I ran across this link over at Slashdot.
Diet Coke and Mentos.
Absolutely brilliant
Slee
It seems I haven’t heard anything about the Diet Coke and Mentos combination until a few months ago, when I started hearing about it everywhere. Is this a new discovery? Or an old one that’s been brought into the limelight again?
That has to be one of the coolest things I have ever seen.
That’s great - I can’t wait to try it out. I wonder if the results will be any different with our sugar-based Coke (I don’t expect it to be, but you never know)
But please - do warn if you’re linking to a page with embedded video. Sometimes Quicktime makes the machine crash. Normally, I can check the URL, but not with an embedded file like that.
The video is great.
Music is good too.
The “joke” at the end just makes it perfect.
the two “scientists” toast the experiment, and then sprew the coke themselves
This isn’t really about “food” or “entertainment” (at least, not in the sense of “arts and entertainment”) so I’m moving it from Cafe Society to MPSIMS.
I kept meaning to ask a GQ about this. Anybody know what the reaction is? Chemicals involved, etc…
I’ve seen videos dating back to 2004, so it’s definately not a new fad.
According to the website, it’s all about the nucleation sites. Apparently Mentos have tons of little areas on it which bubbles can form around. Because it’s heavy enough to float to the bottom it reacts with the entire bottle and all those bubbles add up to one big geyser.
AKA “sink”. 
I like it; it’s got a sort of Blue Man Group vibe to it. Is there a high-quality downloadable version anywhere?
In the May edition of FHM magazine there is a spread featuring Kari Byron from Mythbusters, and this is one of the things they have her explaining. While wearing a red bikini and a doctors lab coat. I haven’t gotten any Mentos since reading (well, sort of reading, sort of staring) the article, but this is soooo on my to do list.
I wanted to revive this thread to ask about this experiment. We want to try it as part of the Independence Day festivities tomorrow. We bought several rolls of Mentos and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke, along with a two-liter bottle of seltzer water. Will it work with seltzer water (which will be less messy, and is cheaper)? Any other advice?
And before you go do a web search, I’ve already found this page with some advice, but would appreciate hearing of any others with advice.
I don’t know about the seltzer water, but might I suggest store-brand diet soda? I don’t think there’s anything specific about the Coca-Cola brand itself, and store-brand soda can be very cheap.
(no guarantees, as I haven’t tried it myself…just a suggestion)
Based on what Cecil says, I’d say that Diet Coke is going to work waaaaay better.
Here’s another experiment that didn’t go off quite as well. It features an attractive lady in a tank top instead of nerds in labcoats, though, so I like it better.
Thanks. I’m also wondering about the appropriate number of Mentos. The page I linked to suggested dropping a whole roll of Mentos in at once, perhaps using a tube. Will it work with one or two tablets? What if I use a 20oz bottle of diet soda?
I’ll just mention that a couple weeks ago, at my sister’s place in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, we tried the Mentos-Coke experiment. I don’t think we performed it correctly, however. We used a single Mento per bottle and tried it on 20-oz. bottles of Diet Coke (and Diet Pepsi, for comparative purposes). In both cases, we got a massive foaming reaction which left only about 20% of the original liquid volume in the bottle, but no geyser. We did not get around to trying other combinations of fluid volume and number of Mentos, but either there wasn’t enough liquid, or not enough Mento, or both. I’m going to try it again tomorrow, with more Mentos and different-sized bottles, and see what’s up.
The guys in the video cheat a little bit. They drill a small hole in the cap bead three or four Mentos onto a string, then put them under the cap and screw the cap back on. When they let go of the string, the Mentos drop into the soda and the foam shoots out the little hole.
Big deal…we’ve been doing this in in Las Vegas for years. Check out the Las Vegas huge Menthos/Diet Coke display.
Not sure if I’d call that cheating; the video makes it pretty clear that’s how they set it up, and there’s no way they’d have been able to arrange the video without doing that.