So Guy finds mouse in his Mountain Dew, Pepsi use science to prove that it wasn't there from time of bottling. By admitting that their product is acid enough to dissolve a corpse in the time that passes between bottling and delivery to the customer. Not sure if it's awesome or gross. But not to be outdone, the internet has come to the rescue to prove that the line between awesome and disgusting is very, very fine. Some guy puts a couple of mice in bottles of Mt Dew, picture blogs the dissolution Picture not safe for lunch. Spoiler Focus: Ever proved yourself innocent by admitting something really fucking embarrassing? Acted weird in front of your girlfriend's parents because you just jizzed in your pants like that stupid movie? Alt Focus: Ever conducted an amateur science experiement? Possibly involving dissolving a mouse in soft drink? Found a recipe for meth on the internet and wanted to see how it went?
For all the lawyers out there - Donoghue v Stevenson redux! Personally, I want to try the bathtub napalm recipe from the Anarchist's Cookbook one day when I'm feeling particularly suicidal. For purely scientific purposes, of course... I have a bunch of weeds out the back that drink glycophosphate and laugh heartily at me.
Alt Focus: I had a reasonably well equipped chemistry lab set up in a back shed in my childhood home. A couple of years before I started at my high school, a fire took out about half the school (according to wikipedia this was a failed attempt to hide evidence of a break in - huh, never knew that), and all the science consumables were stored in a demountable. At that age, I devoted my time to entering demountables rather than women, and I stole a little of everything. An incomplete list of things I had: bunsen burner with gas supply (my prize possession as for some reason my parents wouldn't let me have any firemaking things in a wooden shed I'd padlocked after we accidentally set my best friend's backyard on fire), magnesium, sodium, hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, formaldehyde, ethanol, copper / cobalt chloride, potassium permanganate, and all the associated equipment: beakers, pipettes, test tubes, anything that could fit in a backpack. Basically, if I could make it explode, burn, or melt something, I was into it. (No, I wasn't an especially well-adjusted child, why do you ask?) Our experiments were mostly focused on optimising the chemical reactions (bigger explosions) or finding reliable reactions. (For example, if you put citric acid and bi card soda into a coke bottle and then put some water into it, it takes somewhere between 1 - 15 seconds to explode. The range is too big, and I have a scar about 3mm below my left eye to demonstrate the problems this causes. Seriously, don't do this. It's fucking dangerous and I'm lucky I still have both eyes. Conversely, if you use hydrochloric acid and a reactant, you've got a solid 20 seconds to run... usually.) Then we started getting into placement and shaping of the... experiments. (Taping a bottle to a window does nothing and won't break the window. Leaning a slab against the same window and reflecting the blast is a different story). Oh, and we had a competition going to build the best potato gun, and find the best ammo and fuel for it. (Hint: not petrol. See earlier note about setting friend's backyard on fire). That was great fun and we learned a fair bit about combustion from it. Oh, and the importance of soundproofing your chamber if firing in residential neighbourhoods. Unfortunately, while you Americans and Canadians have some sanity in your laws, in Australia a bunch of kids building a spud gun is legally identical to owning an unregistered handgun; i.e., a felony. We never got caught with the spud gun (did get caught / ratted out with the hydrochloric acid... experiments), but a mate of ours did. He lived across the road from the school, and was firing at the school windows about 2am. Cops came, bullied their way into his house, found his dope plants etc, and he ended up having to move and change schools. Fortunately the cops decided not to go after him for felony firearm possession, but it fucked his life up pretty significantly anyway. We put the toys away after that. Nearly a decade later my parents tore down that shed and found out what was in it. They just about had an aneurysm even then. Getting told off by your parents for your high school shenanigans when you are 24 or so is really quite surreal.
Alt-Focus:As a kid, I tried to make microwave popcorn without the microwave. Instead, I used a large pot with boiling oil in it. Do not attempt this. Your kitchen will fill with smoke and the popcorn will burn to such a degree that you will not be able to eat it.
Like Gaunt, during childhood I had an obsession with fire and explosions(Still do). When our Father moved to Australia from New Zealand I had 5 months on the farm with next to no supervision and a nearly full farm sized petrol bowser. This was heaven for a 13 year old Bundy. Queue me sneaking off to the shed or into the paddocks making petrol bombs and homemade napalm and all sorts of other contraptions. Never once burnt any hair off my body but probably the stupidest thing I did in this time period was trying to make a flamethrower out of a plastic spray bottle. I thought it was pretty cool that after a while the nozzle had a permanent flame and I no longer needed a lighter until it dawned on me that it might run back down and explode in my hands and so ended the flamethrower.
