Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Make Your Own Electric Guitar Pickup
If you like playing electric guitar, this could be a cool project for you. In this project you'll wind one or more of your own electric guitar pickups and test them out in an inexpensive electric guitar to understand just how electric...
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Science Buddies: Pick This Project!
This lab will help you understand the physics of vibrating strings, and find out why the tone of an electric guitar changes when you switch between the different pickups. If playing guitars is a hobby of yours, this experiment makes an...
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Science Buddies: Blowing Bottletops: Making Music With Glass Bottles
This is a musical project about the resonance of closed-end air columns. Organ pipes, flutes, and brass instruments are examples of musical instruments of this type. In this project, you'll learn how the pitch of the note produced...
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Science Buddies: Guitar Fundamentals: Wavelength, Frequency, & Speed
This is a rockin' project for guitarists with an interest in the physics behind music. If you have ever wondered why the pitch of the note changes when you fret the string, this project will help you understand by applying basic...
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Science Buddies: How to Make a Guitar Sing
This is a great project for musicians interested in the physics of stringed instruments. If you have ever played an acoustic guitar, you may have noticed that picking a single string can make one or more of the other (unpicked) strings...
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Science Buddies: How to Make a Piano Sing
The renowned pianist Vladimir Horowitz once said, "The most important thing is to transform the piano from a percussive instrument into a singing instrument." In this lab, you will learn about sympathetic vibrations, a method used to...
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Science Buddies: What Material Makes the Most Resonant Soundboard?
If you like music and musical instruments, this project might resonate with you. You will investigate materials that could be used to build acoustic musical instruments. You can then use a music box mechanism and a sound level meter to...
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Science Buddies: Artificial Intelligence Teaching a Computer to Play Tic Tac Toe
This is a more challenging JavaScript project. You will have to figure out a way to translate game strategy into a computer algorithm. Directions will show you how to create a working Tic-Tac-Toe board on a webpage. Just by showing the...
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Science Buddies: Most Effective Treatment for Whitefly Infestations on Plants?
Whiteflies are a group of closely related insect species whose larvae live on plants. Like aphids, they suck nutrients from the plant's circulatory system. You will be asked to find the most effective method for fighting a whitefly...
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Science Buddies: Caffeine and Heart Rate: A Pharmacological Study Using Daphnia
In this project, water fleas (Daphnia magna), a semi-transparent freshwater crustacean, are used to study the effects of caffeine on heart rate. You do not have to learn how to take a crustacean's pulse though, because you can actually...
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Science Buddies: Earthworms: Nature's Tiller?
Everybody knows that worms are good for the soil, but not everybody knows why. This lab shows you how to efficiently measure earthworms within units of soil to determine their affect on decomposition and reduction of surface residue.
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Science Buddies: You've Got Permission to Be a Backseat Driver!
You can see what happens to your car's fuel efficiency when it takes you downtown to see a movie, up a hill for a great view, or out for a cruise on a flat country road. This is because a car's fuel efficiency does not remain the same...
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Science Buddies: Paper Chromatography: Basic Version
Many substances are actually mixtures of different things. For example, milk, which looks like it is one substance, is actually a mixture of many different solids and liquids. Chromatography is a technique that is used to separate...
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Science Buddies: Bomb's Away! A Ping Pong Catapult
With this project you'll send ping pong balls flying through the air with a rubber-band powered catapult. This catapult makes it easy to reproduce the launch angle, and to measure the amount of force applied to the projectile. Armed with...
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Science Buddies: Image Compression vs. Image Quality: Finding the Best Tradeoff
In this project you'll learn about how digital image files are encoded, and compressed. You will also measure the quality of compressed and uncompressed images, which will give you important insights into the tradeoffs between file size...
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Science Buddies: Follow the Bouncing Ball: A Web Animation Project
This project is a fun way to try your hand at programming and expand your knowledge of web design. You will learn how to create some simple animations, and perform tests and make measurements to help you create more realistic-looking...
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Science Buddies: Programming Nanor Gs in a Virtual World
In this two week long project, you will design an assembly-language control program for the microprocessors of a colony of nano-organisms (NANORGs) in a virtual world. If you're up for a real programming challenge, this is the project...
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Science Buddies: Which Materials Are the Best Conductors?
There are two main types of materials when it comes to electricity, conductors, and insulators. What are they made of? Find out by testing different materials in a circuit to see which ones conduct the most electricity.
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Science Buddies: Shaking Up Some Energy
Shake N' Light flashlights have been advertised on televisions across the nation in the recent year. But many do not understand just how they get energy to light up the bulb without using batteries. Do this experiment to make your own...
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Science Buddies: Rainbow Fire
Astronomers can determine the atomic composition of distant stars by measuring the spectrum of light emitted by the star. Sound cool? Well in this project you can do something similar by observing the color of flames when various...
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Science Buddies: One Bad Apple Spoils the Whole Bunch: Plant Hormone Ethylene
We have all heard the old saying, "One bad apple spoils the whole bunch." Due to the production of the plant hormone ethylene during the ripening process, this saying proves true. This experiment will investigate the role of ethylene in...
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Science Buddies: What Makes the Rings of Saturn?
Saturn is a unique planet because of the many beautiful rings surrounding it. How are all of those rings made? Why is each ring unique?
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Science Buddies: Where Did All the Stars Go?
If you live in a big city or urban area it is hard to see many stars at night. In most urban areas only the most brilliant stars, planets and the moon can be seen. This is because of something called light pollution which is the...
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Science Buddies: The Moon and the Stars
When you are in the city, only a few of the brightest stars are visible. But when you are in the country, you can see many more stars than you can count. Sometimes you can even see the bright belt of our galaxy, the Milky Way. In this...