Imagine a plate of spaghetti. The noodles slide around and don’t clump together, just like the long chains of molecules (called polymers) that make up slime. They slide around without getting tangled up. The pasta by itself (fresh from the boiling water) doesn’t hold together until you put the sauce on. Slime works the same way. Long, spaghetti-like chains of molecules (called polymers) don’t clump together until you add the sauce – something that cross-links the molecule strands (polymer) together.
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Scientists call this a non-Newtonian fluid. You can also fill an empty water bottle or a plastic test tube half-full with this stuff and cap it. Notice that when you shake it hard, the slime turns into a solid and doesn’t slosh around the tube. When you rotate the tube slowly, it acts like a liquid.


About 80% of the organic chemistry industry is devoted to making synthetic polymers. If you’re planning to become a chemical engineer, your chances of working with polymers is pretty high! You find polymers everywhere – plastic bottles are made of polyethylene, frying pans coated with teflon, clothes made from polyester, shoes from synthetic materials. There are two main categories of polymers – natural and synthetic. The ones I just mentioned are synthetic, like PVC and polystyrene foam. Natural polymers include DNA and cellulose.


A colloid is a mixture where one substance is suspended throughout another. When we make slime, the borax is the colloid and the borax-water solution is the colloidal suspension (borax will somewhat settle out after a bit of time, but some of it still remains dispersed in the water.) When you add a polymer (the glue), it forms a gel network and you get slime!


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