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Kevin Sturge sent me a link to the Eepybird’s video (embedded below) showing a Bellagio-like display featuring Diet Coke and Mentos in lieu of traditional fountains. It was hilarious. Apparently I’m one of the last to know about this as the Eepybird video has been seen 6 million times already. A Google search of “Diet Coke Mentos” yields 3.8M results. Heck, it was even on the David Letterman Show. Clearly, I’m late to the party!
The Eepybird Video (101 2 liter bottles of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos)
Want to see this on your iPod? Your iPod Movies has over 100,000,000 files.
Seeing this got me thinking, what causes this reaction? Carbonation? Is there some special ingredient?
Now serendipity steps in, I sit down to watch some TV last night and lo and behold the MythBusters are queued up on my ReplayTV with an episode devoted to, drum roll please, Diet Coke + Mentos! What are they setting out to do?
- Find out what causes the reaction (just saved me a few hours of tinkering)
- Compete to see how high they can send a stream of Diet Coke into the air (saved me a few hours of fun)
- Build a Diet Coke/Mentos powered rocket (you’ll have to watch this to see the results)
- Discover some more interesting home concoctions (I liked the methane soap bubble trick)
It turns out that Diet Coke and Mentos were made for each other. The carbonation does play a big role, but it doesn’t work alone. I encourage you to watch the MythBusters episode for details.
Spoiler alert (if you are going to watch the episode, stop reading now.)
The active ingredients are: Diet Coke has aspartame (artificial sweetner), caffeine (rush), and phosphoric acid (a preservative) in addition to carbonation that aid in the reaction. Mentos have gelatin, gum arabic, and many, many microscopic nooks and crannies that aid the reaction. The reaction itself is termed as nucleation, that is the extraction of the gas en masse in a short time period which aids the energy release.
Go out and have some fun, try it yourself!
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Technorati Tags: Diet Coke Mentos | Nucleation | MythBusters
My wife heard me cracking up while I watched this. I really liked the Mentos ad at the end of the video – Wendy’s response was that Mentos are already hard to find and this is only going to make it worse!
Jay
I am a middle school teacher who is always looking for new and unusual ways to get my students involved and motivated. On our first day this year we are going to perform the Mentos and Coke “experiment” using different sodas and of course a lot of scientific method. It’s such a great activity.
Goals – Theres no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. Theres no telling what you can do when you believe in them. Theres no telling what will happen when you act upon them.
– Jim Rohn [E. James Rohn] American Motivational Speaker
This is so awesome
Love the menots diet coke experiment. Did it with my 4 year old this weekend and explained what a chemical reaction and how a volcano erupts. He was digging bigtime. We found another cool site with fun science experiments to do. Will post
the link below for anyone interested.
http://weirdsciencekids.com/FunExperiments.html