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You will need: Four bottles of very pure water, distilled water is best One bowl A freezer Lots of patience – this can be a difficult experiment to reproduce! Take the labels off the bottles of water. 2 Place the bottles in a freezer and leave undisturbed for at least 30 minutes. Check on the bottles regularly! 3 As soon as one looks like a bottle is forming ice crystals, gently remove them from the freezer. 4 Shake one of the bottles and watch the ice crystals form instantly! 5 Try stirring one of the bottles with a straw, or perhaps adding a piece of ice or dirt to the solution. 6 Try carefully pouring the supercooled water into the bowl over an ice cube… you’ll form an ice stalagmite! Why Does This Happen Ice generally forms on microscopic scratches and bumps called nucleation sites. Nucleation sites, or ‘bumps’, occur within most containers with imperfections – even dissolved impurities such as calcium or even air bubbles act as nucleation sites for ice to form. If you remove the nucleation sites from the water, the water cannot form ice crystals easily. Normally, pure water (without impurities) will form ice crystals at 0 degrees Celsius or lower. However if pure water is cooled down very slowly, in a very smooth container with no dust inside, you can make water stay a liquid at temperatures below zero. Supercooled solutions are very unstable. Introducing air bubbles or a seeding crystal into the solution causes the liquid water to rapidly freeze. Be aware that supercooling is different from freezing point depression. Freezing point depression occurs when you dissolve an ionic solid such as salt in water. A saltwater solution will have a lower freezing point than pure water – do the experiment and find out for yourself! Take the labels off the bottles of water. 2 Place the bottles in a freezer and leave undisturbed for at least 30 minutes. Check on the bottles regularly! 3 As soon as one looks like a bottle is forming ice crystals, gently remove them from the freezer. 4 Shake one of the bottles and watch the ice crystals form instantly! 5 Try stirring one of the bottles with a straw, or perhaps adding a piece of ice or dirt to the solution. 6 Try carefully pouring the supercooled water into the bowl over an ice cube… you’ll form an ice stalagmite! Why Does This Happen Ice generally forms on microscopic scratches and bumps called nucleation sites. Nucleation sites, or ‘bumps’, occur within most containers with imperfections – even dissolved impurities such as calcium or even air bubbles act as nucleation sites for ice to form. If you remove the nucleation sites from the water, the water cannot form ice crystals easily. Normally, pure water (without impurities) will form ice crystals at 0 degrees Celsius or lower. However if pure water is cooled down very slowly, in a very smooth container with no dust inside, you can make water stay a liquid at temperatures below zero. Supercooled solutions are very unstable. Introducing air bubbles or a seeding crystal into the solution causes the liquid water to rapidly freeze. Be aware that supercooling is different from freezing point depression. Freezing point depression occurs when you dissolve an ionic solid such as salt in water. A saltwater solution will have a lower freezing point than pure water – do the experiment and find out for yourself! Variables to test More on variables here Try salty vs freshwater. What happens if you rapidly heat up the super-cooled water in the bottle? ›

Has the video for making a Litchenberg Fractal woodburning device been taken down? I can't find it anywhere. Thank you

(Wrote an email as well before discovering this website. Whoops.) Knowing the violently explosive power of thermite burning on ice from Mythbusters, I was wondering if it's possible to control that reaction in some way to power a rocket with thermite and ice (or some similar combination involving thermite) to cover a reasonable distance, (hopefully) without destroying the rocket. Would be awesome to see just the bright flames spewing out the back of a rocket, even better to see it take off into the sky, and it's also a neat challenge both in figuring out how to control the reaction well enough to make it directional and less kablooey-y, and the engineering of a rocket body that won't melt from the heat of the thermite and is capable of delivering the fuel in a manner that prevents it from being spent all at once! (p.s.-might want to check this category's description, not sure if the "togeather" is intentional)