Hone your electrostatic levitation skills and fly some tinsel. Next time you’re in the vicinity of a Christmas tree, impress your friends and family with a little levitation. By experimenting with ...

The distribution of the mass of an object determines the position of its center of gravity, its angular momentum, and your ability to balance it. Place a lump of clay about the size of your fist ...

Create your own personal sound system with a coat hanger and string. Create your own personal sound system with a coat hanger and a string, producing musical sounds that only you can hear Cut two ...

Make a simple mini-motor. A coil of wire becomes an electromagnet when current passes through it. The electromagnet interacts with a permanent magnet, causing the coil to spin. Voilà! You’ve created ...

Discover why your favorite cat videos don't leak out of optical fibers. A transparent material, such as glass or water, can actually reflect light better than any mirror. All you have to do is look at ...

Gelatin can do much more than just wiggle and jiggle. Gelatin can be used for much more than a sweet treat. It can also act as a smoked lens—which allows you to view total internal reflection—or as a ...

See yourself as others see you. Two hinged mirrors create a kaleidoscope that shows multiple images of an object. When you set the hinged mirrors on top of a third mirror, you create a reflector that ...

A bicycle wheel acts like a giant gyroscope. A spinning bicycle wheel resists efforts to tilt it and point the axle in a new direction. Any rapidly spinning wheel exhibits this gyroscopic property—and ...

With polarized light, you can make a stained glass window without glass. Using transparent tape and polarizing material, you can make and project beautifully colored patterns reminiscent of abstract ...

When we think about objects that respond to magnets, fruit usually doesn't come to mind. Watch a rare-earth magnet repel a grape and discover different kinds of magnetism. A note on magnets: Only ...

Make a truth teller for light. Turn an old CD into a spectroscope to analyze light—you may be surprised by what you see. Try pointing your CD spectroscope at the fluorescent light in your room, sunlit ...

Make beautiful music with sticks, straws, and rubber bands. By making simple adjustments to this noisemaker, you can raise or lower its pitch and make different kinds of sounds. Stretch a wide rubber ...