We Dare You!: Hundreds of Science Bets, Challenges, and Experiments You Can Do at Home

INTRODUCTION: A WINNING STREAK

Bet you can get hooked on this book after trying only one trick. Pick any page. Try any trick. It looks like you will have to go against all odds. Your first reaction, which is only normal, is that these challenges are s-o-o-o ridiculously crazy or impossible only a fool would even try. But we bet you can do them … and we’re no fools.

You can’t lose because these are all fixed bets. In each one the odds are stacked … and they are all in your favor. We guarantee you’re going to win. We’re betting on a sure thing when we say you’ll be hooked on these challenges. That’s the best part of these tricks. No question about it, winning is fun.

Creating this book was fun, too. Kathy went over to Vicki’s house to play. We played with TV remotes. We blew bubbles, sent each other secret messages, stabbed balloons, made nutty putty, tied bones in knots, ripped apart disposable diapers, cut up rubber balls, munched Life Savers, and set nuts on fire. We had some amazing experiences. Would you believe that you can make your lips lie to you? That you can set a speed record for unrolling toilet paper? Or that it’s possible to give artificial respiration to a fly? And how about making fireworks from a grape or a saw from kitchen cleanser? These things sound outrageous and they are. They are also true.

How do we know? We did each trick. (We also tried a lot more that didn’t work. Flops and bombs didn’t make the cut.) Nothing beats doing it yourself—except maybe sharing it. While we were researching this book, friends, family, even the mail carrier, looked forward to hearing us yell, You gotta try this! We laughed a lot. No doubt other grown-ups would think we were weird. Too bad for them. We know fun when we’re having it. We figure you do, too.

What you might not know is that the winning formulas in this book are all fixed by science. The odds were stacked at the beginning of time by Mother Nature. It took some of the greatest minds in the history of the world to figure out what was really happening. Galileo, Newton and a number of others saw beyond the limits of human senses and experiences. They reasoned and experimented and figured out why some obviously easy things just won’t work and why some seemingly impossible things will. Now you can cash in on their discoveries.

Science is a way of knowing by trying. So don’t take our word for it. It’s not in the spirit of science to believe what you read or to believe what someone tells you. This book is the key.

Surprise yourself. Fool your friends. Amaze your parents. Outsmart your teachers. With Mother Nature as your secret ally, you can overcome some of the most amazing challenges you’ve ever heard of. You’re bound to have a good time. We’ll bet on it!

—Vicki Cobb & Kathy Darling

1. THE HUMAN WONDER

Who is the Human Wonder? It’s not Superman, Wonder Woman, or even the Incredible Hulk. It’s someone with the power of science. Surprise! It’s you.

You can perform superhero acts you didn’t know were possible. We’re going to reveal some of your unbelievable powers in this chapter. The Incredible Hulk may well envy your ability to hold down someone with a single thread, and you can outsuper Superman with secret messages sent by your blood.

You’re better connected in some ways than you thought you were. Would you believe your upper lip has a direct link to your temperature sensors? So does your heart. Brainless connections also exist between your nose and your ears. Some messages aren’t sent through the brain.

Muscles can act as if they have minds of their own, making moves that are out of your control. And in a real brain bypass, the spinal cord can be tricked to give you a fake fright.

On the other hand, don’t believe what you see or trust what you hear, smell, or feel as you do some of the tricks in this chapter. Your senses can fool you. So can your body. The way you perceive the world is not always the way it really is. This allows us to include a crazy bunch of specialized con games—a trip into the world of inner space—for your own mind and body. You’ll think you have taken leave of your senses as we trick your eyes with an optical illusion, prove that the hand is not always quicker than the eye, fix it so one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing, and set it up so that your body will disobey your mind. You can be tricked into seeing spots that aren’t really there, and in our version of a truly tasteless joke, an apple seems to be a potato.

The most surprising thing of all is that these talents have been there all along. But most people can’t use these quirks of taste, touch, and sight without the kind of help we’re going to give you. The capacity of the human mind and body has long fascinated scientists. Their testing, stressing, and pushing of the limits of the human being have led to many useful discoveries. This chapter probably will not introduce things that will make medical history. The Human Wonders were selected for the highest possible fun and stun factors . . . but this is just the beginning ...

Welcome to science—up close and personal.

KEEPING THE LIDS ON

Bet you can roll your eyeballs so that you can’t open your eyes!

THE SETUP

Roll your eyeballs so that you are looking up as high as you can. Do not tilt your head backward. Now close your eyes. Keep your eyeballs in the raised position and try to open your eyes.

