I've done a few.
A coilgun - basically, this is a tube wrapped with coils of wire. You put a projectile in the end and turn the coils on - this sucks the projectile towards the center of the magnetic field. When it reaches the center, you turn off the coil, and the projectile carries on moving. If you have multiple coils, you can reach quite a speed.

It's also known as a 'Linear Accelerator'.

An electric bike - it reached quite a speed for a few seconds, and then overheated.

But the best one was probably this:

"Let's see what happens when I connect two 240v transformers back-to-back, and then electrocute myself?"

Yes, it hurts.
(Half of Stephen Fry's right buttock pissed on your dog on, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 16:16, 2 replies)

Air gun
I shot myself in the thigh and arm with an air pistol to see how much it would hurt.
(wattoo, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 16:16, 2 replies)

Back when i was in school
we would have science experiments using Magnesium.

I managed to snaffle some spare bits (upto about 10cm)

I'd heard it was good to light.

SO one night I went home and lit some in my backgarden once it had gone dark.

For 4 seconds it was daylight again, such weas the brightness, i could see the clouds, the houses in the distance, I even heard birds begin to tweet. Then blackness again.

upon returning to my house i realised i couldnt see anything straight ahead, and for the reminder of the evening i had to rely on my preliferal vision , meaning i walked everywhere and spoke to people with my head pointing a completely different direction.
(Dan dan dan They tik urh jerbs!!!, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 16:14, 1 reply)

I think most of my in- course experiments at university were pretty pointless
I decided it'd be a good idea to do a straight chemistry course there, and discovered that about 99.9% of the tests we did were titrations, with maybe the occasional gravimetric analysis thrown in for good measure. Fun times.

Anyways, one time in the labs we were charged with preparing some sort of stock solution for use in one of the said titrations, and it involved the boiling of zinc granules with some misc. acid. So there I was, merrily heating this solution away, waiting for this magical reaction to take place.

So I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

Blatently, nothing was actually happening, so I checked with one of the lab technicians milling around, who advised me to add some more zinc. I get back to my station, and get a reasonably large spatuala-full to dump in. This is where an important life lesson is learnt.

Don't add cold metal to boiling liquid.

I had the briefest of moments to go "Feck!" as a great plume of boiling hot zinc and acid erupted from the beaker I was using, and peppered the worksurface with this lethal combination. I luckily managed to dive out of the way with ninja-like reflexes, but I'm afraid there was still a casualty from this, and it's one which is scarred for life.

As far as I'm aware, my lab desk still has pockmarks from where I melted hot metal into the varnish.
(LordMatthius http://www.justgiving.com/marathon-matt2009, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 16:12, Reply)

I was a bit of a pyromaniac as a kid
but also a very responsible one. My godbrother had managed to burn down a farm a couple of years before, so I knew that making fire out in the fields could result in a smacked bottom (and an embarrassing trip to the fire station and farmer's house to make a full confession).

My parents have a thatched cottage, so making flames in my room was also obviously not an option.

Where to indulge myself in flamey joy then? Where my parents wouldn't catch me? Why, the bathroom of course! Fully tiled, not terribly flammable, and of course there's a handy supply of water if things get a bit too hot.

So I used to pile up loo paper in the loo itself, resting on the turd-shelf, and set fire to it. I'd feed the conflagration with more and more loo paper; when the flames looked like they were getting too high, I'd simply flush the loo and drown the fire. Perfect!

