The Battery Longest Lasts

The Battery  Longest Lasts  electric battery companies market their products by making impressive claims about how exactly durable and reliable their batteries are. However which battery lasts the longest? Will a far more expensive, brand name battery really last longer than the usual generic battery?

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Before we create a hypothesis that addresses this question, let’s find out about the two most common types of electric batteries. Alkaline batteries are made with potassium hydroxide, the industry basic solution (meaning it can neutralize a good acid). A non-alkaline battery is made along with ammonium chloride and zinc. The ammonium chloride is actually acidic. Alkaline batteries tend to be more costly than their non-alkaline counterparts, just like brand-name batteries tend to be more expensive than generics. But in each situation, what are people really paying for?

Issue
Which batteries last longer: brand-name or universal, alkaline or non-alkaline?

Materials
Several different manufacturers of AA batteries. Try to purchase batteries that have roughly the same expiration date (at least inside the same year), and note the price a person paid per battery. Here are some recommendations:
Brand-name batteries:
Rayovac
Energizer
Duracell
Eveready
Panasonic
Universal brands:
CVS
Walgreens
Rite Aid
Kirkland (Costco)
Several identical flashlights that take two AA batteries (get one flashlight for every type of battery you plan to test)
Laptop
Clock or watch
Masking tape to behave as labels



Procedure
Choose a day where you’ll have the ability to monitor your experiment all day. Make sure to start your experiment each morning!
Label each flashlight with the model of battery you'll use that flashlight to test.
Load each flashlight with two from the appropriate model of battery.
Turn all from the flashlights on at once. Note the period, and record it in your notebook.
Keep track of each flashlight until it dies. When one is out, note and record the time in your own notebook. Record your data in a chart such as this:
Battery Brand Name or Generic.Cost Expiration Date Alkaline or even Non-Alkaline? Time before Dying
Results
You may have found that name brand batteries don’t meet the hype! In addition, there isn’t necessarily a correlation between just how much a battery costs and how it works. However, you may have found that alkaline batteries keep going longer than non-alkaline batteries.

Why?
A battery generates current via a chemical reaction, where new chemicals are formed on both sides from the battery. In general, the more chemicals a battery has that may change into other chemicals, the longer this lasts, and this is partly what explains why alkaline batteries possess a slight chemical advantage over their non-alkaline counterparts.
Heading Further
A great way to expand this experiment will be testing how a battery’s expiration date affects just how long it lasts. Do older batteries perform much more poorly? Test the same brand and kind of battery, but test individual batteries with a variety of expiration dates. You could even investigate which sort of battery technology—alkaline or non-alkaline—will give a battery an extended shelf life!

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Building a Wind Gauge

Building a Wind Gauge Here is a simple wind gauge for use in breezes. It will indicate direction and relative speeds. Use the wind gauge to find out where the wind blows strongest. Compare gauge readings. Do obstacles affect wind speeds and direction?


Left side toward direction wind is blowing from. Bottom parallel to ground.

Directions:

Print out the pattern using your Internet browser software.
Trace the pattern onto cardboard.
Cut out the light cardboard wind gauge.

Tie thread or string in hole.

Move gauge until thread is blowing the same way edge furthest from the string is pointing. This indicates wind direction. Keep pointing the gauge in that direction.
Where the thread points along arc indicates a relative velocity. Make marks with a pen along the arc to show how hard the wind is blowing.

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Musicians Develop Better Hearing

Musicians Develop Better Hearing a current study published in the journal Ear and Hearing found that those who are trained and practiced musicians are better in a position to distinguish the words of a conversation in the middle of a noisy room. If this idea could be generalized, it will have important practical implications for those who are hard of hearing and children along with learning disabilities. Test out the hypothesis on your own.

Materials:
An audio recorder and player
The noisy environment
2 volunteers to record the conversation
20 or more musician test topics
20 or more non-musician test subjects
Document and pencil for recording and analyzing outcomes

Experimental Procedure

With your recording equipment navigate to the noisy environment and record your two volunteers using a conversation amidst the noise. The recorded conversation ought to be very difficult but not impossible to listen to.
Note the length and type of music experience your musician test subjects have.
Have test subjects pay attention to the recording, picking out and writing down just as much of it as they can hear.