INSIDER INFORMATION

This is impossible. The muscles that are required to raise the eyelids are already hard at work in the opposite direction keeping the eyeballs looking upward. In fact, there are many people who can’t even shut their eyes with their eyeballs rolled back. So if you are one of these, shut your eyelids and roll back your eyeballs under your closed eyelids. Now try to open your eyelids.

HOT STUFF

Bet you can taste hot peppers with your wrist!

THE SETUP

Place a few drops of Tabasco sauce on the inside of your wrist. Wait a few minutes. In a few minutes you will definitely feel a burning sensation on your wrist. The burning sensation is not as great as the burning sensation you would feel on your tongue, which has the most receptors for the hot chemicals. These are not taste receptors but pain receptors.

In Tabasco sauce and other hot spices there is a chemical that triggers nerves that respond to hotness. Be sure to wash the Tabasco sauce off your wrist with soap and water when you have finished the experiment. Hot peppers can cause irritation over a prolonged period.

OUT OF TOUCH WITH REALITY

Bet you can’t tell hot from cold!

THE SETUP

You will need three bowls of water: One cold, one very warm, and one room temperature. Soak your left hand in the cold water and your right hand in the hot water for about three minutes. Then, plunge both hands into the bowl of room temperature water. Is the water hot or cold?

INSIDER INFORMATION

You will not be able to answer because the water feels both hot and cold. The brain is getting conflicting signals from your hands. One says the water is cold; the other says it’s hot. You will be thoroughly confused.

Hot and cold are relative terms and depend on what you use as a reference. Here you use two different references. The hand that has been in the cold water now feels hot. The hand that’s been in the hot water now feels cold.

MISSING THE POINT

Bet you can’t make two pencil points meet on one try!

THE SETUP

Take a sharp pencil in each hand. Hold your hands about two feet apart and with the pencil points facing each other. Close one eye. Keep it closed! Now try to get the points to meet.

INSIDER INFORMATION

This trick proves that you can’t always believe your eyes. You can’t bring the points together because you eliminate binocular vision (vision from two separate vantage points) when you close one eye. Binocular vision helps your brain calculate the distance of an object. When one eye is covered, the familiar depth cues are missing. Depth perception is most difficult on objects as close together as the pencils. And the margin for error with targets as small as the pencil points is enormous.

Practice will make you perfect in this stunt. The body learns other ways to judge depth when given practice. See if you can get the pencil points to meet after a few more tries. Bet you can!

ONLY BY A THREAD ...

Bet you can hold a friend on the ground with a thread!

THE SETUP

Get a friend to lie face up on the ground. Hold the ends of a piece of thread about two feet long in your hands. Place the middle of the thread under your friend’s nose. Now let your friend attempt to stand up.

INSIDER INFORMATION

The thread victim will have to lie helplessly on the floor. The reason? The upper lip is an extremely sensitive spot. It hurts too much to try to break a thread held there. It won’t take much force, on your part, to keep a good friend down.

Your friend is not the only one with a touchy upper lip. You can lead a bull around with ring in his sensitive nose area. And cowboys subdue a wild horse with a nose string called a twitch.

TIGHTWAD’S DILEMMA

Bet you can’t crumple a sheet of newspaper into a wad with one hand!

THE SETUP

Take a double-page sheet of newspaper and crumple it into a tightly compressed ball. Use both hands. Set this ball aside. With one hand, grasp the edge of another double-page sheet of newspaper and try to crumple it into the same tightly packed ball. This time you must use only one hand for the task. The newspaper may not be pushed against anything and you must get the same-sized ball you got with the two-hand crush.

NOTE

Choose a subject with fairly small hands for this trick. A man with gigantic hands might come close enough to claim he is a winner.

INSIDER INFORMATION

Most people underestimate the size of a sheet of newspaper. It soon fills the normal-sized hand, leaving only the tops of a few fingers free to deliver power to crumple the remainder. Even if you are big-handed enough to wrinkle up the entire sheet, you will not be able to compress it. The fully extended hand cannot cover enough of the surface of the sphere-shaped wad. To compress a sphere, pressure must be exerted over most of the surface.

TIME TO GET CRACKING

Bet you can’t crack a knuckle twice in five minutes!

THE SETUP

Cracking your knuckles is easy, but we bet you can’t crack any particular joint twice in five minutes. So take out your watch and get cracking. First, crack the joint until no more popping noises are heard. Then begin the timing. Another pop in the same knuckle within the five-minute limit wins.

