Cruz’N With Science

Find out
for yourself.

A place to go when you want to know how something actually works. Demonstrations filmed in a science lab, sorted by the science inside them rather than the order they aired. Live instruments and working simulations you can open and push on yourself. True things about the world that sound invented, with the numbers to check them.

Start exploring
On air CH 05

Forces

You have never actually touched anything.

The Wow Files 01 / 08

8 true things, cycling. Read them all

Start here4 episodes

If you have never seen the show, open one of these first.

  • Sublimation
  • Dry ice
  • Lab safety

Dry ice never melts — at −78.5 °C it goes straight from solid to gas, a jump called sublimation, and that is where all the fog comes from. It is also the episode where the pumpkin doubles as a lesson in what not to do.

  • Static electricity
  • Electric charge

Rubbing two materials together does not make electricity — it moves electrons from one surface onto the other. One side ends up short, the other ends up with extra, and opposite charges pull. The cling, the shock and the hair standing up are all the same effect.

  • Density
  • Polarity

There are two reasons, not one. Oil is less dense than water, so it floats — and oil molecules are non-polar while water molecules are polar, so they will not bond with each other at all. Density decides the order; polarity decides they stay apart.

  • Season one highlights

A clip show pulling the best moments from the first half of season one — the fastest way to see what the series is before committing to a full episode. Fair warning: the studio is decorated for December.

The Wow Files3 of 8

Real numbers, all of them checkable, and stranger than the invented version. Open one to find out why it is true.

Press your hand flat on a desk and nothing makes contact. The electrons in your skin and the electrons in the wood repel each other and hold the two surfaces apart. What you feel as solid is an electromagnetic force pushing back across a gap far too small to notice.

A lightning channel reaches roughly 30,000 °C. The surface of the sun sits near 5,500 °C. The bolt only wins on temperature — it is a few centimetres wide and gone in a fraction of a second, while the sun has been doing it for four and a half billion years.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: Static Cling

Earth's water has been cycling for about four billion years and almost none of it ever leaves. Every glass you have ever finished has already been ocean, glacier, thundercloud, and the bloodstream of something that went extinct long before there was anyone to name it.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: Cloud in a Bottle

All 8 wow files

Doors out of here33 destinations

This site is not the last stop. These are the places worth an afternoon — live instruments, real research and working simulations, all free and none of them asking you to sign up.

Live 3D Eyes on the Solar System NASA Fly the actual solar system, with every planet at the position it occupies right now, built on real NASA mission data. Grab time and drag it forward to watch the orbits run. Planetarium Stellarium Web planetarium Stellarium The sky above your exact address, tonight. Type in your town, spin the view, switch on the constellation lines, and find the Milky Way from your own back yard. Scroll If the Moon were only one pixel Josh Worth A map of the solar system drawn to true scale. Reaching Jupiter takes a genuinely uncomfortable amount of scrolling, and that discomfort is the entire lesson. Live 3D 100,000 Stars Google Chrome Experiments Zoom out from the Sun until the Milky Way is a smudge beneath you. Every star you pass is a real catalogued star sitting at a real measured distance. Gallery Webb Telescope image galleries NASA The sharpest images of other galaxies humans have ever captured, free to download at full size. Read any caption and you learn how far back in time you are looking. Live data Live global wind map nullschool Every wind on Earth, moving, drawn from live forecast models. Switch the overlay to temperature or pressure and weather stops being weather and becomes a system you can read.

Every destination, by subject

Built on the actual standards26 of 37 benchmarks

Everything on this site is pinned to Florida's fifth grade science benchmarks, quoted word for word from the state's own document. 26 of the 37 have an episode; the rest have a destination that covers them. Teachers, that page is for you.

Open the standards map

Episode strand

Matter & Chemistry

Solids, liquids, gases, and the changes that cannot be undone. Density, polarity, phase change, polymers, enzymes and reactions — including the two most-watched episodes the show ever aired.

