Air Pressure

Key Concepts

There's air pressure surrounding us everywhere, all the same pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi). You feel the same force on your skin whether you’re on the ceiling or the floor, under the bed or in the shower.

An interesting thing happens when you change a pocket of air pressure - things start to move. This difference in pressure causes movement that creates winds, tornadoes, airplanes to fly, and some of the experiments we’re about to do together.

An important thing to remember is that air always pushes stuff around. While lower pressure does not “pull,” we think of higher pressure as a “push”. The higher pressure inside a balloon pushes outward and keeps the balloon in a round shape.

Experiment & Video

Fountain Bottle Seal a 2-liter soda water bottle (half-full of water) with a lump of clay wrapped around a long straw, sealing the straw to the mouth of the bottle. Blow hard into the straw. SPLASH!!

What happened? As you blow air into the bottle, the air pressure increases inside the bottle. This higher pressure pushes on the water, which gets forced up and out the straw (and up your nose!).

Sneaky Bottles Poke a balloon into a water bottle and stretch the balloon's neck to cover the bottle from the inside. Repeat with other bottle. Using your tack, poke several small holes in the bottom of only ONE of the plastic water bottles. Put your mouth to the bottle and try to inflate the balloon!

What's Going On?

This is a great magic trick to use with the kids. You're trying to expand a balloon, but when you do this in a closed container, space becomes a problem. In the bottle with the hole, air is allowed to leak out, this making more room for the balloon to inflate. With the no-hole bottle, you run into trouble because there's nowhere for the air already inside the bottle to go when the balloon gets larger.

In the next issue, look forward to more science secrets.

Talk soon,

Aurora

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This experiment guide includes:

Over 30 complete experiments...

Defy gravity as you levitate water

Crush a soda can using a few drops of water

Make an indoor corkscrew roller coaster

Stick your kid inside a real bubble

Grow crystals overnight

Create and crack your own geodes

Build a flying machine that shouldn't be able to fly at all

...and much more!

Your kids will be so jazzed about science that they'll be begging to learn more...