by Nate Ball
Notes About Safety
• Down at low voltages, electromagnets are pretty safe. But naturally, you’re going to want to add more batteries to make your electromagnet more powerful. This is awesome, and you should do it. But be careful! When experimenting with more powerful batteries like 9-volts and beyond, make sure to have an adult supervising. And wear safety glasses in case you get a spark.
• You’ll probably notice that when you run your electromagnet for a while, it gets hot. This is because most of the electricity from the battery is dissipated as heat by going through the electrical resistance of your wire. If you use bigger batteries, it’s going to get hot faster. If you use really big batteries, you could burn yourself or even melt the insulation or the wire. Use caution and always start small.
Troubleshooting
• If your electromagnet doesn’t seem to work, the usual culprits are either a dead battery, too small of a battery, or the most common problem: not making a connection between the wire and the battery in the first place. Ensure you have a good contact directly with the copper in your wire by carefully restripping the plastic insulation off the wire. If you used magnet wire, spend a little extra time sanding the insulative lacquer off the conductor to ensure a good contact.
Read a sneak peek of book three of the Alien in My Pocket series:
Radio Active
“It smells like the devil burped in here.”
Olivia had just shut the door of my room. She pulled two rolls of SweeTarts out of her pocket and tossed them to Amp, who was still sitting on my alarm clock.
“It smells like that because he keeps eating those fart pills,” I said, still hunched over my math homework. “Hey, did you get the one about the train leaving San Francisco at eight p.m.?” I asked, turning around in my chair.
Olivia is in my class at Reed School. Schoolwork isn’t difficult for her. Olivia just sort of knows stuff. She usually finishes her math homework while everyone else is packing up to leave for the day. She’d be a real brain if she weren’t so weird and didn’t talk so much.
“Forty-eight miles an hour is the answer,” she said, watching Amp flip SweeTarts into his mouth.
“Forty-eight?” I croaked. “I have five hundred forty-four!”
“How is that possible?” She laughed, shaking her head at me. “What train travels that fast, Whacky Zacky?”
“Maybe those Japanese bullet trains. I saw them on TV.”
“They don’t go that fast,” she corrected me. “Two hundred miles an hour, tops.”
“We have trainlike vehicles back on Erde,” Amp said, once again bragging about how great things were on his planet. “They travel about as fast as sound travels here.”
“I’ve told you before about talking with your mouth full,” I grumbled, turning back to my incorrect math problem. “You may have fast trains on Erde, but we have something called manners here on this planet.”
“Has he been this grumpy the whole time?” Olivia asked Amp.
“Since he got home. Surprisingly, math makes him angry.”
Honestly, all our meetings about fixing Amp’s busted spaceship, getting him off this planet, and returning my life to normal went like this. What was the point of meeting if we never accomplished anything except pointing out all the things I do wrong? I was so not the problem.
There was a knock on my bedroom door. Olivia quickly moved to block the view of Amp from the doorway.
She always did this, even though Amp could easily make himself invisible to someone. He uses one of his Jedi mind tricks. He basically erases your memory of seeing him as you see him, so you instantly forget you’re seeing him while you’re looking at him.
I know, it sounds complicated. You get used to it. But Olivia always forgets he can do that.
The door clicked open and my little brother poked his head in.
“I heard you have SweeTarts,” he said. “I want some.”
“Go away, Taylor,” I groaned from my desk. “We’re busy.”
Olivia reached into her pocket and tossed Taylor a roll of SweeTarts. He intentionally missed the catch so he could step all the way into my room. “Hey, what are you guys doing?” he asked, looking around. “It smells like burning toothpaste in here.”
Taylor knew something was up. He knew I was hiding a secret, and he’d dedicated his life to figuring out what it was. He’d even built an army of spy robots to help him. Fortunately, I’d destroyed most of them when I caught them in my room.
My parents are convinced Taylor is some kind of genius. He is only in the first grade and building robots. But I don’t care. I think he’s only a genius at annoying me.
I got up and pushed him out of my room. “Go play with your robots, you Nosy Nelly.” I closed the door on him and leaned my back against it.
“But I want to hang out with you guys,” he said from the other side of the door.
“Buzz off!” I shouted. I heard him walk down the squeaky hallway.
Olivia sat up on my bed. She had an odd look on her face. It was almost white, like she’d seen a ghost.
“What’s wrong with you?” I ask. “Is Amp’s gas cloud getting to you?”
“How did he know I had SweeTarts? I didn’t tell him, and you didn’t tell him, so how did he know?”
The three of us stared at each other.
Without looking down, Olivia unclipped the walkie-talkie from her pocket. She held it up and stared at it. “That little sneak is listening in on our walkie-talkie conversations.”
“What a clever idea,” Amp whispered.
I looked at them both. I was pretty sure steam was coming out of my ears. “A clever idea that the little worm is gonna pay for.”
About the Author
NATE BALL is the host of the Emmy and Peabody award-winning PBS reality shows Design Squad and Design Squad Nation. An MIT graduate with a Master’s Degree in mechanical engineering, Nate is also the cofounder of Atlas Devices, a two-time All-American pole-vaulter, and a competitive beatboxer. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Credits
Cover art by Macky Pamintuan
Copyright
Alien in My Pocket: The Science UnFair
Copyright © 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers
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