I spent a few very happy weeks doing this, whilst my mother got increasingly worried that I'd caught some kind of bowel disease? After all, how else do you explain spending an hour in the bathroom, flushing repeatedly and using up 2 rolls of loo paper?
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 16:11, 3 replies)

Also to do with gummy bears
When I was 16 I went to Munich for a month to do some work experience. In the centre of Munich there is a whole shop dedicated to gummi sweets, it is one of the best places on earth and I often bought the odd Kilo or two just to keep myself going.
One day, for a treat, the people I was working for decided to send me to Austria on the train to see some mountains and gardens and stuff. Now I have never been a massive fan of long train journies and as such by the time we had been on the train home for about 30 seconds I was a bit bored. So me and the four other people I was sharing a cariage with decided it would be a good idea to stick several gummi figures including your traditional "gummi bear" to the outside of the window to see how long they would last before falling off. Much to the credit of the German sweet makers the bear lasted all the way back to Munich.
I sometimes imagine that bear... still riding the rails 8 years later... those crazy gummis.

(I also tried to squash my baby sister behind a door when I was 5 years old to see whether she'd "go like Flat Stanley" I was foiled only by one of those annoying door stops)
(tillyecl Tilly, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 16:10, Reply)

Pointless,
Christ on a bike, I have done hundreds of stupid pointless experiments.

-I tried to see how long I could go without sleep. I ended up going for four days and in the end I think I was dreaming and I was awake and I found it difficult to tell the two apart. I decided to call it a day and have a kip when my mother found me next to the oven in the kitchen. The oven was on and I was stuffing a damp(!) pillow into it.

-Attempted to make Crystal Meth in university lab as I thought I could become Merc – driving drug tsar. Our tutor told us how to make it in a ‘cool’ attempt to be friendly and to be down with the kids, except he didn’t tell us the specific reagent to be used. I decided that it probably didn’t matter and used an arbitrary one. I don’t know what I made eventually but it gave my mate a headache for 3 days.

-used liquid paper on my keyboard to see how well I can type without looking at the keys themselves. Verdict? New keyboard.

-Attempted to make thermite in my uni halls of residence kitchen for shits and giggles. This was slightly more successful and I managed to completely destroy the gas cooker and gave myself second degree burns on my hands and face. I also melted a plastic bin.

-Attempted to see how long I could give up meat. The answer was a surprising 20 minutes.

-Attempted to live for a week on original flavour Oreo cookies because my local Costcutter was doing a deal on them. I managed 2 days and at the end when I finally went to the toilet the bowl looked like there had been an explosion in a Guinness factory. I also had to wipe crumbs from my chocolate starfish.
(powervator and NONE SHALL PASS, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 16:08, 4 replies)

Gummy bears
As a small child I discovered that if you leave a gummy bear in a tub of water for about a week it grows absolutely MASSIVE! (think about 10cm long)

Trouble is they disintegrate when you touch them...

I imagine it would work for Haribo as well, just not got around to trying it...
(SillyMoo, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:54, Reply)

Chemistry is FUN.
Remember the experiment where you drop some magnesium ribbon in hydrochloric acid to watch it fizz as it releases hydrogen? We were doing that when one kid realized that hydrogen is flammable and produced his lighter.

One explosion and a spray of acid later...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:49, 2 replies)

Operation Manky Garden
Can you, I asked in the name of SCIENCE, grow a tomato crop, from poos derived from an all-tomato diet?

Despite two years of trying, an ASBO, the disgust of those I hold dear and Nutter-of-the-Week recognition from this fine website, the answer is a sound NO.

I have resisted the temptation to repeat this experiment with peaches, but have found - through carefully recorded experimentation - that beetroot makes your piss purple.

If you are not expecting purple piss, it can also make you think you are dying of kidney failure.

Don't do it kids!
( Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:48, 3 replies)

Grow your own
My father teaches a core microbiology course in his department, which involves getting 1st year undergraduates to not chew gum, not wear open toed shoes, not wear hats, sit still for 20 minutes, listen to him, and plate out a variety of substances on a variety of bacterial media, then stick them at various temperatures overnight. the idea is that the following day, the students will have a nice selection of growths on their media, and this will then lead to a discussion about what has grown, where it came from, why that particular species likes living there etc etc.

