What's 'activator' or 'magical liquid'?

Most years, I give my students some freedom after the AP chemistry exam. There's still so much more chemistry to learn, but I've completed the required curriculum for the year, so we can explore a few cul de sacs of chemistry.

We've played Minecraft because they told me there was a bunch of actual chemistry involved - which turned out to be kind of true. There's certainly a whole bunch of material science involved.

I've also had them research chemistry programs as universities around the midwest, practice and perform a demonstration for my non-AP course, and honestly - write a blog post for my chemistry blog. 

Today's post, however, is about the time my students asked if they could just make slime. We make polyvinyl alcohol slime in first year chemistry, but they wanted to make glue (which I recognize is often PVA-based) slime. One of the students said she had a gallon of Elmer's school glue at home from her Covid lockdown slime days (apparently slime-making was a thing for many school-age students during Covid lockdown?)

In discussing what they could bring in, other students in the class offered to provide shaving cream (apparently to make 'cloud' slime - a fluffy variation), small fruit-shaped slime charms, glitter, and non-staining food coloring. I, generous sort that I am, offered my leftover borax solution from the crystal making experiment early in our matsci curriculum. It's a little more than the 4% concentration called for in most slime recipes, but it's close enough.

One of the students asked me if the borax solution took the place of the activator. I'd never heard of an 'activator' solution before, so I started looking around online.

Apparently the borax solution + PVA/glue solution with which I am most familiar has some alternatives - sort of. There's the 'borax-free' variety using baking soda and contact solution, but the contact solution has to contain boric acid - which would be neutralized into...um...sodium borate (aka borax) with the addition of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). There's also the option to just purchase pre-mixed activators, one of which - shown in the image - is Elmer's Magical Liquid.

With a quick check of the Magical Liquid's SDS, I see that it's a solution of boric acid, sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride (?), and a couple of anti-microbial agents. The various concentrations seem lower than I would have thought: <1% boric acid, 1-5% sodium bicarbonate, <1% sodium chloride, and <0.5% of each of the preservatives. I'm feeling too lazy to do the math to do actual calculations, but I'm pretty sure the combined percentages - discounting the bicarbonate and the chloride masses - would come out decently below the 4% of the borax solution I'm used. Wonder if that's just a case of commerce allowing for the lower concentration leading to more needing to be purchased.

At $17 per quart (from Amazon as of 6/7/26 when I'm typing this up), the magical liquid has to be a high margin item for Elmer's. It's more expensive if you want your slime to be green-apple-scented. Sadly the cherry limeade scent looks to be sold out and might be out of production now - even though Elmer's still has it listed on their website.

Cherry limeade's my favorite...grape's favorite, too.

Artist Transforms Found Books into Sparkling Crystallized Sculptures

Source - https://www.alexisarnold.com/#/crystallized-books/

That's either a really sad ending for a great book or a great repurposing of an awful book.

Either way, that's a book that's been soaked in a borax solution and left to crystalize.

It's kind of cool looking.

I'll let Alexis Arnold describe her own creation, a part of the Crystallized Books series...

The Crystallized Book Series addresses the materiality versus the text or content of a book. The crystals remove the text and solidify the books into aesthetic, non-functional objects. The books, frozen with crystal growth, have become artifacts or geologic specimens imbued with the history of time, use, and memory. 

I kind of dig it and might make one of those myself. I can't imagine it would be too tough to make. I already know how to make a borax solution. I assume the soaking isn't too tough. And lord knows I've grown enough borax crystals by just letting the solution evaporate.

Thoughts?

Source - https://www.alexisarnold.com/#/crystallized-books/

BORAX: What it is, how to use it, and how to cook it down PROPERLY

Wait for it...wait for it...

I promise you there's a punchline coming in this one, but it takes about 4:50 of set-up to get to the punchline.

What Trent (as previously featured) shows us here is the results of heating borax as a flux in blacksmithing of steel. He shows, initially, what happens when you pour borax straight onto heated steel. The borax bubbles up and doesn't necessarily stick right when it's been poured. Because of that, according to Trent anyway, some blacksmiths will 'cook down' their borax resulting in glassy beads (as previously featured) that can then be pulverized and used as a non-bubbling flux.

