How To Make Slime Without That Messy Glue (Plus Bonus Recipes)!

Just about everyone has at least heard about slime, now let’s learn how to make slime without sticky glue! It is squishy, gooey, oozy, and just plain fun. You can make farting noises with it, throw it at walls, and gross adults out with it. But, what exactly is slime and how can you make it yourself, Well, check out this guide to find out. If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older. Slime (also called Flubber) has been a staple of kid’s lives since the late 1970’s when it became a children’s toy. Slime is a gooey and sticky substance that is somewhere on the spectrum between a solid and a liquid and its viscosity (the speed which a liquid can flow) can actually vary depending on temperature. But just what is this fun substance,

It can exist in nature, interestingly enough, and is used as a defense mechanism. Slime is also prevalent in humans, especially come cold and flu season in the form of snot. There is, however, one animal that shows off its slime. That animal is the beautiful Hagfish (pictured below). As you can see in the picture below, Hagfish secrete slime as a defense mechanism against other fish (and sometimes humans). This slime coats everything, and in water, it is extremely effective in stopping or slowing down any predators. The Hagfish slime is so effective, in fact, that our United States military is looking into creating a synthetic slime to be used on our aircraft carriers and other marine ships to be used to protect our ships.

Now synthetic slime, on the other hand, is slightly different (and far less nasty) than the Hagfish slime. Besides being a great toy, it can actually be used to help save people. Slime can be used to plug wounds, and can even be used as armor for divers. What is the science of slime, As y’all probably guessed, artificial slime exists because of a chemical reaction. The main ingredients in slime are glue and boric acid (we will cover this later on) react to each other to create this fascinating thing. The glue has molecules in it that slide around easily actually link up with the boric acid molecules that slow down that sliding.

That slowed down flow makes the liquid become considerably more viscous and turns it into an almost solid object. Now there are recipes for slime that exclude some ingredients, but this is the general idea behind slime. When talking about slime we do need to talk about Sir Isaac Newton and his theories in the matter. He should sound familiar to y’all since he is the one who first theorized about gravity and had his fingers in many different science pies. Slime is considered to be a non-Newtonian fluid. What that essentially means is that it doesn’t follow Newton’s law of viscosity (think flow of a liquid and shear rate).