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JULY 2003

Product Review:
Zero Toys’ Zero Launcher
by Mitchell Levine

Common sense tells us that students find physics boring, dry, and difficult. Labs are tedious. Equations are excruciating. Newton’s laws might as well be in the Principia Mathematica’s original Latin for all that today’s high school Regents students care. Yet not only is this material required for standards completion and achievements, it’s so crucial to everyday practical matters that incomprehension can actually lead to physical injury. What can a science teacher do to make this stuff interesting?

Actually, all that’s needed is an approximately fifteen dollar investment in one of the most fascinating and inexpensive science demonstration aids that this reviewer’s ever seen, the amazing Zero Launcher by Zero Toys. Think aerodynamics, fluid and statistical mechanics, torsion, and classical dynamics are too complicated for your sixth graders? Wrong! With this bargain-priced plastic unit, your class will not only receive a vivid demonstration of all of the above principles in action, but additionally experience the joy that comes only with the ability to blow six inch strawberry scented, kosher (that’s right, kosher) glycerin-based toroidal smoke rings up to fourteen feet from a handheld plastic unit.

The product uses a simple hand-triggered mechanism that looks much like a water pistol to create a vortex of non-toxic fog based on a physical law called the Bernoulli effect. With just 2 AA batteries and a little bit of practice, anyone can create endless and transfixing instances in miniature of the same phenomenon that drives volcanoes, tornadoes, and whirlpools. How much fun is this to watch? An Education Update staff member, actually wore out the batteries on the very first day we unleashed this monster on the office. Luckily, one small bottle of Superfog included with the product can produce 25,000 smoke rings! As a onetime physics major myself, I can personally say that the Zero Launcher is among the very best visual demonstration aids I’ve ever seen! For info or orders: www.zerotoys.com.

 

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