These are weird, difficult times in all ways. People are stuck at home, schools’ doors are closed, and our summer is uncertain. For Science in the Parks, we’re trying to figure out what the immediate future holds and how we can support playful, authentic science in our community. We’ll post updates here about what our 2020 summer tour will look like, but for right now we want to start to provide more resources. In particular, we want to start a series that we’ve long imagined that prompts people with ideas for authentic science in their own spaces.

So here’s our first example. This is Adam in his home, stirring some hot chocolate. It turns out that hot chocolate has a very strange effect that you probably have never noticed, but once you realize it you’ll always want to tap the bottom of your mug after you’ve stirred the chocolate in:

We hope that **you** will also try this out to both see that it really happens and to think of ways to investigate what’s going on. What if you used something other than hot chocolate? Or different kinds of hot chocolate? Or different mugs? Or other ingredients? What makes this effect?

Try it out, and watch for more examples like this that you can do for yourself.

And, we’d love to see or hear about what you’re doing. The tag #randomactofscience is what we’re using on Instagram and Facebook to mark these examples, and we’ll try to create a collection of these that our community can share.