Sweet and Fat: 4 Easy Inquiries You Can Do At Home

"In order to make your little nose clearer, more beautiful and full of happiness, this product is necessary for your nose!" - Jaihe Nose Pegs

Yes.  Oh yes.  Who wouldn't want nose pegs?  Plus, they're "anti-germ & stink-proof"!

They came into my possession (I didn't actually buy them) and I just HAD to find a fun use for them.

Here are 4 inquiries we found valuable, the last one including the ridiculous nose pegs.  (It's okay, you can just hold your nose.)

1. Four different liquids and milk

My friend Lucy introduced me to the classic dish-soap-and-milk experiment, but I added some extra liquids, so this is really four experiments set up in a single invitation to explore.

Here's the original experiment, where dish liquid bonds with the fat in the milk to create stunning movement, made visible by food colouring:

I set up milk, food colouring bottles and these four liquids:

• Treacle
• Oil
• Water
• Dish soap

I left a note saying, "What do you think will happen when you add these liquids to milk?  Predict, then test."  I added a clipboard and pencil for the boys to record their results.

Then I left it for them to discover.

They had fun playing with the different liquids and noticing which ones floated and sank, which ones combined and which didn't.  They tested the dish liquid.  It worked, but not as well as in the above video, probably because we used light milk.  So that led us to inquiry number 2...

2. Effects of dish soap in liquids with varying amounts of fat

We used cream (35% fat), whole milk (3.5%), light milk (1.4%) and ultra light milk (0.3%).

The results were not quite what we expected, due to the viscosity of the cream.  The reaction went on a long time in the cream, but the movement wasn't as widespread as in the milks.  Predictably, the movement was more dramatic in the whole milk than in the lighter milks.

Since we had some milk and cream left over, we decided to try another experiment...

3. Scone taste test

We cooked two different batches of scones, one with milk and one with cream, and did a blind taste test to see if we could pick which was which.  (Tough life, but someone's gotta do it.)

It was easy to tell the cream scones from the milk ones.

Did you know fat is our sixth taste sense?  It's officially called 'oleogustus' and is in addition to sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami tastes.

Apparently there may be a learned component to our taste for fat, too.  I wonder, can that help us tackle the obesity epidemic?  I want my boys to learn to make healthy eating choices but they're all like...

The scone experiment doesn't actually test the oleogustus taste sense:  It's very hard to do that outside a laboratory because foods with varying amounts of fats often have very different textures.  Here's how researchers do it if you're interested.

4. Jelly bean taste test

The scone taste testing led us to want to try some other taste tests.

'Sweet' was the easiest one to experiment with.

My sister gave the boys a box of BeanBoozled Jelly Beans (truly for the daring because some of the flavours are gross), so I left out some jelly beans, a blindfold and the nose pegs.

I wanted to see if we could identify the different tastes of the beans without our sense of smell, or if we would only taste 'sweetness'.

The result:  It was really difficult to distinguish between the flavours, in spite of my extensive experience with lollies!  I couldn't even tell if I got one of the gross ones or their identical-looking delicious counterparts.

Next I think I'd like to try this taste test where you keep a salty cracker in your mouth for an extended period and it eventually turns sweet as the enzymes in your saliva break the starch down into sugar.

These are 4 inquiries we found valuable.  If you enjoyed these, please share them!

Looking for more science inquiries with dish soap?  Try our Harry Potter Chemistry!