Kids Zone stuff:

Voltage Game
Static Electricity Experiments
Build Your Own Compass
Guar Gum Slime
Optical Illusions

What is the point of mucous? Is it just supposed to sit in our nose, keeping our boogers slippery and our sneezes sloppy? Well, not quite. Mucous is actually found in more places than your nose, and has a more important purpose than just being gross.

First of all, mucous can be found all down your throat, covering the inside of your stomach, and coating the insides of your intestines. No, not because you swallowed it, ew! It’s found there because it’s supposed to be there. It has a job to do. In your throat, the mucous helps food slip down easier than if your throat was dry. In your stomach, strong acids break down and digest your food, but the mucous covering the inside of your stomach prevents the acids from eating away at your stomach itself. And the mucous in your intestines helps food slip along all the rest of the way through the digestive system. And that’s just in your body!

Mucous can also be found on all sorts of other creatures, like worms, slugs, snails, and fish, keeping them wet and hydrated, helping them move along, or protecting their delicate tissues from harsh weather and ground, amongst other things.

Wow, mucous is so useful and versatile, it makes you just wish you had a handful of it right now! Well, not a handful of real mucous, but how about a handful of you very own gooey, gross, slippery, slimy, droopy, goopy, fake snot? It’s so disgusting, it HAS to be fun!

Materials you'll need:

• Guar Gum Powder (found in most any health food store)
• Borax Laundry Detergent
• A large, plastic container that can hold at least 500mL (that’s half a Litre), which must have a watertight lid so that nothing leaks out.
• Food coloring, if you want to add some color, but be careful not to spill any on your clothes or make a mess.
• Tap water
• Popsicle Stick
  

What to do:
1) In a separate bowl or cup (NOT your sealable container) make a saturated Borax solution by mixing ¼ cup of Borax to 400mL of water. Saturated means that no more Borax will dissolve into the water, so stir until all of the Borax is dissolved, then keep adding more Borax and stirring, a little at a time, until the Borax you’ve added stops dissolving.

2) Add about ½ teaspoon of Guar Gum Powder to your sealable container.

3) Add 250mL of water to the sealable container (add few drops of the food coloring now, too, if you want to).

4) Seal up the container really tight so nothing leaks out, and then shake it really hard for 5 minutes. Don’t stop shaking it, you need to keep shaking it for the whole five minutes. This might be hard on your arms, so maybe take turns shaking with a friend.

5) Open the sealable container and add 10-15mL of the Borax solution you made earlier. Add 10mL for more liquidy mucous, and 15mL for more solid mucous. Be careful not to add any solid pieces of Borax that haven’t dissolved. All the solid Borax should be sitting at the bottom of the solution, so just take the 10-15mL off the top.

6) Wait about 10-20 seconds, then seal the container tight again and shake it up again for about 10 seconds.

7) Now, unseal the container and take a look at your fake snot. Play around with it with the popsicle stick if you don’t want to get it on your hands, but if you don’t mind getting slimed, you can pick it up and it will stick all together in one, big, goopy mess. If the snot isn’t thick enough, or it’s too thick, then try changing the amount of Borax solution you add, or the amount of Guar Gum Powder you use. Be patient, it might take a few tries to get the snot exactly the way you want. Also, you should have a lot of Borax solution left over, so maybe put it in a jar or another sealable container and use it later to make some more snot when this batch dries up.

What's going on here?
So how did we just do that? How did we go from a liquid and two solids to a gooey, thick snot-substance? Well, in one word, the answer is “polymerization”, but I suppose you’d like to know what that means.

Well, all matter is made out of molecules, and molecules are made out of atoms (described pretty well in the Atom Joke explanation at the bottom of the main kids zone page). The molecules of the water and the Guar Gum are small and free to move around, so that's why they could flow like a liquid, but then we added the Borax. When we added the Borax, a chemical change took place, where the borax molecules started connecting the water molecules and the Guar Gum molecules together in long chains (This process of connecting a bunch of molecules into long chains is called “polymerization” because these chains are called polymers). These long molecule chains get tangled up with one another so they can't move around freely like the water and Guar Gum molecules could, and this made the liquid thicker, gooier and snottier. How gross! Some people might think that science is always polite, proper and clean, but really its “snot”.