ACE Science Club Sets Imaginations and Microwaves Aglow

Thursday night, as the stifling, steamy humidity bathed Greenbelt, things started to heat up inside the Community Center at ACE Science Club. Or to be more precise, inside Jacob Tosado’s battered microwave oven, the one in which he created a plasma — the “fourth state” of matter.

Six kids, aged 4 to 12, gathered campfire-like around Tosado, a physics graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Thursday it was all boys, but of course girls and any other Greenbelt kids, 8 to 14, are welcome to participate in the twice-monthly club meetings.

Tosado sparked a wooden kitchen match and propped it up in the center of the oven. He covered the flame with a glass chemistry-set beaker to collect hot gases.

“Ready?” he asked.

Are you kidding? All night, the boys had waited to, as they put it, “blow stuff up,” or in this case, to create a sputtering, glowing example of the fourth state of matter.

The theme was “radiation,” in all its guises. Tosado showed them actual radioactive uranium ore that made his Geiger counter click. He showed them how sound radiates through air. They investigated the electric field that radiates from a wire coil when current is passed through it.

And they witnessed the effects of the microwave energy that radiates through food in a microwave oven and heats it into a plasma (which, by the way, is the same kind of stuff that glows on the surface of the Sun).

Tosado punched a button and the microwave buzzed to life. Invisible radio waves heated the hot gases trapped under the beaker, stripping off the electrons from their parent atoms. It hummed to life inside the glass beaker, filling the oven with a brilliant, ghostly glow like… well, like the Sun.

Tosado flung the door open, grabbed the beaker, and thrust it at the boys. “Touch it — carefully. That’s hot, isn’t it? Why do you think it’s hot? What do you see? What’s going on here?”

“They’re so excited,” said Eleni Elefpherios, who brought her boys Antony, 8, and Alexios, 4, to ACE Science Club, which meets at both the Greenbriar and Greenbelt community centers. “You can almost see the sparks flying from their heads.”

And there were sparks to come, too. Finally, at the end of the 7 – 8:30 p.m. program, the time came to blow stuff up. Tosado microwaved a few small light bulbs in succession until they burst open with a loud pop (safely, inside the microwave).

“Ah!” said one boy, as if speaking for his compatriots, “that is just so cool!”

Again Tosado held the wreckage in his palm in front of the boys, who gathered ‘round him ear to ear. “What do you see? What happened here? Remember what we said before about the antennas? Did you feel that — it’s warm. The metal in the bulb acts like an antenna and conducts heat. It’s called joule heating.”

By day, Tosado is a scientist-in-training at the University of Maryland, where he studies the physics of the surfaces of things. He brings a bit of the scientific world and its thought process with him, tucked under his arm along with an impressive array of demonstration gizmos and gadgets borrowed from a storehouse of gear used to teach science at the university.

“I don’t hold back with these kids,” he said. “The ideas are advanced, college-level science. The more they are exposed to it, the more likely they are to retain the information.”

Tosado leaped from demo to demo, urging the boys to observe, explain, wonder, guess, hypothesize, explore, and, most important, to touch things. He fueled the dialog with a constant stream of questions.

“Can an antenna be made of wood? Why not?”

“What do you think?”

“Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”

“Why are they round? What do you think?”

“If we flip this on, will it pick up more current or less?”

Pay attention! This is advanced stuff.”

Growing up in Florida, Tosado was a science club kid, too. He started with model rocketry, and his enthusiasm remains undimmed for hands-on learning, even though he spends long days in the lab immersed in the painstaking nuts-and-bolts of doing real science.

“But I’ve been able to maintain my curiosity about the natural world,” he said.

The kids pick up on his earnest enthusiasm for cool science stuff. “Yay!” said a boy at one point during the evening. “My hypothesis was right!”