However, dad gets bored with doing this year after year with endless numpties to teach, so he's been experimenting with them to see how far he can get them to go. It started with nasal swabs ('stick this cotton wool swab up your nose, then spread it on a plate'), but over the years he has got them to do swabs of cheek cells (not so exciting), between their toes, under their arms, behind their ears, and he has been suggesting for the past 5 years or so that they do vaginal, urethral (right word?) or anal swabs. This year 2 of them (females) took him up on the idea (they were sent to the toilet to do the actual swabbing). He said the results were fairly dull, as the media they used was the wrong pH to grow much, but he's wondering if he can get any more extreme. I suggested tramp swabs, but couldn't think of anything else. any ideas?
( ascorbate, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:47, 2 replies)

Not a story, more a question.
For some reason, I like soda water and get through loads of it, to the point where Mrs Vertigo pointed out we weren't exactly helping that whole environmental thing by continually buying 2 litre bottles of the stuff (yes, we recycle them, but not buying them at all is better, right?)

Anyway, the upshot was that we bought a Sodastream. After getting over the initial retro 70's thing (btw, the 'flavours' are uniformly disgusting. Just the fizzy water for me thanks), a question has been scratching the back of my brainpan like a continual annoyance: can you Sodastream milk, what would it taste like and would it fuck up your Sodastream?

I think the result would be, yes, foul and absolutely. But I'd be interested if any b3tan has given it a go in the interests of scientific advancement.
(vertigo, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:45, 20 replies)

Let's Get Physics-al
One of the few things that I have remembered about Physics, post-school, is that Speed equals Distance divided by Time. In other words, one can calculate one’s speed of travel by dividing the distance travelled by the time taken.

It’s almost glorious in its simplicity, isn’t it? Almost artistic, it’s even quite pleasant to say.

Speed equals Distance over Time.

Nice.

It was about 6 years later, at the age of 22, that I found that physics, unless one is a physicist, should be kept in the classroom. I was in rehearsals for The Real Inspector Hound, and we were on a lunch break. One of our props was a wheelchair, and our rehearsal room was the Orangery at Bretton Hall college. Bretton Hall, for the many of you that won’t know, is home to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Set in 100 acres of lush green, it is the perfect place to study an arts degree.

Anyway. We were messing about, pushing (well, shoving) each other down the hill in this wheelchair, seeing who could go the fastest.

It was then that I put forward the idea that we could measure the speed to come up with a clear winner. We estimated the distance to the end of the hill as 46m. We had a run up, much like a bobsleigh team, and a pretty straight one. This one was bulletproof. Thoughts of some kind of land-speed record filled our minds.

It was my turn to take the driver’s seat. I was last to step in to the breach and, being the lightest (oh, how cruel time changes things), I had a good chance of winning this one. Two of the guys took an arm each, two a handle each, and one shoved from the back. They really gave it the beans in the run-up, and launched me forwards.

After about 10m, I felt like I had surely passed through the sound barrier. The uneven ground beneath the wheels of the chair jolted my spine and I vowed there and then to make a wheelchair with suspension. At the 30m point, I was still accelerating, the wet grass providing little or no traction. At 40m, I’m showing no sign of stopping.

And then I saw the problem. An edge. An edge beyond which, I knew, lay a 5 foot drop. I slammed on the brakes, which did nothing but throw me in to a sideways slide. At the critical moment, a lump in the ground kicked the wheelchair just slightly in to the air, and I disappeared over the edge.

All was silence. The wheelchair lay a few feet from me, one wheel spinning forlornly as is demanded by convention. I lay sprawled on the ground, having executed the most graceful swan dive followed by face-plant this world has ever seen.

