One of the toughest decisions to make regarding a science fair project is the actual selection of topic. What is it that the science project needs to be about? Some times you think you want to work on a particular project only to realize a few days down the line that it is boring you to bits.

So how do you generate ideas for interesting science fair projects? Get a clue from things you actually like to do. The project is going to be more fun if it involves activities that you already enjoy doing. So get down to making a list of all the activities that you enjoy doing in sports, games, hobbies and anything at all that comes to your mind.

You need to make sure that it is something that you enjoy reading up about as well as doing. This ensures that the actual research part of the science project is easy for you to handle. After all there is nothing quite as boring as having to read books, websites and articles about something that does not interest you.

You can add things to the list that you wonder about. Questions like how does this xyz thing work are very handy while defining the kind of science fair project that you will make.

One of the best ways to spend your summer holidays is playing with toys. And wouldn’t it be even more cool if you could make your own toy town? Imagine a model made from things lying around the house. You could decide to make a model train station and include everything from railway lines to station stops. Or you could make a model of the supermarket complete with shelves and miniature goods on them.

What makes models even more interesting is if some parts of it work or move. For instance in the model of the railway example given above it would be more fun if the trains in the model actually moved on the railway track on their own. You can make a model out of anything you like. And the best part is that you do not need to go and buy things from outside to make a model.

You can ask your parents to give you a bagful of stuff that is lying around the house and which they no longer need. All you need to do is to use this as the basic raw material for making your model. Add some bright colors with either fabrics or paints and you will have an interesting science project on your hands.

No party is complete without its fair share of balloon decorations. And to blow up so many balloons with the air in your lungs is quite a task. Thankfully balloon pumps make that job much easier on any one planning a party these days. Still here’s an interesting science project which will help you blow up balloons without using lung power.

What we need for this experiment are a couple of balloons, some dried yeast, little warm water, a heaped spoon of sugar, a clear plastic bottle and a large bowl in which the bottle can stand. Now here’s what we are going to do. Pour the dried yeast into the bottle. Fill the bottle one fourth with warm water. Add the spoonful of sugar and swirl the bottle’s contents.

Now place the balloon over the mouth of the bottle so that there are no leaks. Now pour some warm water into the large bowl. Place the bottle in the bowl of warm water and leave it on a warm windowsill. Come back in a while to see the progress. You will find that the balloon has magically filled up in your absence. The carbon dioxide from the yeast makes this happen. Now think up of a science project that will help speed up the process.

This is a small science experiment to prove if a lemon will sink or swim if placed in a glass of water. After all the fruit with its acidic juice is one of the most popular ingredients in the kitchen. It is also rather popular in making up science experiments such as writing with invisible ink.

So let’s try and learn a bit more about our yellow colored friend here. Here is what you will need for the experiment. A couple of lemons, a large glass, some water to fill up the glass, and a knife to cut the lemon. It is an easy experiment to set up. First you put the water into the glass. Do remember that you will be adding the lemon to the glass and so don’t fill it all the way up to avoid spills.

Now add the whole lemon fruit to the water glass. What do you observe? It floats. Now that we know that the whole lemon can float we are going to quarter the lemon. Do the individual quarters float? No they sink. Maybe that’s the wrong shape to cut the lemon into. Let’s try again.

This time its going to be lemon rings. Now check if these float? No they don’t. The lemon wedges and rings do not float in the water because the pulp in the lemon starts absorbing water from the glass. This makes the cut pieces heavy and they sink. While the lemon is whole you have a watertight rind making it impossible for the water to soak into the lemon. Now wasn’t that an interesting science experiment?

Have you ever wanted to get rid of a stain on your favorite t-shirt or your mom’s best table cloth? Believe it or not there’s a science project waiting to happen. Essentially the whole thing is just plain chemistry. The material that caused the stain is likely to be removed by another chemical. Lets take a look at some stains and how they can be removed.

The staining chemical needs to be dissolved in another solvent so as not to chemically bond with the fabric it has stained and become permanent. Now the most common solvent is water and if you can wash the material as soon as you drop the offending chemical on it in most cases the stain can be completely avoided. However not all stains wash off that easily.

Some will need the sterner stuff of detergents. These chemicals act as solvents to most of the known food stain possibilities. That’s why they are called powerful cleansers. However some times you may need an even more powerful solvent. There are all kinds of solvents which can be acid or alkali based. Just make sure they don’t damage the material they are trying to get the stain off.

For instance what do you do with the kind of stains that a car mechanic is likely to get on his clothes? In this case a specific grease solvent is needed. Something like a pre laundry soak would do the trick. You can make a very useful science project by tabling just what kind of solvents are needed for specific stains to be removed.

