Glowing Slime

There are lots of things you can do with household items such as tonic water and Berocca. Each of these contain molecules that fluoresce: they emit light of a different color after absorbing light from a UV lamp. This means that they will glow a completely different color in a dark room with a UV lamp. This means that you can combine these molecules, which come from the supermarket or the chemist, with edible optics or slime made from PVA and borax (more on that later) and make glow in the dark slime that is completely safe and non-toxic! Although we cheated a bit here and used some laser dyes (which are definitely NOT safe to eat)

For those of you who are curious, the dyes we used were rhodamine 6G, coumarin 440, 500 and fluorescein. But one of these is Berocca! These dyes highlight the similarities between some of the chemicals we find in our everyday foods and health supplements and those used in research. For example, rhodamine 6G is crucial for staining cells for fluorescent microscopy, allowing us to study how cells behave and respond to external stimuli.

From this, you can make all kinds of neat glow in the dark pictures. We decided to make the Photon Factory and IYL logos.

The other thing you can do with this is buy glow in the dark glitter from a dollar store and add that to you slime for a phosphorescent slime. These will glow in the dark even in the absence of a UV lamp as long as you can charge them up in the sun light