Physics, 1. DiT, 0.
( Devil_In_Tights the *real* DiT!, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:42, Reply)

in 'tinterests o science...
and for a nice shiny one pound coin, a young lad in my long disbanded form group was dared to eat a pound of lard during registration.

the result? two days off school and the inability to hold in turd during that time.
(magictorch, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:40, 1 reply)

Electroplating
The at-the-time-still-to-become Mrs Flatfrog was, and is, allergic to base metals. She had a ring that she was very fond of that I had given her, but sadly it was a cheapie thing and was starting to bring her out in a rash. I had an inspiration: I'd give her the same ring as an engagement ring, but I'd silver-plate it. How hard can it be? Electroplating something with silver is just a matter of getting a silver solution and a couple of electrodes, isn't it?

A bit of research turned up a photography suppliers that could sell me some silver nitrate, but then I was stuck on the electrodes: I realised that the anode (or cathode, I can never remember which is which) had to be carbon, so that it wouldn't dissolve. No problem - a pencil lead is basically carbon. I got a thick pencil and took the wood off, then attached it to a clip. On the other side, I hung the ring from a wire to make my cathode (or anode) and hooked up a 9V battery, then I dipped the electrodes in the solution. Satisfying bubbling ensued, at the end of which the ring was coated in a layer of nasty black gunk which proved impossible to remove.

The story ends well, as I took the measurement of the ring to get something that was actually silver to propose with.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:31, 2 replies)

chemical sisters
chemistry was the bane of my life at school. i thought i would be mixing glowing jewel coloured liquids into beautiful, magical potions. instead, it was a grind of mathematical equations and lessons in which i actually saw the clock moving backwards.

my friend zara and i were so bad at chemistry that the teacher mr bruce (“wiggy”) had pretty much given up on us. on one occasion, he even put a bin over his head rather than talk to us when we approached his desk.

two particular experiments stand out of the years of gcse torture. the first was the chocolate chip cookie experiment, which many of you may have done yourselves – you had to work out three different ways to extract the chocolate from the cookie. now, even zara and i could cope with heating the cookie until the chocolate melted or breaking it into pieces and pulling out the chocolatey goodness. that’s not chemistry, that’s cooking and it’s how girls eat cookies. but the third, chemical way? this was so, so far over our heads, there were planes on their way to manchester airport that were nearer.

bored and desperate, we snapped the cookie in half and ate it. problem solved.

until wiggy found out. he came around with the cookie box, looking to collect the abused biscuits from every lab pair. when he got to us, we could only flush and stammer. and laugh. a lot. wiggy rocked disbelievingly back and forth on his heels, in his labcoat that his wife had clearly made from a spare bedsheet, and peered at us from beneath his toupee. then he shrugged, remembering it was rswipe and zara, and as such, we were utterly beyond salvage.

“this is the last period of the day,” he said, turning on his heel. “five other gcse classes have done experiments with those cookies already today…”

we spent the next week scrubbing our tongues.

the second experiment was even more embarrassing. i can’t remember what we were doing, but we had to heat some white shit up in a test tube and do some calculations. then we had to write our results in a table on the blackboard. whatever the measurements were, ours was about 800 whereas everyone else’s was 1,700ish. damn. foiled again. we were used to it, and didn’t give a fuck. until wiggy looked up from his desk and checked out the table.

“whose is that result?” he said heavily. his eyes were on me and zara before we could admit it, and he shook his head slowly.

“the best scientists in the world, working with the top equipment, can only estimate that 800 is the right answer. it is impossible to achieve that result with a test tube and a bunsen burner. what the hell have you done?”

the really really worrying thing about all this is that both zara and i got an a at gcse. just how low is the exam standard in this country, exactly???
( rachelswipe with a fork, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:31, 7 replies)

Mad Max has much to answer for.
Near the start of the second film, our hero brings the interceptor to a halt by selecting reverse gear whilst the car is still moving forward. The car slows dramtically with the rear wheels spinning wildly in reverse.

This got me thinking.

There was no danger I was ever going to try this in a car I actually owned but I do get issued hire cars reasonably often and sooner or later I'd get one that was rear wheel drive (I figured there was a high chance of death if the wheels you also rely on for steering were spinning in the wrong direction). As it happened, after a few front drive cars came and went, a 2.2 litre manual Vauxhall Omega hoved into view. The test could begin!