I tried to grow sea monkeys once, they didn't grow for some reason! Disheartened, I turned to drugs and alcohol.
Just for fun.... http://www.myscienceproject.org/ (I can't take the credit for this find, dixie asked me to share it)
Similar to Gaunt, I tried to make my own combustibles for a spud gun by electrolysis in my kitchen... Unfortunately it didn't produce nearly the amount of hydrogen I had hoped in a small enough time frame, but the hydrogen we did harvest cost me some arm hair. We ended up just sticking to propane which was giving us 300+ft anyways. The title of this thread reminded me of this:
To round out the pyromaniac Aussie contingent of Disgustipated, AlmostGaunt and Bundy i was also into making things go boom as a youngster. Maybe its something in the water down here? Ditto on the spud guns, we made some awesome ones in my day. Never really experimented with different fuels though, deodorant always worked for us. Makeshift bombs were good fun as well, usually made out of those little Nitrous Oxide canisters for whipped cream (we call them 'nangs' dunno what you yanks call them). Get a piece of tin foil (or a foil pie base), as many nangs as you want and some sparklers. Crush sparklers up and place in bottom of foil. Place nangs top down in sparkler dust and fold up foil around the nangs (secure with gaffer tape). use a sparkler as the fuse. Light and run like fuck... and never, ever go back to check what happened when it doesn't go off when you expect it to. These things can take out a brick letterbox with ease. How we didn't lose any limbs is beyond me. When i found out nangs were much better inhaled than exploded i stopped making bombs.
In elementary school my cousins and I made a molotov cocktail out of gasoline, motor oil, a canning jar, and a rag. We made a few of these and threw them at random shit until my aunt found out and put a stop to that. Some friends and I also made a spud gun in jr. high with the help of my friends' dad. He took us to the hardware to to buy all of the parts. The guy at the store recognized what we were up to and told us he wouldn't be able to sell us stuff used in an illegal activity then told us he was just fucking with us and to have fun. That spud gun was fucking awesome. Spray some hair spray in the back, load the potato, flick the starter and chunks of potato flew well over 100 yards.
Embarrassing? Eh. Definitely compromising. When I was a teenager I got a job one summer working as a camp counselor out on Long Island. One day I got called into the owner's office, where his wife confronted me with a joint, and accused me of selling it to one of the campers. After a great big discussion in which I assured her that there was absolutely no way that was true regardless of what she'd been told, she challenged me to prove how my word was stronger than my accuser's. I asked her to hand me the joint, and I pointed out a few things about how it had been rolled, as I unrolled it. I then pulled a pack of papers out of my pocket, re-rolled the joint and held it up to her, saying, "see? I roll my joints completely different. Couldn't have been mine."
Oh I forgot about the flamethrowers! We made really basic ones by making a wooden frame with a trigger in it, which would push a can of butane forward and spark a bbq lighter. They were great, but I had the same problem as Bundy - the flame travelled back up into the can and we had to bolt. We did the nang bombs as well, as recently as about a year ago - funnily enough, my childhood best friend that I did all this shit with is now a blaster on the mines. (Also a deeply religious 28 year old no-sex-before-marriage virgin type; I occasionally wonder about that coincidence.) He brings home det cord on a semi-regularly basis. Also, you don't actually fire spuds out of spud guns. Way too light and not aerodynamic. Lemons are where it's at kids. They will put holes in your parents' wooden fences. Or, stuff a tennis ball in, and then half a plastic cup filled with gravel for a shotgun effect. And I wish I'd known about this when I was a kid: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.spudtech.com/content.asp?id=16" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.spudtech.com/content.asp?id=16</a>
My uncle had this spudgun he used to bring out the farm. Barrel was about 1.5m long and removeable. Barrel comes off block the blast chamber with a spud and barrel back on then fill the blast chamber with deodorant. Chuck a 6 ounce round lead sinker down the barrel so it sits on the spud and you have a deadly lethal weapon or a great surf caster for fishing. We put one sinker through three iron walls spaced about 10m apart each. Shot other stuff well over 400m, this thing was phenomenal.
Oh. That reminds me of something. Golf balls are the ultimate, but they're a little bit too much. We put one through a car door. You don't need something that goes through 2 inches of steel plate. No good comes of that.