I get the feeling that Trent might not exactly see this as a necessary step.

The science of what's happening seems to be pretty straight forward

First off, borax is actually sodium borate (or maybe sodium tetraborate) decahydrate (Na₂B₄O₇·10 H₂O) (source).

Initially, the puffing seems to be from a simple loss of the water of hydration (the ·10 H₂O part of the formula).

Then the borax seems to decompose into sodium metaborate and boric anhydride through this reaction (source & source).

Na₂B₄O₇ ⟶ 2 NaBO₂ + B₂O₃ 

This appears to be the same reaction that causes the creation of the borax glass beads.

When the beads pick up colors, one source says that the color comes from the formation of metallic borate compounds such as Co(BO₂)₂. That's not relevant to this video, though.

Here we just get to have fun seeing Trent rant again.

Borax glass beads - who knew?

One of the issues that we run into with our material science students is that their attendance in awful. We teach them in a largely hands-on, lab-based class, and they don't come to school as regularly as we would like them to.

To work around that problem, we often try to find - or we're beginning to produce our own - videos showing what we did in lab. Yes, we want the students to be present and do the lab on their own. Second best is to have them come in and make up the lab outside of class, but that's not always possible - or something they're willing to do. The final option is to just say 'watch this video and answer the questions.'

This past year I went looking for a video showing our borax bead lab and didn't have much luck.

Along the way, however, I learned that there's a chemical analysis technique to identify ions in solution that's pretty similar to our borax bead lab. The technique was apparently invented by Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1812 and involved forming a colorless borax bead on a platinum (or nichrome) wire. The colorless bead is then dipped lightly into a solution and reheated. Each ion them produces a characteristic color in the oxidizing and reducing portion of the flame.

It's remarkably similar to what we're doing in class, though we're getting the atoms and ions from the wire directly. Which leaves me with a question - we get a color from nichrome wire, but the test directions suggest that a colorless bead can be produced from the nichrome wire. Can anyone explain that seeming contradiction? Are we just heating our bead longer than recommended in the test protocol?



Notice the paper notes written in an Indian language.



Interesting to use a soda lime glass rod as the substrate for the borax bead.



I like the colors.



Interestingly, many of the videos I found explaining the test were taught by Eastern European or Indian speakers. I assume the borax bead test has fallen out of favor in the US - because of more instrumentation availability - but is still part of a chemistry curriculum in other nations?



Some ions apparently require the use of UV light to distinguish their identities.

You Won[']t Believe What Super Glue Does in Borax

If you're going to try this yourself, make sure to do this in a well ventilated area. As you can see at 4:58 (and onward), the fume that come off of any large amount of super glue require a lot of ventilation.

That being said, I have absolutely no idea why you would want to recreate this experiment at home.

I can't personally come up with any way to turn the immediate, catalytic solidification of cyanoacrylate glue in borax into something useful for class.

Does anybody out there in the blogosphere have any ideas about how to turn this into something useful?

How To: Forge Sterling Silver with Drac (metallurgy modding like a boss)

Debbie and I started to play 'count the mistakes' in Drac's explanations in this video.

Acetone torch? No, probably acetylene torch.

He wants the un-exposed pieces to slag with the rest of it? No, he probably doesn't want slag.

Why would he be using copper tongs? Copper conducts heat wonderfully. (Though copper does at least melt at a higher temperature, +1085C, than does silver, + 962C.)

I thought that saying he was annealing the silver and quenching it was contradictory, but the wikipedia article says otherwise "Unlike ferrous metals—which must be cooled slowly to anneal—copper, silver and brass can be cooled slowly in air, or quickly by quenching in water."

The thickness actually does not matter? I would think that it would matter.

[The silver] came out of the pickle? He put the silver in a gherkin? Oh, nevermind, he's right on that one.

I'm pretty sure they're troy ounces, not trojan ounces.

All that being said, he does end up with a few hundred bucks in his hand. Maybe he could use that to buy a better microphone so we don't hear his torch drowning out his voice.