INSIDER INFORMATION

The minor medical mystery of knuckle cracking has been investigated by a number of scientists. This is how far they’ve gotten. Joints have fluid in them containing dissolved carbon dioxide. When the joint is stretched, the pressure is reduced (because you’ve made the joint larger) and gas bubbles pop out of solution. (You’ve seen this phenomenon when a bottle of soda is opened.) Scientists believe that these gas bubbles are involved in the knuckle-cracking sound but they are not quite sure how the bubbles produce the sound. X-rays of stretched knuckles show bubbles of gas. The gas in the knuckles can’t escape from the joint. But it takes about fifteen minutes for them to be reabsorbed. So that’s how long you must wait before you can crack again!

SHAKY ODDS

Bet you can’t hold your hand still!

THE SETUP

Unfold a paper clip. Smooth out all the bumps and bend it into a V shape. Put the V upside down on the back edge of a table knife. Hold the knife over a table with the ends of the wire resting lightly on the table. Try to hold the wire still.

NOTE

You may not rest your hand on the table or any other object.

INSIDER INFORMATION

The strangest part about this walking wire is that the harder you try to hold your hand still, the faster the wire walks down the back of the knife. Muscles are made up of cells that exist in alternating states of contraction and relaxation. When you contract your muscles to hold a position, only some muscle cells are in a state of contraction. Others are relaxing and recovering, getting ready to take their turn. This constant changeover creates a very slight motion or tremor that can’t be seen easily. The walking wire magnifies this motion. The harder you try to hold your hand steady, the harder you muscles are working and the greater the difference between the tensed and relaxed parts of the muscle.

TIGHTFISTED ABOUT MONEY

Bet you can’t drop a penny held between two fingers!

THE SETUP

Place the tips of your ring fingers together. Fold the other fingers down so the knuckles touch. Have an assistant put a penny between the tips of your ring fingers. Now try to open your fingers and drop the penny. You may not slide your fingers apart.

The ring fingers cannot move independently of the other fingers. Ligaments connect them to the other digits, especially the middle finger. When the middle finger is immobilized, so is the ring finger. The penny is trapped.

Some people, especially pianists, have stretched the ligaments that control the free motion of the ring fingers. When just the middle fingers are restricted, the ring fingers can still move. However, if the knuckles of all three other fingers are made to touch, even musicians can’t make the penny drop.

QUICK BUCK

Bet you can’t catch a dollar bill!

THE SETUP

Put a lengthwise crease in a new dollar bill. Hold it at one end with your thumb and index finger. Have someone place their thumb and index finger around the bill. They must now try to catch the bill when you drop it.

INSIDER INFORMATION

Here is one case where the hand is not quicker than the eye. Don’t worry. Nobody is going to get their hands on your money, because their reflexes will be too slow. The catching mechanism works like this: the sight of the bill dropping must register in the brain, which then sends a message to the fingers. Although this relay takes less than a second, it’s too long.

It is possible to catch a dollar on the drop, but only if you are the one doing both the dropping and the catching. Your proprioceptive sense (sense of your own body movements) coordinates the movement of your hands. The hand that catches the dollar reacts to the message activating the release, not the sight of the dropping bill. Sight is not involved when you are both dropper and catcher. Prove it by doing the drop/catch with your eyes closed.

FOOT FEAT

Bet you can tell shoe sizes without looking at feet!

THE SETUP

Measure the distance from your elbow to your wrist. Then measure the length of your foot.

INSIDER INFORMATION

Nobody would guess it, but the two measurements are the same. Your body has some very surprising proportions. It’s hard to believe that the distance around a closed fist is also the length of your foot. Still another fooler is that the distance from fingertip to fingertip of your outstretched arms is the same as your height.

The convenience of such portable measuring devices led to the use of the parts of the body as linear measurements: the first knuckle of the thumb (inch), the foot, the distance from fingertip to nose (yard), and the hand (four inches), which is used to measure horses.

A TONGUE LASHING

Bet you can suffer excruciating pain from a can of soda!

THE SETUP

Open a can of soda and pour it into a glass. See how long you can keep your tongue stuck in it. Bet you don’t last a minute. Most people can’t stand the pain and you can use this to stage a pain endurance contest with your friends to see who is the toughest. You feel pain because there is a chemical in your mouth that changes the carbon dioxide in the soda bubbles into carbonic acid—a weak acid that your tongue finds irritating. When you drink soda, you swish it around in your mouth and no one place gets too stung. Holding your tongue in place makes sure it gets such a strong dose of the irritant that you eventually have to remove it.

Scientists did two experiments to discover the source of the pain from carbonated beverages. In one experiment they gave the drinkers a drug that blocked the ability of the mouth to change the carbon dioxide bubbles into acid. They felt no sting. In another experiment people drank soda in a high-pressure chamber used by deep sea divers. Here the bubbles stayed in solution. Nevertheless, the people felt the sting as their mouths changed the dissolved carbon dioxide into the acid.

