Nerdy Science Blog

I just read this article by Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., from about.com chemistry. The tutorial is useful for many students.

1. Title page
2. Title
3. Introduction / Purpose
4. Materials
5. Methods
6. Data
7. Results
8. Discussion or Analysis
9. Conclusions
10. Figures & Graphs
11. References

When I was in my middle school year in Malaysia, science students are not required to include references list in their report. I think that is a bad thing to do in science education. When I went to college and university, I found that many Malaysian students tend to plagiarize other works.

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I am doing yeast (S. cerevisiae) transformation, one of the magic ingredients is salmon sperm DNA, which work as DNA carrier. We had good laugh over this name.

“Sperm? Haha! What is the sperm doing in the experiment?”

“Human one can arr? Ask him (our cute lab technician) to donate to you lah~!”

“Yewww~~~”

No doubt, my lab mates also get excited by the name of the ingredient.
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All you need are:

1. One Glass (big enough to put an egg in, not your shot glass for drinking)
2. One Raw Egg
3. Vinegar

What you need to do:

1. Put the egg in the glass and soak with vinegar. (Make sure it is fully covered by vinegar)
2. Leave them for few hours and you can observe the changing of the egg.
3. When the egg fizz, take it out and squeeze it softly, does it feel like rubber ball?
4. Leave the egg back to the vinegar for another week.
5. After one week, take the egg out and drop it on a bowl, and guess what happen? It bounces!

What are the uses of this simple experiment to do bouncy egg?

• If you are too poor to buy a rubber ball to play.
• You can compete with your friends and see whose eggs bounced higher. (Call the game “who-is-the-ballless-one”)
• You simply just scare your friends with these eggs.
• You can use these eggs during the protest, in stead of breaking all the eggs you throwing at their windows, try to reuse the eggs.

Why is it happening?

The process called ‘decalcification’ occured when the egg soaked in the vinegar. Vinegar (acetic acid) actually reacted with the calcium carbonate of the eggshell. When the egg soaked in the vinegar and began to fizz, it indicated the reaction was happening and vinegar dissolved the eggshell. The reaction is as following

2CH₃COOH (acetic acid a.k.a. vinegar) + CaCO₃ (calcium carbonate a.k.a. eggshell) → H₂O (water) + CO₂ (carbon dioxide, which was the fizz) + Ca(CH₃COO)₂ (Bouny eggshell)

Instead of using egg, you can also try to use bones to do this and give your dog a good bite. Maybe you can make bouncing bones and sell to your local toy stores.

Found this video at metacafe:

Make Amazing Bouncy Egg! - For more amazing video clips, click here(Picture)

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