Ever mindful of the consequences of doing this act on a public road, I elected to use one of the vast car parks that serve as employee parking for the industrial estates so numerous in my current place of residence. The test was to be conducted as follows;

Traction control switched to OFF, Car to proceed forward at 60mph in fourth gear before I stepped on the clutch and brought the gear round in a savage U shape through the protective gaiter designed to prevent you from putting the car into reverse whilst going forward. Then step off all pedals and keep the car pointing in the right direction whilst it thundered to a halt.

Essentially this is what came to pass.

The word "essentially" is important however as there were some facets of the experiment I did not anticipate. The first is that the revs do increase rather substantially once the clutch is lifted- the car had been doing 2800rpm at 60 in 4th- This increased to "Vauxhall" some way past the little "7" on the dial in reverse with the clutch off. The second is that having ceased to travel forward, the car accelerates violently backwards whilst you strive to engage neutral. This leads to the third problem- the car wasn't coming out of reverse. Eventually neutral was selected (and by selected I mean was acheived by sitting on the back seat and violently kicking the gear lever) again after which reverse was no longer an option on this particular Omega. Furthermore, a series of warning lights suggested that the engines brief foray into the upper echelons of its design envelope had not been without incident. With a heavy heart, I did what any man has to do at this point.

By which I mean, I drove it to Tesco and into a parking space. I then called the hire car company told them their car had inexplicably failed and I was stranded and very disappointed. They proceeded to apologise and send an upgraded car as soon as possible. I noted with as straight a face as was possible when the chap from the agency came to collect it he cheerfully informed me that this was happening quite a bit with the Omegas and it was a source of confusion to both the company and Vauxhall.

So there you have it. It works for Mel Gibson but is less lastingly successful in a car park in the UK.

Length?- two pretty substantial rubber lines would have greeted the workers on the monday.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:24, 5 replies)

Idiocy
If a friend decides to sit on an overhanging bough of a tree, 20ft up, take his trousers down and shit whilst sitting on the branch. DON'T stand underneath to ensure you get a good view of his obscene blinking purple eye. No shit on me, but the mild prolapsing that a bumhole does in its normal evacuation of effluence, is NOT a pretty site..

When experimenting with your new juicer, DO NOT add garlic at ANY stage. It is absolutely horrific.

DO NOT insist that it will be 'alright' to angle grind a brick wall with no safety glasses. Red brick CUNT.

DO NOT let tree shitting friend test his apparantly blunt knife on the back of your hand, blood will come and a scar will follow.
(Cancer Joy was short lived, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:20, 2 replies)

Idiots and Electricity
Bear in mind that this happened when I was 19 and surely old enough to know better.

I was walking through a pasture one day when I stumbled across a rusty box nailed to a fencepost with wires running out of it. I immediately recognized it as an electric fence, but also recognized that it was long defunct and abandoned. So I took it with me back to my college dorm room to play with.

I used a screwdriver to remove the rusty housing, revealing a 12 volt battery that had long ago decayed to worthlessness and the deceptively simple workings of the device. I tossed out the battery and poked around inside the thing, and noticed a wire that was loose. I saw where it had been attached previously, so I fired up my soldering iron and re-attached it.

Now what?

Ah! I have a 12 volt transformer that goes to my little tape player. There's even a diagram on it showing the polarity of the plug! Cool! And here I have a paper clip I can bend and jam inside the plug, and a couple of test leads with alligator clips that I can attach to the paper clip and to the outside of the plug, then attach to the battery terminals on the box.

A little wheel thing starts spinning, kinda- it's on a spring so it goes back until the spring pushes it the other way again, and there are contacts that the wheel is opening and closing. Huh. Interesting... Ah, I see it now! It's doing that because it's feeding a transformer to step the voltage up lots, and for that to work you have to have an expanding and collapsing magnetic field- in other words, turning it on and off, which is what opening and closing those contacts is doing! Cool!

