Some of the demos we did were pretty sweet. We exploded a lot of balloons - made a "rainbow" of our own kind! Photos taken by Ryan Rodgers (UMN).

We also launched a series of methanol rockets. That's the bright blue thing in this photo (by Ryan Rodgers)!

We made SLIME (left). Photo taken by Ryan Rodgers (UMN).

Soda geysers are really cool!

We look at tons of interesting thing using light microscopes - bugs, sand, rocks, minerals, household chemicals, gold nanoparticles, and more!

We made our own magnetite nanoparticles in a real university lab.

We looked at lots of interesting stuff using a scanning electron microscope.

John Nelson (standing in the back) used this SEM to show us images of a circuit board, monarch butterfly wing, louse, salt crystals, magnetite crystals, and gold nanoparticles.

Scanning Electron Microscopy Image of a Monarch Butterfly Wing
Image taken by Dr. John Nelson

We looked at gold nanoparticles using a high-resolution transmission electron micrsocope.

Atomic-structure image of a single GOLD nanoparticle. This object is only 10 nm in diameter! How big is one nanometer? That's one billionth of one meter. This image was collected using the high-resolution transmission electron microscopy located at the Institute of Technology's Characterization Facility. To see information about the microscope, CLICK HERE!