You gotta love guys who have fun with chemical processes.
Here's a great video with that well known wry/sly british humor (I love how they refer to flower pots as timed delivery devices), where guys do some fun/destructive things with thermite reactions.
For those not in the know, although you will get a lot better sense of what a thermite reaction is from the video, you get a thermite reaction when you ignite a mixture of aluminum and iron powders.
The program that it was taken from 'Brainiac: Science Abuse' is on TV quite a lot over here, and has other such enjoyable experiments as 'how to use an old record player to blow up a caravan' and 'how long does it take to make our volunteers throw from motion sickness using mechanism X'.
All in all a classic of TV programming (and also more seriously a great way to get kids interested in science). In the same way that when I went to an open day at a local University a few years back the Chemistry course was jam packed after the demonstration of contact explosives from the presenting post-grad. If you want to entice kids into science - blow stuff up.
Posted by: Ross | Monday, January 23, 2006 at 11:19 AM