LaVa LaMpS!!!

What exactly is a lava lamp? Where did it really come from?? Well, in 1963, a man named Edward Craven-Walker invented the lava lamp. His company was named Crestworth and was based in the United Kingdom. He named the lava lamp 'Astro' and had different versions of it. He presented it at a trade show and an entrepreneur named Adolph Wertheimer bought the rights to manufacture it.

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The lava lamp is basically made up of a base, a lamp, and a top cap. The base holds a 40 watt light bulb inside a reflecting cone, and that cone rests on a second cone, which holds the light socket and electrical cord. The lamp consists of two fluids- water and a transparent opaque wax that is slightly more dense than the water at room temperature. Although, it is less dense under warmer conditions, causing the wax to float to the top when heated, causing the "lava" to flow through the lamp. When the wax floats to the top of the lamp it's temperature changes again causing it to sink back to the bottom, and the process keeps repeating.

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In my biology class, we decided to make our own lava lamps. Even though we didn't use a light bulb and wax, we were able to substitute them with oil and alkaseltzer tablets or salt. We used a regular water bottle filled 1/4 the way of with oil, and we filled the rest with water. Oil is hydrophobic and is more dense than water, which caused it to sink to the bottom of the bottle. We added food coloring as well, which allowed the whole process to be easier to see.

Food coloring is hydrophylic, or "water-loving" causing it to mix with the water. When you add alkaseltzer tablets to your mixture, they react and oxidize the water allowing the water mixed with food coloring to float causing it to bubble and look like a lava lamp!! I tried to use salt for mine instead of alkaseltzer tables, but that didn't seem to work as well, but it was still an awesome experiment!!

BACTERIA!!! Antiseptics vs. Disinfectants

In this lab we collected bacteria from different areas in the school including our hands, toilets, sinks, door handles, keyboards, and lockers. We used petri dishes and divided them into six parts. We used sterile cotton swabs to swipe all of our bacteria, and we dipped it into a different liquid for each area to see which worked the best. We used our hands to swap the skin bacteria. The first trial was dipped in distilled water, and the second was dipped in isopropyl alcohol. Rubbing alcohol is an antibacterial product called an antiseptic, because you can use it on surfaces of living things, such as our skin. We use disinfectants on non-living things. For the third trial on skin, we washed our hands but didn't dry them allowing the cotton swab to collect any bacteria left over on our fingers.

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After we swabbed each bacteria we then streaked our swab onto our petri dish in the appropriate section. After we used the skin bacteria, we proceeded onto surface bacteria. This is where the toilets, sinks, and door handles come in handy. My surface that I used for bacteria was the toilet in the high school girl's lockeroom.

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I used the same two liquids for each trial that I used for my skin, except I also used bleach for my third trial. After I allowed the bacteria to grow for 24 hours in the incubator, the bacteria from the toilet using the distilled water had grown the most. The alcohol and bleach evidently was able to kill some of the bacteria, but the water did not. Therefore, I believe the disinfectants worked better than the antiseptic.