At this point I was holding the mechanism in my hands, watching it go boing boing boing. I saw that the wing nut that holds on the wire for the electric fence was loose, so I went to spin it into place with my fingers...

My arms hurt for three days.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:10, 3 replies)

How long
can you survive on Red Bull and cocaine?

Answer- 2 weeks. Then you pass out. A lot.
( Madam Marlboro wonders if you've found her yet, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:08, 8 replies)

Bunny Spoiler
My part in a pointless experiment.

I used to have pretty odd acquaintances when I was a nipper but none was more weird than Wayne who lived two doors down from me. Wayne was special needy in a peculiar way. He was also obsessed by animals. He had a dog, a cat, and some rabbits. I think his parents must have been special needy as well as they gave him responsibility to look after the said animals. Incidentally, our acquaintance started when my mum ordered me to go to his house to be his friend.

Anyway, one day he decided to sadistically see how long his two rabbits (the rabbit’s names escape me) would last without being fed.

These poor little buggers lived in his shed and Wayne wasn’t the best ‘dad’ to his rabbits without the murderous intentions that he later acquired so I always felt sorry for them.

So he started to starve them to death.

However, as the days went by, he noticed that despite not feeding them, they weren’t getting thinner and actually looked a lot healthier than they should have been even when he was just routinely neglecting them. They also, he confided to me, started to stare at him more. They were freaking him out with their “intelligent” red eyes.

As the weeks went by, he sported a petrified look whenever he went outside to his shed to check on the rabbits. He became convinced that they were somehow leaving the hutch and going out at night to get food and that they were plotting to get him one day. He stopped checking on the rabbits and refused to go into his garden.

By this point I was almost running out of my pocket money buying food for the rabbits and secretly feeding them, so I suggested to him that if he went back in to the shed and regularly fed them very well, that they might not talk to each other in their special scratch language (which I claimed to understand) about killing him and harvesting his ears (which looked like cauliflowers) for food as punishment.

The rabbits became a bit fatter and they were living in lapin rapture. All was right in the world, and a young intellectually challenged boy learnt that unless he fed and treated animals well, they would gang up and go to work on him with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch.

Addendum.

Wayne also liked to partially suck mints, spit them out, and dip them in chocolate. These were his pointless ex-spearmints.
(powervator and NONE SHALL PASS, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:06, 3 replies)

When
some drunken Neanderthal is really getting up your nose in your local bar. He's not insulting you directly but his racist, homophobic comments are really getting on you tits, it's not a good idea to test out the Legless Theorem.

This theorem states that:

If someone is smaller, or equal in size to me, then I'll be able to beat the crap out of him by my superior strength. (I used to do a lot of rock-climbing and had freakish upper-body strength)

But, if the my foe is obviously bigger and stronger than me, then I'll win because I'm much faster than him.

Over several years of pain-staking research I discovered that I was talking bollocks.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:01, 7 replies)

A little science is a dangerous thing

I honestly can't remember how old I was, or how old my elder brother (who possibly should have known better) was, but it was old enough for me to have had some Physics lessons, and yet young enough to have a fairly new, small, stainless steel compass (one of the North-seeking ones, not a circle-drawing one) - quite possibly obtained after several hard months of saving up Bazooka Joe wrappers.

Anyway, for some reason our parents were out, but we were in, and bored; probably the holidays. I had the compass and was idly playing with it - a pretty limited operation in a suburban bedroom, I can tell you. My mind wandered, as it still seems to even today, with alarming regularity...

...where was I? Oh yes.

I remembered our physics teacher imparting the information that applying an alternating current across a magnetised piece of steel would reverse its polarity. This seemed like a plan and like a loon, my brother agreed. He had a desk lamp from which it was simple to liberate the chord: Presto! a plug with a lead sprouting a 'live' and 'neutral' wire; carefully we separated the wires - if they touched each other once we put the plug in, goodness knows what would happen!

