Science is everywhere.

Saturday was the start of the annual Cambridge Science Festival. There was a massive fair of kid-friendly science experiments, and I volunteered to run the "cornflour" activity.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/strange-cornflour-slime/

Basically you mix cornflour and water to make a goo that looks like a liquid but when you apply pressure to it then it feels like a solid. So you can trickle it through your fingers like a liquid but if you punch it then it acts like a solid and resists your punch. And it gets EVERYWHERE - a serious scientific mess. (The educational idea is to get kids to think about what liquids and solids are, and to have them practice observing and describing an experience like touching this totally bizarre liquid/solid.)

As you can imagine, kids LOVE this, especially little kids. So I was explaining/supervising/playing in the goo with a couple of kids, and one of them had something huge hanging from his nose. I was staring at him, trying to figure out if it was cornflour-and-water goo or a more natural goo, when an adult standing behind me started laughing. He was also looking at the kid, whose nose goo was looking less and less like cornflour, and then he looked at me and said, "Well, it's all about viscosity, isn't it?"

And it WAS... on so many levels.