Oceandirt's Blog

Today was "Take Your Child to Work" day at Bob's company. They do an awesome program, where the kids do lots of experiments (both chemistry and biology). That was was actually a game about how to make a drug. It worked kind of like Mastermind, where you made a guess at what the shape of the molecule was, and you paid the biologist $100 to tell you if it was right. He or she would say "you have two pieces right but only one in the right place" and so you have to pay to guess again. This is kind of how they test new drug possibilities so it is a good lesson for the kids! This shows that Julia and I guessed right and then got paid for the completed molecule.



This was a really cool experiment where we tested water, a glucose solution (those two were our controls), and two liquids which were either milk or "lactaid" milk to see the glucose content. Using our results we answered some questions to determine which of the two liquids was milk. We learned how lactase breaks glucose down to lactose and how come people who are lactose-intolerant can then drink lactaid milk without having problems. It was pretty interesting and we got to do a bunch of little test strip things.



One of our experiments involved prisms. We used regular prisms and these "hollow" prisms which were filled with different colored liquids. We shined white, blue, and red lights through them to see what would happen and what colors came out the other side. It was a colorful experiment!




This was MY favorite experiment. It was an experiment about surface tension. We warmed up some milk for 30 seconds in the microwave, and we put 4 drops of different colors of food coloring in it. As you can see, they kind of stayed separated (the surface tension of the milk keeping firm enough that they didn't really mix). Then we dropped ONE DROP of dish detergent right in the middle of the bowl and then it did THIS:


So, the detergent broke the surface tension and allowed the whole thing to mix up.

We did several other things but that's enough for now! Julia did okay. She overheated at one point and I had to remove her from the room and go to a cold room for her to recuperate. They were doing a simulated HIV test there, which really looked interesting but we missed most of that one. Anyway it was all very cool and very scientific. I think 80 kids participated this year! Wow! The oldest kids did shadowing projects where they worked more one-on-one in the lab with scientists. Bob did that with some kids in the morning, but then he played with Julia's group in the afternoon. All in all a pretty good day.