Re: Can Jell-o conduct electricity.

That's a very good question! I really don't know if Jell-O conducts electricity or not, I'll have to do the experiment myself. Anyway, the easiest and safest way to do this is to somehow acquire what is called a "digital voltmeter"; this measures the electrical conductivity of things. Your school might have one, any electrician or electrical engineer will have one, or you can buy one at Radio Shack for about $20. They usually need a 9V battery.

What you do is brew up a bowl of Jell-O, the size of the bowl doesn't really matter as long as you use the same size bowl each time, but do note the flavor. Now you set the digital voltmeter (DVM) to the "OHMS" setting. There will be two probes attached to the DVM, one red, one black, but in this case you don't care which is which. Stick the two probes into the Jello two centimeters apart in the center of the bowl. Do this to the same depth, say 1 centimeter, each time you do the experiment. Now, with the probes in the Jell-O, look at the DVM and see how many 'ohms' the display reads. I'd expect somewhere between 100 and perhaps as high as 100,000. The LOWER the value, the MORE conductive the Jell-O is. If you should want to do the math, the conductivity can be expressed as 1/Ohms and you can show this on a chart or table.

A good science project would be to measure the conductivity of different flavors of Jell-O. Another good project would be to measure the conductivity of the Jell-O as it cooled from liquid to solid. In this case you'll need a thermometer to measure the temperature of the stuff as it cools. My guess is that the liquid form conducts better (lower ohms) than does the solid. The reason for this is that electricity is conducted in the Jell-O by conductive things called 'ions'. The ions have to be able to move in order for the Jell-O to conduct electricity. So I expect that the warm liquid Jell-O will conduct better than the solid because the ions are more mobile in the liquid than in the solid.

One last project: if you stick strips of two different metals, say copper and zinc (your school will have these), into the solid Jell-O, you've just made a battery. Use your DVM set to 'Volts DC' to measure the voltage between the two metal strips and, as before, try different flavors and temperatures of the Jell-O. Good Luck!