Make a truth teller for light. Turn an old CD into a spectroscope to analyze light—you may be surprised by what you see. Try pointing your CD spectroscope at the fluorescent light in your room, sunlit ...

When light reflects from water, asphalt, or other nonmetallic surfaces, it becomes polarized—that is, the reflected light is usually vibrating more in one direction than others. Polarizing sunglasses ...

Now you see it; now you don’t—an object without a sharp edge can fade from your view. A fuzzy-colored dot that has no distinct edges seems to disappear. As you stare at the dot, its color appears to ...

Discover why the sky is blue and the sunset is red. When sunlight travels through the atmosphere, blue light scatters more than the other colors, leaving a dominant yellow-orange hue to the ...

Dark-colored materials absorb and emit energy more readily than light-colored materials.

Make a simple mini-motor. A coil of wire becomes an electromagnet when current passes through it. The electromagnet interacts with a permanent magnet, causing the coil to spin. Voilà! You’ve created ...

The distribution of the mass of an object determines the position of its center of gravity, its angular momentum, and your ability to balance it. Place a lump of clay about the size of your fist ...

You’ve probably seen an ice skater spinning on the tip of one skate suddenly start to spin dramatically faster. A diver or gymnast may also suddenly flip or twist much faster. This speeded-up rotation ...

With polarized light, you can make a stained glass window without glass. Using transparent tape and polarizing material, you can make and project beautifully colored patterns reminiscent of abstract ...

If you try shooting a basket or throwing a ball at a target, you'll probably come pretty close, even on your first try. But when you put on this special set of goggles and try to make the same shots, ...

The pneumatic tire and the chain drive, followed by the development of gears, revolutionized bicycling in the later 1800s. In the last fifteen years, there has been a revolution of sorts in the ...

One of the most exciting exercises I ever did as a kid was to make a scale model of the Solar System. Most of the pictures in my books made the distance between planets seem small and easy to travel.