Wires separated, plug in, compass in place on the floor near the socket...turn on the socket...carefully touch the wires to the stainless steel casing of the compass...

Result: a bright flash and a loud crack and all the lights and power in the house went out...imagine us sat on the floor with smoking hair standing out from our heads and blackened faces. But by God, the polarity of the compass DID change, yessir, we had a compass that pointed due South. It also had two wicked weld-scars on the casing - as did the two of us once our parents came home to find all the fuses in the house blown.
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 15:00, 3 replies)

Scat cat
Question: What will happen if I swing my grandparents cat by its back legs?

Answer: I will get covered in shit.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 14:58, 4 replies)

Experimenting with boundaries.
Experiment 1.

Apparatus: One 13 years old brat. A constant source of trouble and strife for my poor long suffering parents.

Methodology: See How long can I go without saying a single word to them.

Result: Precisely 3 hours and 37 minutes until I had to grovellingly ask for a lift to a friends house.

Conclusion: 13 years olds need to speak to their parents more than their parents need to be spoken to.



Experiment 2.

Apparatus: One 14 year old brat who thinks he's even better than he was when he was a 13 year old brat

Methodology: Tell your Dad to 'F-off' in the middle of a row about being outside playing football when you've been told to wash the car/

Result: Being chased round and round the garden until your younger brother is laughing so hard that you start to laugh too, then your Dad laughs. Then, as you walk indoors, while still laughing, you get a wallop round the back of the head.

Conclusion: Dad's are evil bastards and just because they are laughing, doesn't mean you've been forgiven.
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 14:55, Reply)

Fireworks & Thinners
There was four of us, I suppose we must have been in our early 20s (old enough to know better, young enough for it not to matter). Three of the four were students, all spending their summers working for the 4th (trevor) who had a small joinery workshop in a barn deep in the sussex countryside. It is also worth pointing out that Trevor was, at the time, a p/t fireman.

It was hot, we were hot and bored with whatever it was that we were supposed to be doing. This called for the obvious step of taping a firework upside down in to the neck of a barrel of paint thinners. There was only a few inches of the volatile liquid left in the bottom - can't do any harm. Wrong.... It wasn't the resulting explosion (more of a 'whoomph' actually) it was more the fireball that was so impressive. Well, it would have been impressive if we had been able to see it properly.
You see, it was obscured from clear view, obscured by the fact that we had placed the barrel in the back of Trevor's van... Not such a good plan
(conanow, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 14:54, Reply)

Purple lips
I once attempted to create a vacuum by putting a pint glass over my mouth and chin and sucking the air out with a valve like action, hard to describe, try it. I sucked so hard and so long that it caused the blood to come to the surface of my skin leaving me with a purple circle all over my mouth and chin which lasted for several days. I had to put on some of my mum's foundation in the hope that the kids at school wouldn't take the piss. They just took the piss because I was wearing make-up instead.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 14:49, 2 replies)

Here it is:


Conclusion? Gravity pulls stuff down!
( Squiggy Alloria makes theme parks., Thu 24 Jul 2008, 14:47, 2 replies)

Beads have holes in them, so do nostrils...
So that means if I put this bead up my nostril, I will be able to breath through it, and so I could. So then I put my finger in to take it out, but what I actually succeeded in doing was pushing it further up, so I pushed my finger in further to get it, and further in it went, rupturing something and causing a nosebleed. I couldn't blow it out, because of the hole, not that I could have thought of that in my terrified five year old state. My dad took a look with a flashlight (once he got a whiff that something was wrong) and concluded that he couldn't get it out, so it was off to A&E where a nice doctor put a set of curved forceps up my snout, took the bead out and gave it back to me.
I did later repeat the 'will it go up my nose' experiment, but only with things that could be safely blown out.
(pins, Thu 24 Jul 2008, 14:47, Reply)