Compare the outcomes of this hearing test for your music performer and non-musician test subjects. Did the musicians do better about the test?
Analyze results more carefully. Did any patterns emerge relating length or kind of musical training or practice to how nicely test subjects did?

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What Direction Should Solar Panels Face

What Direction Should Solar Panels Face is Imagine you’re installing a brand new array of solar panels for an energy-conscious organization in California. You want the largest quantity of sunlight possible to reach the panels. The actual panels are fixed, so you need to determine which direction to point them in order to collect the most light. The company manager wants you to definitely point them west towards the sun—but they’d need to remain facing that direction every day. Which direction in the event you actually point them in?
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Issue
What direction should solar panels face, as well as why?
Materials
Magnetic compass
Empty tissue container
Marker
Pen and paper
4 outdoor/indoor thermometers
Sun-drenched day
Sand (or another form of weight)
Mp3
Plastic wrap


Procedure
Fill your empty cells box with sand.
Tape each of the four thermometers towards the tissue box, one to each side, with the bottoms facing the same direction.
Tape a layer of plastic wrap over each thermometer utilizing a square of equal size for all of them. What do you think the Plastic Wrap is perfect for?
Solar Diagram
Find a spot outside you know will get sunlight all day.
Try to wake up before the sun rises to be able to place your tissue box in this place. Use your compass to find north, and rotate one side of the tissue box to face that direction. Label this side by having an ‘N, ’ and make sure to the rest of the sides with their corresponding directions on the actual compass. Do you think the sun rises straight to the east and sets directly in the actual west? Why or why not?

After the sun's rays begin to rise, wait half an hour and consider the temperature for each thermometer. Record the time for every thermometer in a chart like this:
Do this after every hour during the period of the day, until late in the morning (or until sunset, if you can wait around that long! ).
Collect your tissue box and create a graph of temperatures using the data a person collected. What’s the difference between the greatest and lowest temperature thermometers? Is this surprising for you? Are the temperatures the same at beginning and sunset?
Results

What data you get is determined by your latitude and what time of year it's, but if you’re in the United States you need to see a higher overall temperature on the thermometer that faced south compared to the thermometer that faced north. Someone in the southern hemisphere would visit a higher temperature on the thermometer facing northern.

Why?
Your building manager was wrong. The sun's rays feel warmer in the afternoon just because everything is hotter within the afternoon—after all, everything has had ample time for you to warm up all day! It turns out that regardless of how far north or south the sunlight is, it’s always somewhere in the southern the main sky all day, and it doesn’t rise or set directly within the east or west, respectively (except at special times of year in special places about the Earth). So how come?

The earth is tilted in accordance with its orbit around the Sun. When the actual northern hemisphere is enjoying its summer, our planet tilts that hemisphere towards the sun. For this reason, the sun appears higher in the sky throughout the summer months. It’s winter in the southern hemisphere throughout the northern hemisphere’s summer, because during this period, the southern hemisphere is tilted away in the sun.

If you live north of the actual Tropic of Cancer, the sun will continually be in the southern half of the skies. Because the Earth tilts in different directions during the period of a year, the sun’s apparent position appears to wander from places directly above the Tropic associated with Cancer to places directly above the Tropic of Capricorn and back—but since the sun is almost always in the south from the sky in the northern hemisphere, it may preferentially illuminate south-facing objects, such as buildings or solar power panels. A good rule of thumb is to tilt your solar power panels south towards the sun (and if you wish to get really picky, tilt them at an angle determined both by what lengths north you are and the balance of one's you want during the summer and winter season months).

So what’s the deal with covering our thermometers in plastic? The plastic cover traps heat, allowing the sunlight hitting the whole face of t
he tissue box to the warmth that face’s thermometer. It behaves like the greenhouse: light from the sun passes through the transparent material and heats up anything beneath it. That heat can’t pass back through the actual material and escape. This allows us to determine a bigger change in temperature, which makes our data easier to interpret.

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Testing the Ozone

Testing the Ozone was Did you ever hear of an ozone alert? Ozone is a kind of oxygen that can be harmful to people when it enters our breathing space. You can attempt your surroundings to see which locations possess the highest levels of ozone by creating your personal ozone test strips.

