Glow in the Dark Mountain Dew
Tuesday October 16, 2007
There is a really cool video circulating the internet (I saw it on Metacafe, but it's hosted elsewhere, too) where a guy takes a 20-oz bottle of Mountain Dew™, pours all but about a quarter inch of it into a glass, then adds about a quarter teaspoon of baking soda and 3 capfuls of hydrogen peroxide to the nearly-empty bottle. He puts the cap back on the bottle, shakes it, and it glows with an incredible eerie green light. I thought.. oooh... there's an awesome Halloween project! Unfortunately, it doesn't work, or at least it didn't work for my test subject. He added more baking soda, more peroxide, more Mountain Dew. He tested the peroxide to make sure it was still active. I think this project is a dud. If you get it to work, by all means let me know. I suspect the maker of the video probably had some zinc sulfide in with his baking soda.
There are projects you can try that actually do glow in the dark. You can make glow in the dark ink. Your fingers may glow from the smoking fingers trick. (Warning: both projects involve phosphorus, which is toxic). It's much easier and safer to get a glow from phosphorescence or fluorescence, such as under a black light. Stay tuned... I did come up with a glow-in-the-dark project you can try. It's for glow-in-the-dark slime. While I'm working on the instructions, feel free to make one of the non-glowing slimes, since the glowing slime basically is a variation on one of the standard recipes.
There are projects you can try that actually do glow in the dark. You can make glow in the dark ink. Your fingers may glow from the smoking fingers trick. (Warning: both projects involve phosphorus, which is toxic). It's much easier and safer to get a glow from phosphorescence or fluorescence, such as under a black light. Stay tuned... I did come up with a glow-in-the-dark project you can try. It's for glow-in-the-dark slime. While I'm working on the instructions, feel free to make one of the non-glowing slimes, since the glowing slime basically is a variation on one of the standard recipes.
Comments
Hey Anne,
The guys added the liquid from a glow stick and the unbroken glass chemical solution before the video was recorded. When he shook the bottle the glass tube broke and created a glow stick. The baking soda and peroxide are just there. They have no effect on anything. Actually, baking soda and peroxide react with eachother and if there is enough of it it can create and explosion based on pressure.
If you watch it closely, you can see that a break in continuity occurs after the person pours the Mountain Dew into the glassinto the glass. During this break is when the contents of a glow stick were added to the Mountain Dew bottle. According to Wikipedia, hydrogen peroxide serves as an activating agent for the glow-stick dye. “It reacts with the ester to form an unstable CO2 dimer which excites the dye to an excited state; the dye emits a photon (light) when it spontaneously relaxes back to the ground state.” I don’t know what the purpose of the baking soda is… apparently just to help activate the hydrogen peroxide, which is why it says, “add a little…” Mountain Dew may have more sugar and caffeine than most sodas, but there’s clearly nothing much different about it otherwise. Just another internet scam.
Rats… sorry about the typo above. lol
I tried it last night with my six year old son watching intensely and sure enough it was a hoax. Damn, wish I would have done a little more research first. My son really likes glow in the dark stuff and I think I had his hopes up. Oh well, that will teach me!
in the video when this happends when the camera zooms in on the baking soda and zooms back out you can see how the bottle has been rotated. the MTN> DEW logo no longer faces the camera insted its the back of the bottle. meaning the bottles were switched while zoomed in.