Things you need:

• Large container or sink
• Different types of drinks - Including diet and regular
• Water

The Experiment:

Fill up the container or sink with water higher than the height of the cans. Then place the cans in the water and see what happens.

So that's how it works…

Whether something floats or sinks has to do with how much it weighs for it's size, in other words, it's DENSITY. If something is heavier than the water it is taking the space of, or displacing, it will sink, otherwise, it will float. Since the two cans are exactly the same size, the only thing that could be different is their density, how much they weigh.

Why does the diet soda float while the regular soda sinks? It depends on how they sweeten the drink. The regular soda uses sugar, almost 40 grams of it, to give it that sweet taste people love. On the other hand, diet drinks use artificial sweeteners to provide the sweetness. Artificial sweeteners are molecules which trigger the same receptors on your taste buds as sugar does, but they stick much better and stay on for much longer than a sugar molecule does. This means that a gram of sweetener, such as aspartame, tastes 180 times sweeter than sugar, so you need far less to get the same amount of sweetness.

What if you…

• Put other drinks in the water? Do they float or sink?
• Compare the amounts of sugar on the label for each drink.

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