9 episodes · 1 h 26 m · 77,775 views

  • Food science
  • Asking a testable question
  • Chemical change
  • Reaction rate
  • States of matter
  • Phase change
  • Dissolved gas
  • Pressure
  • Polymers
  • Absorption
  • Enzymes
  • Decomposition reaction
  • Density
  • Polarity
  • Chemical change
  • Combustion
  • Demonstration
  • Science communication

Episode strand

Forces, Heat & Energy

Gravity, heat, charge and radiation — the things that move other things. Why a metal spoon burns you, why a doorknob bites in winter, and how turning a handle becomes sound.

5 episodes · 48 min · 1,434 views

  • Thermal conduction
  • Insulators
  • Gravity
  • Free fall
  • Air resistance
  • Energy transformation
  • Induction
  • Static electricity
  • Electric charge
  • Microwave radiation
  • Conductors

Episode strand

Air, Weather & Earth

Air is a substance with mass, and it is pressing on you right now. Atmospheric pressure, condensation, the water cycle, and how a tornado gets its spin.

5 episodes · 46 min · 1,517 views

  • Air pressure
  • Properties of matter
  • Water cycle
  • Condensation
  • Air pressure
  • Volume
  • Atmospheric pressure
  • Weather
  • Vortices
  • Tornado formation

Episode strand

Specials & Seasonal

The two long-form episodes: a Halloween dry-ice hour and a season-one clip show. Looser, funnier, and the fastest way to get the flavour of the whole series at once.

2 episodes · 29 min · 1,144 views

  • Sublimation
  • Dry ice
  • Lab safety
  • Season one highlights

New for 2026–27

The 5th Grade Classroom

Short unit films for Mr. Cruz's fifth grade science students, built against the Florida standards. Students, this is your tab — it grows as the year does.

2 episodes · 5 min · 2 views

  • Course trailer
  • 2026–2027
  • Scientific investigation
  • Evidence vs. opinion

SC.5.N.1.1 · SC.5.N.2.1 · SC.5.N.2.2

Interstitials

The Wow Files

Eight true things about the world that sound made up. Every number here is real and every one connects to somewhere you can go next — checking them is the entire point.

8 files · every one checkable

Press your hand flat on a desk and nothing makes contact. The electrons in your skin and the electrons in the wood repel each other and hold the two surfaces apart. What you feel as solid is an electromagnetic force pushing back across a gap far too small to notice.

A lightning channel reaches roughly 30,000 °C. The surface of the sun sits near 5,500 °C. The bolt only wins on temperature — it is a few centimetres wide and gone in a fraction of a second, while the sun has been doing it for four and a half billion years.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: Static Cling

Earth's water has been cycling for about four billion years and almost none of it ever leaves. Every glass you have ever finished has already been ocean, glacier, thundercloud, and the bloodstream of something that went extinct long before there was anyone to name it.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: Cloud in a Bottle

At −78.5 °C, carbon dioxide goes straight from solid to gas without ever being a liquid — a jump called sublimation. And the fog rolling off it is not the CO₂ you are seeing. That is ordinary water vapour from the room, condensing in the cold.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: Halloween Spooktacular

Air at sea level pushes with 14.7 pounds on every square inch of your body, which adds up to several tons spread across your whole surface. You do not collapse because you are pushing back just as hard from the inside — the two cancel out so precisely that you have never once noticed.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: The Bone Crusher

An average cumulus cloud carries about half a gram of water per cubic metre, and can easily be a kilometre across in every direction — somewhere near 500,000 kilograms of water. It floats because the warm air holding it up is lighter still, not because water stops having weight when it goes white and fluffy.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: Cloud in a Bottle

It takes roughly 3,000 volts to make a spark jump a single millimetre of air. So the faintest doorknob zap you have ever felt in winter was already thousands of volts — it just carried almost no current behind it, and current is the part that actually matters.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: Static Cling

Strontium burns red, copper burns blue-green, sodium burns yellow, barium burns green. Heat those atoms enough and their electrons jump up, fall back, and dump the difference as one precise colour of light. A fireworks show is a chemistry readout you can watch from the driveway.

Watch it happen — Cool Science: Explosive Fireworks

Thirty-three destinations

Somewhere Else Entirely

Doors out of this website and into the actual instruments: NASA's live solar system, the wind moving over the planet right now, working simulations from the University of Colorado, and cameras pointed at animals who do not know you are watching. Every link checked by hand.

