DailyDirt: Making Good Toys
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
While it's still summertime and schools haven't started up yet, kids are happily playing outdoors (hopefully) and not worrying about the coming onslaught of homework and common core initiatives. The stuff that kids play with has gotten more advanced over the years (not just iPads and gaming consoles), and some toys are really fascinating. Here are just a few things- Here's a Kickstarter project to sell a water hose attachment that can make 100 water balloons in under a minute. It's not exactly rocket science, but apparently some plastic tubing and elastic o-rings is worth about 15 cents per water balloon. [url]
- Play Doh is generally safe to eat, unless you're severely intolerant to wheat gluten, because it's made of water, salt and flour (plus a bunch of other proprietary stuff). There are some recipes for making your own sculpting clay at home that might be more appetizing, but what can you expect from a toy product that was originally designed to clean soot from wallpaper? [url]
- Soap bubbles are fun, but how hard could it be to make soap bubbles a solid color with some dyes? Apparently, it's non-obvious to those skilled in the art (see US patent 7910531), and simply adding dyes to soap bubble solutions make mostly clear (regular) bubbles with all the dye collecting in a single spot on the bottom of the bubble. [url]
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Filed Under: kid stuff, play doh, soap bubbles, toys, water balloons
Companies: kickstarter
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http://www.soy-yer.com
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So it's not as easy as simply combining the washing up liquid and the dye before adding the water, the same way my mum's always done it? Who knew?
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Re: Yes, it's not as easy as that...
Getting a dye to dye a bubble a solid color - without it pooling at the bottom and eventually popping the bubble - is actually a fantastically complex problem, and solving it involved some major advances in materials science and thin film physics. It's actually really interesting.
Or, I'm sure your mom just tossed some food coloring in there and it worked. Makes sense, right?
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