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A Herbarium
What could be more pleasant than walking through a meadow or in a forest?
Yet often we lack initiative or a motivation to leave home. Creating a herbarium
is not only a way to learn about plants and not only a pleasant and instructive activity,
but it also provides us with the stimulus to get back to nature and a way to study it as a
part of our regular routine. |
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Folk Toys
This article deals with toys from the folk tradition that the children of a
time gone-by built for themselves. These toys are based on simple mechanisms
and utilize physical principles. This is an opportunity to learn while
having fun and even to rest from the strain of studying. |
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Experiments in Electrochemistry
Building a lemon battery or even a tomato battery, measuring the conductivity of water, performing
galvanic deposits, these are only a few of the fun and educational experiments described in
this article. This will make you one of the small group of people who knows how batteries work. |
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Lexical Analysis of Texts
From the program we provide you, you will be able to perform interesting research in the
linguistic field, for example comparing different authors, comparing the language used in
different eras, composing thesauri of the terms used in the fields of news, literature,
philosophy, science, and so forth. You will also be able to extract the keywords of a text
to point out repeated expressions. You might even consider recording and transcribing the
conversations of young people and analyzing their language. The program further permits
you to determine the readability of your own texts and those of authors and journalists. |
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Environmental Exploration
Do you love nature? Would you like to actively contribute to its defense? This article
gives you some pointers on how to start some volunteer activities in the naturalist field. |
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The Necklace of Democritus
Imagine being able to align all the atoms of a grain of salt having one cubic millimeter in volume.
How long would the "necklace" you obtain be? Help Democritus, who needs to find out! |
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How to Find Ideas for Science Fairs
Many readers write to us asking for ideas for experiments they can do at home or at school.
In this article, we provide some information about how to find experiment ideas.
This could also prove useful for teachers looking for ideas for laboratory activities.
Further, this article can also be appreciated by amateur scientists, as they are always
looking for new and amusing experimental activities. |
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Science Experiments on Environmental Education and Biology
This article assembles 38 experiments on soil, ecosystems, growing plants and rearing
small animals, photosynthesis and breathing, chromatography, electrophoresis, cell division, etc. |
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Surface Phenomena and Colloids
Why do certain insects manage to elegantly skate on water instead of miserably
drowning? Why does water sprayed on a pane of glass in some cases gather in
the form of drops and in others disperse to form a thin film? Why does water rise
alongside a capillary tube? How come soapy water can make bubbles while tap water
cannot? In what way do soap and detergent clean dirt? What is gelatin? And an
emulsion? And aerosol? With the experiments proposed in this article, you will
learn the answer to these and many other questions, and you will become one of
the privileged few to know how to make cubic bubbles. |
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Experiments with Acids and Bases
How do you measure the acidity of a substance? What are acid-base
indicators? What is a litmus paper? How can you titrate vinegar to determine
the percentage of acid? With the experiments proposed in this article, I
will look to give answers to these and other questions. You will also
produce indicating paper from red cabbage juice and you will determine its
color scale. Finally, you will go in search of other natural indicating substances. |
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Making and Recycling Paper at Home
Paper is so widespread in our world that we almost do not notice its presence.
And yet it is an invention that only came to us a few centuries ago. Making a
sheet of paper is an interesting and fun experiment. You will learn how paper
is made, how it is manufactured, and the advantages of recycling it. Before
the advent of paper, what did people write on? This article also describes
the major writing media man has used over the course of time. |
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A Paleolithic Fire Lighter
Anyone can light a fire with a modern gas lighter, but how did primitive men
succeed in lighting it? Yet fire was very important given that it allowed
them to warm themselves during winter in their icy huts, to cook a meal, to
prepare weapons and to defend themselves from wild animals. In this article,
I present a model of a prehistoric lighter with which you can get into the
mind of a prehistoric man while he is lighting a fire. As we are so much
more advanced than him, how much time will it take you to light a fire with
that method? Ten minutes? Who knows... Try it, then we'll talk again! |
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Cuneiform Tablets
Children love playing with mud. Why not use clay to help them learn
something? This article shows you how to make cuneiform tablets, an
important step in the history of writing. |
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The History of Writing
People learn to read and write in an almost mechanical way. Teachers say
to us: "This is the letter A, this is the letter B" and so on. They
only tell us that writing was invented some thousands of years ago and
that, by convention, history begins with writing. No student suspects
what is behind these symbols. The typical child does not know the long
and riveting path that leads to the alphabet, or that each letter of the
alphabet has a history of its own. This article helps you do some
experiments in order to better understand the history of writing. |
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How to Extract DNA From Fruits
By now, biotechnology is protagonist of science magazines. Almost every day
we receive news on DNA. Here is a simple and nice experiment which allows
you to have a look at the field of molecular biology. This experiment can
be the first of a series of other experiments in this discipline. |
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