My kids begged for Floam™... well... forever, to hear them describe it. I saw the bright colors of this slime-with-beads and envisioned my sofa permanently transformed into those colors by the inevitable accident. We got Floam™. It was coooool. It was cool enough to want more.

In my opinion, if you're playing with any type of slime, you may as well make it yourself. The trick to making a Floam™-like product is finding the polystyrene beads. You're familiar with polystyrene as Styrofoam™. You can grate Styrofoam™ to get beads, but if you have access to a craft store, it's a lot simpler to just get beads for bean bags or dolls and use them. As you can see from my kids' creation, when you add beads to slime, it opens up a whole new world of fun.

Let's Make Floam | Slime, Gunk & Flubber

April 25^th is Nobel Prize winning Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli's birthday. Pauli is best known for the Pauli Exclusion Principle which states no two electrons in an atom can have the same quantum state. Did you know he was rather infamous for the Pauli Effect?

The Pauli Effect would manifest itself by equipment breaking down, vacuum tubes burning out or the power failing mysteriously when Pauli was in the area. Colleagues started to recommend he stay away from the laboratory when important demonstrations or experiments were to be conducted.

I hope your lab equipment doesn't malfunction or break today! Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

Happy Easter! Traditional Easter activities at my house include Easter egg coloring, biting the ears off of chocolate rabbits, an Easter egg hunt, re-hiding of eggs (which is how I know how hydrogen sulfide smells), and then making a lot of deviled eggs and egg salad. There is chocolate on Valentine's Day, but having already sampled some chocolate Easter eggs, like those shown here, I'm going to have to say Easter is a superior holiday for candy.

Here are some chemistry-related Easter activities for you. If you want to get an early start, it's fun to dye hollowed eggs before Easter. When the holiday arrives, don't hide hard-boiled eggs in your heater register.

• Natural Easter Egg Dyes
• Colored Chalk
• Theobromine in Chocolate
• Water into Wine Demonstration
• Egg in a Bottle Demonstration
• Peeps S'mores in the Microwave

April 24 marks the passing of the first person to refuse the award of a Nobel Prize. Gerhard Domagk was a German pathologist who discovered the first sulfa drug, Prontosil, had antibacterial properties and he began the practice of antibiotic treatment of disease and infection. This would earn him the 1939 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Passing up the prize was not Domagk's idea. When the Nobel Committee announced his prize, he was arrested and forced to give up the prize by the Nazi regime. Hitler's government was embarrassed just four years before by the Nobel Foundation when they awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize to Carl von Ossietzky for publishing information about Germany's rearmament in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Ossietzky was convicted of treason and served 18 months in Spandau Prison. He was later arrested again and put into a concentration camp. The German government passed a law preventing any German national from accepting a Nobel Prize. Domagk was finally able to accept his prize after the war in 1947.

Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

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If you're dyeing Easter eggs this weekend, or just boiling eggs to eat, you may want to avoid getting the green ring around the egg yolk. The green ring forms when you overheat the egg, causing hydrogen and sulfur in the egg white to react and form hydrogen sulfide gas. The hydrogen sulfide reacts with iron in the egg yolk to form a grayish-green compound where the white and yolk meet. While the color isn't particularly appetizing, it's fine to eat. You can keep the yolk from turning green by chilling the eggs as soon as they have finished cooking. One way to do this is by running cold water over the hot eggs as soon as the cooking time has elapsed.

The value 6.626 x 10^-34 J·s is Planck's constant (denoted by h). This constant is the relationship between the energy of a photon to it's frequency. This relationship established that light energy was quantized instead of a continuous spectrum. It also marked the beginning of quantum theory in physics. The man responsible, Max Planck was born on this day in 1858.

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Happy Earth Day! Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. The purpose of the day is to inspire appreciation for the earth's environment and awareness of issues that threaten it. With that in mind, here's a look at some environment-related chemistry. I selected features that focus on cool features of the environment, like snowflakes and changing leaves, as well as issues, such as the greenhouse effect and fluoridation of drinking water.

• What Is Earth Day?
• How Can I Celebrate Earth Day?
• What Is the Greenhouse Effect?
• Why Leaves Change Colors
• Why I Oppose Fluoridation of Public Water
• Answers to Snowflake Questions
• Can Cloud Seeding Dissipate Hurricanes?
• Plant & Soil Chemistry Science Projects

Photo: NASA image, featured on the unofficial Earth Day flag.

April 22^ndis the birthday of Rita Levi-Montalcini. She was awarded half the 1986 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of nerve growth factors. Upon graduation in 1936 with a medical degree, she was denied an academic or professional position in her native Italy under Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws. Instead, she set up a home laboratory in her bedroom and began researching nerve growth in chicken embryos. The paper she wrote on chick embryos earned her an invitation to a research position at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1947 where she stayed for the next 30 years. The Italian government recognized her by making her a member of the Italian Senate for life in 2001. She is still a respected and active member of the Senate. This year will be her 102^nd birthday. Happy Birthday!

Today was a busy day in the history of science. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

Here's an interesting chemistry demonstration for you. Take a container of ammonia and react it with a small amount of hydrochloric acid to produce ammonium chloride. The reaction proceeds very quickly, so it looks like you are turning a clear liquid instantaneously into smoke or a white cloud of tiny crystals. It's a simple demonstration with dramatic results.

White Smoke Demonstration | Make a Smoke Bomb

April 21^st is the birthday of two important scientists in the field of cell biology. Oskar Hertwig was the first to pinpoint when fertilization occurs between sperm and ovum cells and Walther Flemming was the scientist who observed the behavior of chromosomes in the nucleus during cell mitosis. Both discoveries were major events in late 19^th century biology.

Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.