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Potassium nitrate (saltpeter) is used for many chemistry projects, most notably for making smoke bombs . I've talked about how you can obtain potassium nitrate at a store or online, but you could make it yourself from easy-to-find ingredients. NurdRage has a YouTube video of this simple inorganic chemical reaction (as well as many other cool chemistry videos). Potassium Nitrate Ingredients 40 g ammonium nitrate (from an instant cold pack which has ammonium nitrate listed as its ingredient) 37 g potassium chloride (sold as a salt substitute, with potassium chloride listed as the ingredient) 100 ml water Make Potassium Nitrate Aqueous solutions of ammonium nitrate and potassium chloride are reacted to exchange the ions and form potassium nitrate and ammonium chloride. The ammonium chloride is much more soluble in water than the potassium nitrate, so you will get potassium nitrate crystals, which can be separated from the ammonium chloride solution. NH 4 NO 3 + KCl → K

I've been asked "How do you remove salt from water?" enough times that I suspect finding the answer to the question is a common science assignment. So... how do you do it? You can boil or evaporate the water and the salt will be left behind as a solid. If you want to collect the water, you can use distillation . One way to do this at home would be to boil the saltwater in a pot with a lid. Offset the lid slightly so that the water that condenses on the inside of the lid will run down the side to be collected in a separate container. Congratulations! You've just made distilled water. When all of the water has boiled off, the salt will remain in the pot. Evaporation works the same way, just at a slower rate.

Ernest Rutherford became the first to transmute one element into another. He bombarded nitrogen atoms with alpha particles to create oxygen using the reaction: α + 14 N → 17 O + 1 p

2004 - Mars rover Spirit lands on Mars. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover landed on the surface of Mars. It was designed to act as a wandering robotic geologist to sample the soil in the area near its lander. The original plan was for the rover to travel for 40 meters a day with a lifetime range of 1 kilometer, but is still operational as of its six year anniversary.

Charles Hatchett January 2 nd is Charles Hatchett's birthday. Hatchett was an English chemist who was the first to discover the element niobium. He was working for the British Museum and analyzed a sample of the mineral columbite when he identified a previously unknown element he called columbium. His claim was refuted when another English chemist named William Hyde Wollaston claimed Hatchett's columbium was just another form of the element tantalum. The element was later rediscovered by Heinrich Rose and named niobium. Hatchett stopped working as a scientist and took over his father's business as Royal coach builder. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history .