this with the glass container, it was very impressive and bubbled up violently. A mess which we had to clean up after the show... But well worth it!

Balloon Science

2008-10-02T15:28:00.004-10:00

Balloons are not just for parties, fun and games. There's some cool science that can be learned with balloons. This show was a fun and festive show. Dr. V made a cool balloon corral with painter's tape to keep the balloons from running away!

Dr. V explains to the camera person how the experiment will run and what he'll be doing, so the camera person has a better idea of how to shoot the show and what he should be focusing on.

Red Cabbage Chemistry

2008-10-02T15:17:00.007-10:00

I learned that the stuff that makes red cabbage 'red' is a great pH indicator. This was a great experiment for TV, very colorful, instant reaction, as well as easy to do at home! Just be prepared to smell cooked cabbage in your house for a little while...

This experiment took some shopping around for supplies, but all the supplies can be found at the drugstore or grocery store.

Here's Dr. V looking concerned at the current events. Once we get set up, we watch the news show as it's being broadcast from the studio. It's a very complex production with the timing, cueing people up, getting people miked and placed. Very exciting!

Another serving of Eggs...

2008-10-02T15:10:00.005-10:00

Oh the fun you can have with eggs! This was a fun and simple show, great to try out at home with the kids, and you can eat the eggs after your done, the cooked ones, at least. It takes some practice to get the spinning down. We thought about using a table cloth to make the eggs stand out more, but weren't sure we could still spin the eggs well... And the boiled eggs went over very well at the studio as a post-show snack!

Flour Power!

2008-10-02T15:00:00.004-10:00

This was a great experiment that went off with a BANG! Garret Hashiro, from Oceanit's Science and Technology group built our explosion contraptions. He deserves much of the credit, as it took several configuration, many tries, and a lot of cleaning up to get this experiment working. Thank you Garret!!! We're definitely keeping those for another episode.

Instant ice

2008-10-02T14:29:00.008-10:00

Whew! This show was a stressful one! We bought the sodium acetate for this one a while ago but we were having trouble getting it to be stable enough so we could transport it to the studio! The solution could not be violently disturbed, and nothing, not even a speck of dust could fall into the solution, so as not to trigger the reaction. So we tried it again, and used a more diluted solution. It's such an awesome experiment, especially to see in person! As you can see, we made it to the studio with many back up containers of solution. It worked really well! Lesson learned, we should have used a dark colored table cloth. That would've shown the reaction better on TV.

What do you think of the new lab coat? Tina Sprague from Oceanit's marketing team sewed it from scratch!! YAY! Big MAHALOs to Tina!!!

Groovy Sharpie Tie-Dye

2008-10-02T14:06:00.004-10:00

This is a close up of Dr. V's old lab coat. We used the Sharpie tie-dye method to decorate it, but on the TV, it ended up looking washed-out and not very vibrant. To celebrate the end of this lab coat before we ushered in the new look, we demonstrated the technique on this show.

This is our practice shirt. For the show, we got our gratuitous plug for Oceanit in there!

Polymers Polymers Everywhere

2008-08-22T09:40:00.003-10:00

This show was fun and something easy that kids can do, especially if they have a younger sibling at home who's still in diapers! It was very difficult to find the water crystals for gardening use. I went to a couple different garden shops and was told that they order it, and it's either back ordered, or as soon as it comes in, it sells out.

The polymer we used on the show came from FloraDec, a craft store. They are decorative water crystals for floral arrangements. I wonder if they could also be used like the gardening crystals to retain water in the soil?

Stay tuned for a new look!

Egg Float

2008-08-19T11:13:00.004-10:00

This show was a little tricky when we were preparing. We originally tried using table salt, but the water got very cloudy.

After more research on the Internet, and thanks to Steve Spangler, we learned that we need to use Kosher Salt for the proper effect, clear water. Then it worked like a charm! The salt water interface is actually pretty stable, as we discovered when Jeff dropped the egg into the water. It dipped down into the salt water layer and floated back up to the halfway level, thankfully!

Walking on Water

2008-08-07T11:31:00.006-10:00

This show is one of the best we've done so far, but it was the hardest we've worked for it as well. Here's a short video of the preparation of almost 100 pounds of cornstarch and almost 10 gallons of water. It was much harder than expected...

That is our awesome intern Lee's legs that you see running on the cornstarch. We had to make sure it worked. Thanks Lee!

A big thank you goes out to Cam Hagihara for getting us a great deal on the cornstarch! As well as to Camryn, his daughter, who was on the show with us! We had a bit of a scare prior to the show. When we opened up our "oobleck," it had a layer of water about two inches thick and was pretty hard once again. I was very afraid that after all that hard work, we wouldn't be able to use it... So we had to dig.work.grab.hit.scrape.mix it all up AGAIN. Camryn was a great sport and got right in there with us. We got it mixed well enough right before the show, maybe at 6:30!! That was scary. Camryn got in one short practice run before the cameras started rolling.

Playing with the smaller, blue version. This is about two pounds of cornstarch and some food coloring.

Here's Camryn running on the oobleck. She was actually looking forward to sinking into it.

Rewind!

2008-08-01T12:04:00.006-10:00

We took some video of this earlier experiment, before this blog was up. But wanted to share! Oceanit's awesome intern Lee put this video together. This is the dry run of the "elephant toothpaste!"

This video, also courtesy of Lee, is from the trial run of "playing with Ethanol"

This dry run actually worked out better than the one we did on the show. I'm not quite sure why yet, maybe not enough time to vaporize? But the bottle collapse worked beautifully on the show!

Can Crushing

2008-07-29T11:51:00.005-10:00

Another successful show. This one was a little nerve racking. You never now how things will actually go on the show (LIVE!) until you're there, on camera, walking through it. But it worked, all except for one can, Jeff's first can. I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it wasn't hot enough?

Lessons learned: There are a couple things we could have done differently to get a more dramatic effect on this experiment. One thought, use an aquarium with cold water and completely immerse the can so that you can see it imploding in the water. Another thought, if we're using a bowl, don't use the ice, it interfered with the sound of the can crushing, which is pretty cool to hear, even if you can't see the can imploding.

Convection

2008-07-22T09:40:00.007-10:00

Another show that went off without a hitch. It was great how Jeff, the weather guy, was excited to do this show, since convection has a lot to do with meteorology. Here's the practice shot in the lab. Earlier we had tried it with red and blue for the hot and cold water, respectively, but the mix of red and blue water did not look very appealing. The blue and yellow worked very nicely.

Here's the post-show experiment. It worked!! That is always a good feeling.

Here's some behind the scenes of Jeff Booth getting ready to jump on the Weird Science set. He's pretty amazing. He's giving the weather and traffic report while putting on his lab coat and goggles! Talk about multitasking!

Wikipedia has a more technical explanation of convection.

Elephant Toothpaste

2008-07-15T10:04:00.005-10:00

Today's show went really well! Pretty much just as planned. This photo is post show, prior to cleaning up. Good thing we brought disposable table cloths! Too bad this is one of those experiments that you can't really do at home, since the chemicals are dangerous. But it's a wonderful reaction to show off the coolness of chemistry and learn about catalysts.

It's good to have Jeff Booth back. He's got a great energy for this show. Not that Steve and Taizo weren't great too, but it was difficult working with two other people on such a short segment.

Too bad KGMB doesn't post the short promo piece they do before the commercial break before the show. For those that caught it though, you got to see me squeeze out almost an entire tube of toothpaste out onto the table. Rarely do you get to see that! It looked like a long candy cane coiled up into a pile.

Check out these other elephant toothpaste experiments.