WRITE WRONG

Bet you can write backwards!

THE SETUP

Hold an index card against your forehead. Write a word on the card going from your left to your right (using cursive script if you can). Imagine you are writing normally. Don’t stop to think about it.

INSIDER INFORMATION

When you look at what you’ve written it will be stranger than a hieroglyphic and just as hard to read. But hold it up to a mirror or turn the paper over and hold it up to the light and lo and behold it’s legible! Amazingly, you have perfected mirror writing. Ordinarily you would not be able to do this, but when you hold the paper against your forehead, the right and left sides of your brain get confused and a mirror or backward image of normal writing occurs. Some people can do mirror writing with a paper in front of them. Leonardo da Vinci was one, the famous scientist and artist from the fifteenth century. He wrote backwards to keep others from reading his ideas.

A NOSE JOB

Bet you can hang a spoon on the end of your nose!

THE SETUP

For this trick, use any nose and any metal teaspoon. Heat the bowl of a spoon either by rubbing it with your hand or placing it in a cup of hot liquid. When the spoon is warm, tilt back your head just slightly and let the bowl of the spoon run down the top of your nose, with the handle hanging down. As you return your head to its normal position, the spoon will stick to the end of your nose and hang there. Some people have been known to hang spoon for several hours. Good spoon hangers can talk and even laugh during the experience.

INSIDER INFORMATION

We honestly don’t know why this trick works. We think the spoon sticks because the heat from the metal causes the tissues of the nose to swell slightly and conform to the shape of the spoon. But we are only guessing.

This is a stunt that some people can do the first time they try it. Others have to practice a few times before they get the hang of it. If you aren’t one of the lucky first-timers, continue rubbing the bowl to heat it and stroking the spoon down the top of your nose. The effort is well worth it, for this is a mysterious and amusing stunt that is guaranteed to get you noticed in any restaurant.

DISJOINTED DIGIT

Bet you can make your finger hang loose!

THE SETUP

Hold your hand with the fingers extended straight out. Bend the ring finger down at the second joint but keep the other fingers fully extended. Flick the tip of the ring finger repeatedly with the index finger of the other hand.

INSIDER INFORMATION

Weirdness reigns! The fingertip appears to be disjointed and wobbles up and down with each flick.

The bones are held together with strong ropelike connections called ligaments, and the muscles are attached to the bones by ropelike connectors called tendons. When you bend your ring finger the ligaments and tendons holding the tip of your finger are completely relaxed. Your finger joint wobbles freely at a mere touch but you can’t move it without outside help. The same phenomenon occurs with your other fingers but not to the same extent as with your ring finger. The disjointed fingertip doesn’t work if you bend all your fingers or if you extend all your fingers straight out. Try it. Strangeness itself!

NEW MOON?

Bet you can make a full moon shrink!

THE SETUP

This illusion has two parts:

Look at a full moon after it has risen. The moon should be near the horizon.

Next, view the moon through a little window you make from the space between the thumb and forefingers of each hand with the fingertips touching each other. Hold the tiny window close to one eye. View only the moon. Don’t let any of the objects on the ground enter your little viewing window.

INSIDER INFORMATION

The shrinking moon illusion has been known for hundreds of years. Although the ancients realized the moon seems much smaller when it is high in the sky, the reason behind this illusion is still not completely understood.

Scientists have measured our perceptions, and we see the moon as two and a half to three and a half times larger near the horizon than high in the sky. The best theory to explain this phenomenon is that the moon appears larger when it is near identifiable objects. When you remove these visual cues by blocking them out with your fingertip window or by waiting until the moon is high in the sky, the moon appears to shrink. In the case of your tiny window the shrinkage is instant.

BLOOD TELLS!

Bet you can write a secret message without using any ink!

THE SETUP

Use your fingernail to scratch a message on the inside part of your forearm. Do not break the skin. The words will appear lighter than your skin color for a moment and then disappear. Later, when you wish to reveal the message, rub your arm briskly and the word will appear in blood-red letters.

INSIDER INFORMATION

When you scratch your arm you are scraping away dead skin cells. Brisk rubbing of the arm increases heat at that spot and stimulates the blood flow. The letters of the message appear red because the skin over them is thinner and more transparent than the skin that has not been scraped. The blood shows through. Your secret message still will be readable ten or fifteen minutes after you have written it.

A TASTELESS TRICK

Bet you can fool your taste buds!

THE SETUP

Hold your nose and put a pinch of dry coffee in your mouth. Can you identify the coffee taste? Chew it. Let it dissolve on your tongue. Roll it around your mouth. Do anything . . . but don’t let go of your nose.