Mentos Exploding Drink - The Hoax! Can you freeze a Mento in an ice cube to play a time-delayed practical email to friend
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It's an e-mail that probably showed up in your inbox... Create an Exploding Drink! The prank is based on the widely known phenomenon of dropping MENTOS® chewy mints into soda to create an erupting geyser. Instead of just dropping the Mentos into soda, the pranksters suggest freezing a Mento in the middle of an ice cube. Serve your friend a refreshing soda drink and garnish with the tainted ice cubes. When the ice cube melts, the Mentos is exposed and the soda erupts everywhere. Great idea, right? Readers of the Boing Boing blog suggest that it's a hoax... but no one out of the 600 plus people who posted a comment bothered to try it. We turned Steve Spangler loose to find out if it really works.

Materials

You'll need a roll or box of MENTOS® chewy mints, an ice cube tray and some of your favorite soda. Either diet or regular soda will work for this experiment, but diet soda is less sticky when you're cleaning it up!

Experiment
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As you might imagine, the trick is to find a way to freeze a Mentos chewy mint in the middle of an ice cube. The authors of the practical joke suggested the following method for preparing the special gaffed ice cube...

Fill an ice tray so that each section is half full of water and place the tray in the freezer.
Once all of the half-size ice cubes are frozen, place a Mento on top of each frozen cube.
Fill the tray to the top with water and freeze again.

It's Practical Joke Time

Serve your friend (or foe) a refreshing soft drink with three or four of the special ice cubes. When
the ice melts, the Mentos is exposed to the carbonated drink and the cup runneth over.

BUT WAIT! Does it really work? Read the explanation below before you start freezing a roll of Mentos.

Observations

We waited and waited and waited... the ice cube melted... the exposed Mentos fell to the bottom of the glass of soda... and nothing happened. Why?

How does it work?

The secret to the Mentos reaction is right on the surface of each chewy mint. If you could look at the candy under a microscope, you would discover that each Mentos has thousands of tiny pits all over the surface. These tiny pits are called nucleation sites - perfect places for carbon dioxide bubbles to form. As soon as the Mentos hit the soda, bubbles form all over the surface of the candy. Couple this with the fact that the Mentos candies are heavy and sink to the bottom of the bottle and you've got a double-whammy. When all this gas is released, it literally pushes all of the liquid up and out of the bottle in an incredible soda blast.

However, if all of these tiny pits are smoothed over, the reaction will not occur.

That's exactly what we observed when we tested this practical joke. When the mint is placed in water, the surface dissolves and all of the tiny pits are filled in - so to speak. Since you need a rough surface for the bubbles to attach, the Mentos is no longer the perfect place for bubbles to form.

You can test this theory by quickly dipping a Mentos in water and drying it with a hair dryer (careful not to burn your fingers or melt the candy). Drop the modified Mentos into a glass of soda... and nothing happens.

If you're very careful, you can use the hot air from a hair dryer to just barely melt the surface of the Mentos. Again, drop this modified Mentos into a glass of soda... and nothing happens.

These experiments lead us to another idea... What would happen if you completely melted a Mentos and poured the liquid into the soda. Do you get an erupting geyser? The lab rats respond with a big NOPE.

So, what did we learn from this little Mentos Diet Coke practical joke?

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet
Trust your science senses - if it doesn't make sense, keep asking questions
If you're really bored, get off the couch and try it. You might make a cool discovery