Water Balz Jumbo Polymer Balls

Such cute, bouncy little music from a video about fun, deadly little toys.

Ok, deadly might be an overstatement, but the jumbo growing spheres available from various companies have been recalled because, as written on the US Consumer Product Safety Commission's website...

The soft and colorful product can be easily mistaken by a child for candy. When the marble-sized toy is ingested, it can expand inside a child’s body and cause intestinal obstructions, resulting in severe discomfort, vomiting, dehydration and could be life threatening. The toys do not show up on an x-ray and require surgery to be removed from the body.

That's a bit of a bummer as the gel spheres are great in class for demonstrating index of refraction, lensing in an eyeball, crosslinked polymers, and osmosis & diffusion and as a medium for watching seed germination. Some companies - including Education Innovations, a favorite of the ASM teachers camp program - are still selling the spheres in smaller sizes, but it appears that the giant spheres are no longer available because they can sort of stop of the intestines.

Which is bad...

...but isn't as bad as ingesting Aqua Dots would be.

Young Scientist Winner - sodium polyacrylate filled 'sandbags'

The greatest inventions seem so obvious after somebody else comes up with them.

Peyton Robertson's sodium-polyacrylate-and-salt-filled 'sandbags' are no different. Of course filling sandbags with sodium polyacrylate is a brilliant idea.

Of course you'd need to add something to increase the density so the bags don't float away.

Of course salt would be the easiest thing to add because it's cheap and can adjust the density of the swollen sandbag easily.

Of course the sodium ions would decrease the swelling of the sodium polyacrylate, so you'd need more sodium polyacrylate.

Of course I never would've come up with this and am absolutely blown away by Peyton's idea.

Check out the rest of the finalists here.

Barricade Fire Gel on the DIY Network

"This is basically a do-it-yourself fire blocker..."

Yup, that's about right.

The comparison of the untreated and untreated sides of the 'house' is stunning, and the application of the sodium polyacrylate is absolutely brilliant.

I'm stunned that the host has the faith to put his Barricade-coated hand over the torch. That's some faith in the product.

If I lived in a different part of the country (not in southern Ohio, as I am), I'm thinking I would stock Barricade by the tankful.