Materials:

Four cups
Distilled drinking water
Glass pot (do not substitute a metal 1! )
1 ¼ teaspoons cornstarch
Stove
Wood spoon
Potassium iodide
Coffee filter
Paintbrush
Scissors
Hiding tape
Spray bottle

Experimental Procedure

Measure out four glasses of distilled water and place it into the glass pot.
Mix in 1 ¼ teaspoons associated with cornstarch
Heat the mixture over a medium flame while stirring it having a wooden spoon. When the mixture thickens and becomes a little see-through, remove it from the stove.
Include the ¼ teaspoon of potassium iodide, and mix. Let the mixture cool.
Put a coffee filter on the ceramic plate, and brush both sides from the filter with the mixture. Try to ensure that the mixture is spread evenly on the entire filter. You have now created an ozone check paper.
Use additional filters to make a lot more ozone test papers.
Wash your hands with soap and tepid to warm water.
Let the test papers dry in the dark place.
Cut the test papers into strips.
Spray a strip with distilled water as well as hang it in one of the locations that you want to test.
Spray and hang additional test strips in the areas. Consider hanging some strips inside and a few outside, as well as hanging some in places that you simply think experience higher levels of pollution.

Depart the strips for eight hours.
Take lower the strips and spray them with distilled drinking water. The strips should change color based how much ozone they were exposed to. The actual darker the purple color, the more ozone is in the air near their location.
Note: Don't place the strips in direct sunlight.

Terms/Concepts: Ozone; Which factors will probably increase the ozone levels in the atmosphere?

References:

First Place Science Fair Projects with regard to Inquisitive Kids, by Elizabeth Snoke Harris. Pp. 110-112.

Keren Perles did as an educational writer, editor, teacher, and tutor of ages. Her experience spans the subject places, from science and math to English and also the Hebrew language.

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How to make a CD balloon hovercraft

CD balloon hovercraft Make this happen very simple project to generate a floating disc that will skims across a surface exactly like the way an air flow hockey puck as well as hovercraft does.

What exactly you need:
Blank CD or CD that you do not want any additional.
Pop-top cap coming from a water bottle as well as dish soap package
Balloon
Hot glue rifle
What You Accomplish:
Use the scorching glue gun for you to carefully glue your bottle cap in the center hole in the CD and allow it to go set. Make confident the edges are generally fully sealed.
Force the pop-top hat closed. Blow up the balloon, then hold it to ensure no air escapes, but don't tie up it off. Stretch the mouth in the balloon over your bottle cap (you might require an assistant that may help you do this so that you can don't lose any air through the balloon). Now adjust the balloon in order that it stands up direct and centered.
Set the hovercraft with a hard, smooth kitchen table and open your pop-top; then nudge the product along and see how are you affected.
What Happened:
A hovercraft operates by forcing air out and about beneath it, setting up a cushion of air flow to float in. Hovercrafts usually have a very "skirt" that surrounds the camp to contain air; in this undertaking the CD can be light enough who's doesn't need a huge cushion, so no skirt is critical. The balloon acts as being a pressurized gas slot provided. When you wide open the cap, the balloon allows air out over the cap, creating a skinny cushion of air within the CD.

As anyone nudged your hovercraft all-around, you may have remarked that it zipped down the surface like the air hockey puck. That's because air flow hockey uses a similar principle, with the puck floating with a layer of air flow. In the case associated with an air hockey kitchen table, the air is forced out of your table below rather than source above as being a hovercraft. Try pushing an ordinary CD across your table, and after that your hovercraft. Do both the move differently? That's for the reason that thin cushion of air through the hovercraft reduces the friction relating to the CD and your table. Because in the reduced friction, hovercrafts could reach higher data transfer rates.

Experiment ideas:
Test to see should your hovercraft works differently in case you open the hat only part way instead of all the so-called way.
Try distinct sizes of balloons. Does the hovercraft run longer with a larger balloon?
Hovercrafts work ideal on smooth surfaces hence the air can propagate evenly, but research yours on several unique surfaces to see how it behaves. Should it work on a new sidewalk or rug?

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