33 links · all verified 29 July 2026 · every one opens in a new tab

Space & the Solar System6 destinations

No episode of the show reaches this far yet, so every door here is one NASA or an observatory built.

Live 3D Eyes on the Solar System NASA Fly the actual solar system, with every planet at the position it occupies right now, built on real NASA mission data. Grab time and drag it forward to watch the orbits run. Planetarium Stellarium Web planetarium Stellarium The sky above your exact address, tonight. Type in your town, spin the view, switch on the constellation lines, and find the Milky Way from your own back yard. Scroll If the Moon were only one pixel Josh Worth A map of the solar system drawn to true scale. Reaching Jupiter takes a genuinely uncomfortable amount of scrolling, and that discomfort is the entire lesson. Live 3D 100,000 Stars Google Chrome Experiments Zoom out from the Sun until the Milky Way is a smudge beneath you. Every star you pass is a real catalogued star sitting at a real measured distance. Gallery Webb Telescope image galleries NASA The sharpest images of other galaxies humans have ever captured, free to download at full size. Read any caption and you learn how far back in time you are looking. Reference NASA Space Place NASA NASA's own site written for students: the Sun, the planets, comets, asteroids and the Milky Way, with games and make-it activities attached to each one.

Water, Weather & Earth8 destinations

Live instruments. What the atmosphere and the ground are doing at the moment you load the page.

Reference The water cycle, mapped U.S. Geological Survey The USGS water cycle diagram with every arrow explained, and the ocean sitting where it belongs — at the centre of the whole system rather than off to one side. Reference Weather and atmosphere collection NOAA Assembled by the agency that actually forecasts the weather: air pressure, humidity, wind, clouds, hurricanes and climate zones, with data and lessons for each. Live data National Weather Service NOAA The live forecast for your zip code, straight from the source instead of from a television. Click the map and read the actual discussion the forecasters wrote. Live data Live global wind map nullschool Every wind on Earth, moving, drawn from live forecast models. Switch the overlay to temperature or pressure and weather stops being weather and becomes a system you can read. Live data National Hurricane Center NOAA The real forecasts Florida runs on. During season you can watch a storm's cone get drawn and redrawn as new evidence arrives — science correcting itself in public. Activity Build a family disaster plan Ready.gov The federal preparedness site's section for students, including a fill-in family plan. This is the one benchmark on the whole list you can finish at your kitchen table tonight. Live data Live earthquake map U.S. Geological Survey Every earthquake detected anywhere on the planet in the last hour, plotted as the readings come in. Check it across a week and the plate boundaries draw themselves. Gallery Scientific Visualization Studio NASA NASA's own studio turns satellite data into animations: ice thickness, ocean currents, carbon moving through the atmosphere over a year. Real measurements, made watchable.

Matter & Atoms5 destinations

Working simulations for the things too small, too fast or too hot to put on a table in front of you.

Simulation States of Matter: Basics PhET, University of Colorado Add heat, remove heat, and watch the particles themselves change behaviour. It is the demonstration from It's A Matter Of State, except this time you hold the thermometer. Simulation Sugar and Salt Solutions PhET, University of Colorado Pour solids into water and watch what dissolves, what refuses, and what is happening at the molecular level while it happens. Then raise the temperature and time it again. Simulation Build an Atom PhET, University of Colorado Drag protons, neutrons and electrons into place and find out which element you just made. The best available answer to "if atoms are too small to see, how does anybody know?" Zoom Cell Size and Scale University of Utah One slider takes you from a coffee bean down to a single carbon atom without ever cutting away. You pass a skin cell somewhere in the middle, and then keep going for a long time. Reference Interactive periodic table Ptable Every known element, clickable. Switch to the states view and drag the temperature slider to watch the entire table melt and then boil, in order.

Energy & Electricity4 destinations

Build the circuit, move the electrons, and follow energy through every form it takes without losing track of it.

