Mechanical Lego Arm

I worked on building a mechanical arm with Lego today. 

This is the arm in it's open form.

This is it closing up.

If I disconnect the bottom, it becomes a shorter tool.

It takes a while to fix if it breaks.  It has to be adjusted exactly the same on both sides until it's working properly.  In this photo, I'm adjusting it so that it will become curved, as you can see in the next photo:

This can be useful reaching something high up on a shelf, or on the top of the fridge, like today when I reached my mom's camera.  (She's just finding this out now.  She seems a little surprised and unimpressed.)

The mechanical arm can also be useful in reaching for random objects, as long as they're not too heavy;

in touching food that you don't really like;

and in reaching small snacks that you do like to eat.

I might make a few adjustments to the arm, and make it look better.

Science with Candy

This is some of my Halloween candy.  You can do awesome experiments with your Halloween candy.

In this experiment, you can get many colours out of a bag of m&m's.

Once you get all the colours painted on a piece of paper, the dye in the colours might start to separate if you add water.

This is a smartie experiment.  If you use a small sieve and rinse the smarties, you can see how the colour washes off.

If you soak the smarties in a glass of water, you can get colours like this,

and this!

Colours and letters will soak off skittles too.  Look very closely for the floating 'S':

Hint: it's between the orange and red skittles.

Next, my caramel experiment.

For this experiment, I soaked caramels in warm water, cold water, and vinegar with baking soda.

The hot water is the mushed up one; the one soaked in cold water has the deeper lines; and the one from the vinegar and baking soda dissolved the little bumps.

Next, an experiment to see which chocolate bars will float.

We found that the kit kat and aero bars floated because they have air bubbles inside.  The crunchie, oh henry, caramilk, and hershey bar all sank.

Then we stirred them around in hot water.  The aero and the hershey bar dissolved completely.

See if you can guess which the others are:

Another experiment with m&m's showed us that you can paint with them.

Dip them in water for a few seconds, and use a paintbrush in the colour or just hold them in your fingers and draw with them like crayons.

For my last experiment, vinegar and baking soda takes the colour off m&m's and smarties quicker than just regular warm water. 

In this photo, you can see the carnauba wax floating at the top of the glass.  That's the glossy glaze put on candies to make them shiny.