Colors are all around us. We have so many different hues and shades that at times it is difficult to imagine that all of them stem from the same three primary colors red, blue and yellow. Of course it’s a simple matter to mix up the secondary colors from the primary ones and our little science project here is to do just that.

What do you get when you mix up the cellophane sheets of two different colors and shine a flashlight through them? You project a secondary color onto the wall. If you mix red and yellow you get orange. If you mix yellow and blue you will get green.  If you mix blue and red you get purple.

Now with the primary and secondary colors you can paint a rainbow. Of course the red, blue and green are considered primary colors in the computer images as the RGB combinations are used to create digital images. In fact when combined they give you the base white color for the computer screen.

Naturally colors play an important part of our lives. Without color things would be like a rainy day black, white and grey. So get out those colors and start off with your own multi hued painting adventure. You could even keep records and make a science project out of it.

Mixed powers like salt and pepper can seem impossible to separate, but this handy science experiment shows you just how to do the trick. We all know that everything is essentially made up of atoms. The atom is the smallest part of a substance that retains all the physical and chemical properties of the matter.

However the atom can also be broken into three smaller parts called the protons, electrons and neutrons. Of these the protons have a positive electrical charge while the electrons have a negative charge. The neutrons as the name suggests are neutral with no charge. The atom itself is supposed to have a balanced number of these sub parts so that it retains a largely neutral effect.

So how is this going to help us separate salt and pepper? Lets first sprinkle a spoon of salt on  a plate. Now add a spoon of pepper to it and mix it lightly till the salt and pepper are well mixed. Now get a comb and a woolen cloth. When you rub the comb on the cloth you will charge it negatively. Now hover the comb over the mixture and you will find the pepper particles dancing off the plate and sticking to the comb.

How did it happen? Salt and pepper are both positively charged and the negative charge of the comb attracts them both. However as the pepper particles are lighter they fly up higher and get separated from the mix. Follow up this interesting science experiment with one of your own.

The purpose of using invisible ink can be as simple as a lover’s note being passed in class to as complex as sending out spy messages from another country. There have been different types of inks used down the ages and science experiments have produced new substances that can be used as invisible ink as well.

Depending on the type of invisible ink that has been used there can be different methods of making the writing on the paper visible. For the simpler inks such as the juice of lemon or milk it is easy to reveal the secret writing. All you have to do is heat up the paper and the writing on the page pops right up. Of course you need to make sure that you secure the heat source properly or you may just end up burning the sheet of paper on which your message is written.

For the more complex inks, which can be fluorescent in nature, you will need to have a source of ultra violet light to see what the message is all about. Portable lights can be carried on your person so that you can decode and decipher the message written with fluorescent ink. These are more durable inks as they can’t be washed away very easily. Science projects to find more invisible ink possibilities are always in progress. Maybe you will discover the next one.

Invisible ink is of many different types. From juice of citrus fruits, to milk and of course the kind that can be made from cornstarch. There are a number of choices for your invisible ink. Unfortunately once the iodine solution has been dabbed on to the paper the invisible ink becomes visible and can be read quite easily.

There is however one kind of invisible ink which remains hidden even after you have read it.  That clear fluid you see may be more sinister than it appears. It could be fluorescent invisible ink that you could use to write on any surface. The only way it will be read if some used an ultra violent light to show it. When the light is switched off no one is the wiser about the secret message given by the ink.

Did you know that most bodily fluids are fluorescent by nature? It has been proved by science that blood semen, saliva, vaginal fluids are all naturally fluorescent. Thant means that a crime scene investigator can narrow down his scope of investigation by merely shining an ultra violet light on the area to see where the human bodily fluids prevail. This technique is usually seen in television shows as the investigator flashes a hand held portable ultra violet light around the body to see where all the blood has been washed up.

We all have secrets that we want to keep from the child in school to the corporate boss, there’s always something that we don’t want the wrong eyes to see. Invisible ink is a simple way to keep a secret, unfortunately it is not a very secure one. After all the coding of a message is a more secure manner to keep a secret. If you don’t have the key you don’t know the secret.

That is where scientists have worked for years on science projects that help keep data safe from the enemy. With the advance of technology there have been many gadgets that have been used to encode your secrets. The unfortunate thing is that just as soon as you have a new method of keeping secrets the enemy has found a new one to decode them. It is a constant ongoing struggle to keep data safe.

With the advent of the internet data has become more accessible than before. You could merely with a click of a mouse find out everything from all the information you like about a person who interests you to the lyrics of a particularly appealing song that you like to hear. In such an open society too there are some secrets that must be kept. That is why year after year millions are spent on science projects that deal with securing the data.