More than 60,000 people gathered over the weekend for the annual Maker Faire. The fair showed the work of more than 500 "makers," backyard scientists and craftspeople with a brainy bent. Here are some of the event's most memorable sights.
Fritz Grobe is working fast. He doesn't have long before he and Stephen Voltz will drop 624 Mentos into 104 liters of Diet Coke, unleashing enough energy to pump artificial sweetener and carbonated water all over a crowd of hundreds of cheering onlookers at the annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif.
Look at a Mentos candy under a microscope and you'll find its surface is dense with nooks and crannies, the lab-coated Grobe explains as he screws a nozzle loaded with Mentos onto a bottle of soda. Drop the Mentos into the bottle, and carbondioxide bubbles latch onto the surface of the candy as it drops to the bottom. It's a process called nucleation. The same phenomenon causes clouds to form as water vapor condenses around particles of dust and pollen.
The reaction is explosive--and lots of fun. (More than 5 million viewers have watched a clip of Grobe and Voltz unleashing hundreds of Mentos-Diet Coke geysers at once.) "Speaking as someone who has taken quite a few liters of soda to the face, it's not particularly dangerous," Voltz says with a grin. "It's all about trying it at home."
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