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It's fun and easy to use foods and flowers to make your own natural Easter egg dyes. The two main ways to use your own dyes are to add dyes to the eggs when boiling them or to dye the eggs after they have been hard-boiled. It's a lot faster to boil the dyes and eggs together, but you will use several pans if you want to make multiple colors. Dyeing the eggs after they have been cooked takes as many dishes and more time, but may be more practical (after all, most stoves only have four burners!). Try both fresh and frozen produce. Canned produce will produce much paler colors. Boiling the colors with vinegar will result in deeper colors. Some materials need to be boiled to impart their color (name followed by 'boiled' in the table). Some of the fruits, vegetables, and spices can be used cold. To use a cold material, cover the boiled eggs with water, add dyeing materials, a teaspoon or less of vinegar, and let the eggs remain in the refrigerator until the desired color ...

If you celebrate Easter, there are several projects you can do that will add a bit of educational chemistry-related fun to the holiday season. If you want to get an early start, it's fun to dye hollowed eggs before Easter or make a sugar crystal string Easter egg for an Easter decoration.

Would you recognize the drug Rohypnol (roofies) if you saw it? Rohypnol is sometimes called the "date rape drug" because a person who takes the drug may be incapacitated and also unable to recall events which occurred under the influence of the drug. While Rohypnol used to be manufactured as a white pill, which could be crushed and dissolved in a liquid such that it was invisible, the drug is now supplied as a green tablet that contains a blue dye. The dye is intended to be visible if an attempt is made to dissolve the drug in a drink, though obviously the color wouldn't be noticeable in a blue or dark-colored beverage. I've added some quick facts about Rohypnol to my drug facts index so you can learn more about this drug and also see what it looks like.

You can grow this emerald crystal geode by substituting ammonium phosphate for alum (and green food coloring) in this easy geode project.

Violet flames are very easy to make. All you do is sprinkle salt substitute on your fire. Salt substitute contains potassium chloride and potassium bitartrate. If you are familiar with the emission spectra from flame tests, you'll recognize that potassium salts burn violet or purple. To me, the color seems more of a blue-violet, but you can get a more reddish purple if you mix a little strontium from the red fire tutorial in with the salt substitute. Keep in mind, violet is not one of the colors your eyes see really well. The subtle glow of these flames can be completely overwhelmed by the colors from trace impurities. This means two things: (1) Use as pure a fuel as you can. I used Heet™ fuel treatment, which is methanol. If you sprinkle the salt substitute on your wood-burning campfire, the flames will change color but the color won't necessarily be violet. (2) Use salt substitute and not lite salt. Lite salt is a mixture of normal table salt (sodium chloride) with pota...

February 24th marks the passing of Henry Cavendish. Cavendish was a British natural philosopher that made meticulous studies of gases. He made extensive studies of the 'airs' he collected including the discovery of hydrogen. He collected hydrogen by collecting the gas given off by the reaction of metals and strong acids and called it 'inflammable air'. Inflammable air was almost entirely made up of phlogiston, the substance in a body that causes them to burn. He found if he combined three parts inflammable air with seven parts of common air and dropped fire into the mixture, it would make a very loud noise and produce water. He also noted that all of the inflammable air and nearly a fifth of the common air was used up in this experiment. Further investigation found if he mixed two parts of inflammable air with one part dephlogisticated air (oxygen) would produce water. We know this reaction today as: 2 H2 (g) + O2 (g) → H2O (l)