Jelly Bean Experiments

Here's a mom after my own heart! In this blog post on Fun With Little Learners, she's doing a bunch of jelly bean experiments with her kids. For instance, she noticed that Starburst jelly beans have floating letters. (The Jelly Belly logo also floats, if you try those.) They also drop jelly beans in Sprite, mix colors, and freeze them in water.

Easter Egg Chromatography

It was just a way to keep the eggs from rolling around the baking sheet, while containing the color. But, when I set my newly dyed green Easter Egg onto a paper towel, I accidentally started the process of chromatography.

For chromatography, you need two things:
1) fibers, such as in a paper towel or coffee filter, to transmit the liquid
2) moving liquid, such as water, which dissolves the dyes and carries them through the paper.
Apparently, the water running down off of the egg and soaking the paper towel was enough to push the dyes further away from the egg, and start the colors separating.

Notice the ring of beautiful blue around the green dye. There are also spots of yellow in the middle of the green, which at first I thought must have dripped from a yellow egg, but turn out to be the yellow dye remaining after the blue dye is separated out. (I repeated the experiment, keeping yellow eggs far away, just to make sure.)

I also noticed this effect with blue, which separated slightly so that one patch of blue was a little darker violet, but it didn't photograph well.



Warheads for Candy Experiments!

Impact Confections will support candy experiments by donating Warheads for our booth at the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Come try the Warheads Acid Test with us April 28-29 at the Walter E Washington Convention Center in Washington DC!

Easter Grass


If you want some fun with Edible Easter Grass, (which looks like Styrofoam shreds), just dump it in water. In no time at all, you'll have a mess of limp spaghetti-like strands to stir around and dangle off the end of a fork.
This is one kind of candy nobody should regret sacrificing to science. It tastes like cardboard.

Chemistry of egg dyeing

As part of the USA Science and Engineering Festival, chemistry professor Diane Bunce is going to explain the chemistry behind egg dying. If you can't make it, read this article for a sneak peek, and learn why you need vinegar in egg dye.