Back on Monday, I read an article on Slashdot about a pair of artists/performers who recreated the Las Vegas Bellagio Fountains. But instead of using electric pumps and water, they used Mentos and Diet Coke. The videos on their site are hysterical and after watching them a few times, I got curious about whether the reactions were really that dramatic, or were they somehow “juiced up”?
Always up for a good science experiment, on Thursday I explored a nearby Safeway store but couldn’t find Mentos on the shelves. (I wasn’t at all worried about whether I’d be able to find the soda.)
Laura and I went to Target on Thursday night to get a bag of dog food for Wylie. Twenty minutes later, we walked out with a 20-pound bag of dog food (the reason we’d gone there), two 2-liter bottles of Diet Pepsi (on sale), and a package containing five rolls of Mentos.
After dinner we came back to my house and went into the back yard (soda on cars is to be avoided). We opened one bottle and leaned it against a log so it wouldn’t fall over (and also so it wouldn’t rain back on us). I only managed to drop three mints into the bottle before the foam started rising.
The stream of soda lasted about five seconds, arcing ten feet in the air. And that’s without doing any fancy stuff like the guys in the video did with drilling holes in the bottle top or rigging things up so they could drop five mints in simultaneously.
After five seconds, the soda stopped flying, but what was in the bottle kept bubbling for another ten seconds or so. In the end, more than three-quarters of the soda was gone and what was left had gone completely flat.
Sure, it was a silly thing to do, but it was still pretty neat 🙂
Whoa, cool!!!!! If we had a yard I would have tried it to, but you know T. would kill if I tried it in the house (I was thinking perhaps setting it the tub and closing the curtain, but then I thought it might hit the ceiling).
You are prolific lately. 🙂
I wonder what this combo could do to Peeps… maybe actually dissolve them or at least launch them into space like a stunt guy from a canon.
The stream in the backyard looked to go about ten feet high, but that may have been an illusion. A later one (with the cheap soda) only went about four. More experimentation may be called for.
Let me know how things go with your soda-fountain-in-the-bathtub experiment. 🙂
Peeps seem very nearly indestructible, but I do have some ideas for soda-powered rocket research. Perhaps some Peep-related research could be incorporated into it. 🙂
Black Rhino is a brand of tools.
What supercharges Peeps is the microwave. If you put two Peeps on a plate facing each other, then insert a toothpick into each one, you can make them joust.
Jousting and other varieties of Peep durability testing is a favorite subject in some groups.
The big surprise with peeps was that they’re very close to indestructible.
Ha ha!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/fool/20060612/bs_fool_fool/115014124318
A co-worker clipped Monday’s Wall Street Journal article. The cultural differences between Mentos and Coke were quite different. Mentos wants to hire the guys who did the big “Fountain” video and put them on a promotional tour. Coke on the other hand doesn’t seem to be interested.
So…$10 million worth of free adverstising isn’t interesting?!?!?!?!
Yeah, Coke’s definitely missing the boat on this one.