3 experiments that changed science, one bowl at a time.
You may eat a bowl of cereal for breakfast every day, but have you ever thought about using it to conduct experiment? Many of its properties relate to other areas of research such as material science and fluid mechanics.
Puffed Rice Cereal and Compression
Julio Valdes, a civil engineering professor at San Diego University, recently performed experiments on puffed rice cereal. He determined that the velocity at which you compress it affects how it deforms. He believes that this could have implications for manufacturing and snow compression.
At low velocity, a tube of cereal was crushed erratically at various points. At very high velocity, the crushing was quite uniform. The interesting crushing happened at an intermediate velocity where researchers observed a rising band of compressed cereal. This went against their hypothesis that the cereal at the top of the tube would be crushed while the cereal at the bottom would not be.
These new observations could help our understanding of a new area of material science dubbed “crunchy matter,” involving porous and brittle material. The experiments were also performed on Cocoa Puffs and Cocoa Krispies with similar results.
The Cheerio Effect
A phenomenon known as the Cheerios Effect occurs when small, floating objects, such as Cheerios, clump together. Dominic Vella, a graduate student from Cambridge University and L. Mahadevan, a mathematician from Harvard University, studied the phenomenon in 2005 and determined that the clumping is due to surface tension, buoyancy, and the meniscus.
Objects that are less dense than the liquid they are in will float. Because of the density of Cheerios and the surface surface tension in your bowl of milk, some of your Cheerios will float. They create tiny dents in the milk that change the shape of the surface and cause the pieces of cereal to float towards each other.
The clinginess of Cheerios at the edge of the bowl is caused by them floating along and upward on the meniscus, the rising of the milk at the side of the dish where it is attracted to the bowl.
This phenomenon doesn’t only apply to Cheerios. Paper clips placed in a bowl of water or bubbles at the top of your beer will act in the same way.
Iron Extraction
Have you ever wondered how much iron is in your breakfast cereal? With this do-it-at-home experiment, you can easily extract the iron from your bowl of cereal using a bar magnet.
Start by choosing a box of cereal that is high in iron such as Total. Mix it with water and let it sit for a while in a Ziplock bag. Place a bar magnet under the bag and squish the contents around. Carefully flip the bag and magnet over and you will see little black specks at the surface near the magnet. These are tiny bits of iron. If you keep the magnet touching the bag but move it around a little, you will see the specks following it.
Eating enough iron is important for your health. Not getting enough can leave you tired, pale-looking, and irritable.
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