Experiments with Water Tension

I thought it might be fun to take a look at water suface tension. We began by asking the basic question. What IS water surface tension? The most simple basic answer is that water contains properties that cause water molecules to want to stick together. They don't want to separate. Water usually has some sides that contain it but take a glass of water for example and the top is open. At the suface of the glass the water wants to stick together and forms almost what looks like an elastic, stretchy barrier. Much like a balloon. At some point those molecules will break apart and the water will spill over. We used a full glass of water and added paper clips one by one until the water suface tension broke. We were very surprised and amazed with how many we added. 307 regular sized paper clips, 4 large, 4 safety pins, and 4 small misc objects. The glass was more than half full of paper clips and yet the water tension did not break. We ran out of paper clips before we could answer our question. I should note that in the end I removed at least 3 teaspoons of water to return it to the glasses regular full position. Next we added water drops one at a time to the surface of a penny. It took 16 drops before the water tension broke. We could see how the drops clung to each other when placed near but not directly on each other. Of course we've all seen this little trick of nature but it's interesting to take a closer look at it. Then we searched Chris Hatfield, our Canadian astronaut on youtube and watched what happened when he wrung out a wet cloth in space (an Extreme Environment - our Science Unit this term). The results were shown above. The water tension appeared to be even stronger in space due to the lack of gravity which would cause the molucules in the water to pull away from each other.