In Junior Science club this week, our curious scientists have been investigating how you can move water from one cup to another without pouring it.  

Working in small groups, the budding scientists lined up five beakers, and filled the first with blue watercolour, the third with red and the fifth with yellow; all the other glasses were left empty. Starting with the blue beaker, the girl’s added one end of rolled up paper towel and then put the other end in the empty glass next to it, and continued this process with each beaker.

After several minutes, the water moved along the paper towel and into each empty beaker, until the volume was equal in each beaker. The water was able to move upward against gravity because of the attractive forces between the water and the fibres in the paper towel.

The girls predicted what they thought might happened and why, and learnt about hydrogen bonding between particles of water.