You take a container of water and touchthe surface of it.

Just by the power

ofyour touch, the water freezes solid! You start with a tray of water and
thengently place a finger on the surface ofthe water. As your friends stare at it,
icestarts to expand out from your fingertipuntil the whole block of water is
solidice. You don’t even need to touch thewater directly: take a bottle of
waterand pour it into a glass. As it pours intothe glass it starts to freeze until
there isa frozen block of ice in the glass.The liquid that you’re freezing is
notpure water and the resulting ‘ice’ is notactually frozen, it is just
crystallised.Instead of pure water, what you areusing is a solution of water
thatcontains sodium acetate. Sodiumacetate is a salt, much like normal
tablesalt except instead of each sodium atombeing attached to a chlorine
atom(giving sodium chloride, which is whatyou have in your kitchen), they
areattached to acetate ions (the anion ofacetic acid). Sodium acetate looks
likenormal salt and tastes just like salt (donot taste it though!) except with
anacidic flavour (due to the reaction ofthe acetate ion with water/moisture
toproduce a weak solution of acetic acidi.e. vinegar!) as well. For
this reason,sodium acetate is often used asflavouring on salt and vinegar
crisps! Ifyou check the ingredients on a savourysnack and see E262 listed, then
that’ssodium acetate that you’re eating.Like salt, you can dissolve lots of
sodiumacetate in water but eventually thewater will reach a point where it
cannotdissolve any more. However, if you heatthis saturated solution up you
can keepdissolving more and more salt into it.Once you’ve heating water up
near itsboiling point of 100C and dissolved inas much sodium acetate as you
can,you then let the water cool back downagain. All of the sodium acetate
willstay dissolved but there is now muchmore than would normally be at
lowtemperatures. This is called a super-saturated solution and the momentyou
give the sodium acetate a wayto leave the solution, it will!Sometimes, just
touching the solution– or even bumping it – will cause all thesodium acetate to
crystallise back out.To make sure it does this when youwant, you can put a few
sodium acetatecrystals on the tip of your finger, or inthe glass, so where the
solution contactsthem they start a chain crystallisationreaction.Sodium acetate
can beeasily ordered throughmost chemical supplycompanies. If you talk toa
science teacher they willbe able to order itthrough the school’s labtechnician.
They’ll alsohave the equipment tosafely heat and super-saturate a solution.The
sodium acetate willcome out of super-saturated solutionreally easily if it
contacts anything or isdisturbed. Make sure you only put it innew and
completely clean containers. Ifyou cool the containers, there is lesschance of
the sodium acetate comingout of solution. This can be a verydifficult trick to
perform because of howeasily the sodium acetate comes out ofsolution.When
the sodium acetate solution‘freezes’ it actually gives off a lot ofheat! A reaction
like this that producesthermal heat energy is known as anexothermic reaction.
If you later applyheat to the crystallised sodium acetate,it will go back into
solution ready torelease that heat again when it re-crystallises. Re-usable heat
pads areactually full of sodium acetate for thisvery reason!