LETTER TO THE EDITOR: Squirrel was more buoyant than billed

To the editor:

We are very grateful for your excellent coverage of the Science Nutz’ floatation craft, the Squirrel. However, we have just a few corrections.

Firstly, for the benefit of other kids who wish to duplicate our experiment, we would like to inform the reader that, in fact, displacing one pint of water for every pound would only achieve neutral buoyancy, resulting in an unfloatable vessel and potential casualties. In reality, the rule of thumb that we used was that for every pound, we had to displace two pints of water. This is rather important for a successful ship.

A less fatal error was made with the spelling of the Science Nutz. While the correct and much more widely used spelling ends with an “s,” we decided to go for the slightly more whimsical spelling ending with a “z.” We thank you again for the wonderful article, and hope the readers enjoyed it as much as we did.

Emily, Christopher, Eric, and Caitlyn Anderson; Avery, Christopher, and Steven Wilson; Hannah and Haley McConnaughey, Nickolay Hacking

The Science Nutz

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