Simulation Energy Forms and Changes PhET, University of Colorado Follow energy as it changes form — cyclist to generator to light bulb to heat. The energy symbols stay visible the whole way, so nothing ever mysteriously disappears. Simulation Circuit Construction Kit PhET, University of Colorado Wire a battery to a bulb and it lights. Leave one gap and it will not — the closed-circuit benchmark in a single move. Then swap the wire for wood and test conductors yourself. Simulation Balloons and Static Electricity PhET, University of Colorado Rub the balloon on the sweater and watch individual electrons move across. Then hold it near the wall and see attraction happen with no contact whatsoever. Build it Science Snacks Exploratorium Hundreds of real demonstrations from San Francisco's Exploratorium, each with a materials list you can mostly raid from a kitchen. Filter by subject and pick a fight with one.

Forces & Motion2 destinations

Set the forces yourself and watch the sum. Gravity with a number attached to it.

Simulation Forces and Motion: Basics PhET, University of Colorado A tug of war where you set the forces and it shows you the sum. Balanced forces, unequal forces and heavy objects refusing to budge — all four force benchmarks on one screen. Simulation Gravity Force Lab PhET, University of Colorado Change the mass of two objects and watch the pull between them change with a number attached. Gravity stops being a word and becomes a quantity you are adjusting.

Living Things & Bodies4 destinations

Organs, adaptations, and animals being watched live by cameras they are unaware of.

Reference How the Body Works Nemours KidsHealth Written by a children's hospital system: every organ on the benchmark list — skin, brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, intestines — what it does, and how it can go wrong. Tour Natural History Museum virtual tour Smithsonian Walk the halls of the Smithsonian from a laptop, room by room, stopping in front of whatever you like for as long as you like. No queue, no crowd, no closing time. Live cam Live animal cams Monterey Bay Aquarium Live cameras inside the kelp forest and open sea tanks. Pick one animal, watch it for ten minutes, write down what it actually does — you have just made a systematic observation. Live cam Bird cams Cornell Lab of Ornithology Nest cameras run by Cornell's ornithology lab, including hawks and owls raising chicks in real time. Adaptation is a great deal more convincing when it is happening live.

How Science Works4 destinations

The part that outlasts fifth grade: evidence, replication, and real research you are allowed to join.

Citizen science Zooniverse: real research, open to you Zooniverse Working scientists post data they cannot get through alone — galaxy shapes, penguin counts, century-old weather logs — and anyone may help classify it. Your work ends up in real papers. Reference How science actually works UC Berkeley Berkeley's answer to the benchmark stating that real investigation does not follow the neat steps of "the scientific method". It shows the messy actual shape instead. Reference What is science? UC Berkeley Where the line sits between a claim you can test and a claim you merely believe — the difference between evidence and opinion, argued carefully rather than asserted. Library Browse every PhET simulation PhET, University of Colorado The entire free library from the University of Colorado, sorted by subject and grade. Nobel-founded, used in classrooms worldwide, and it runs in a browser with no account.

Florida NGSSS · Science · Grade 5

Grade 5, Benchmark by Benchmark

All thirty-seven fifth grade science benchmarks, quoted exactly as the state writes them, each one wired to the episodes and the outside destinations that actually teach it. Built for the students sitting the test and the teachers planning around it.

37 benchmarks · 26 with an episode · all 37 with somewhere to go

The Practice of Science7 of 8 with an episode

Eight benchmarks about how knowing anything actually works — testable observations, repeated trials, control groups, and the difference between evidence and a confident opinion. This is the part of fifth grade science that outlives fifth grade.

SC.5.N.1.1

Define a problem, use appropriate reference materials to support scientific understanding, plan and carry out scientific investigations of various types such as: systematic observations, experiments requiring the identification of variables, collecting and organizing data, interpreting data in charts, tables, and graphics, analyze information, make predictions, and defend conclusions.

Watch
Go
Zooniverse: real research, open to youZooniverseScience SnacksExploratoriumLive animal camsMonterey Bay Aquarium

SC.5.N.1.6

Recognize and explain the difference between personal opinion/interpretation and verified observation.

Watch
Go
What is science?UC Berkeley

Properties & Changes in Matter3 of 5 with an episode

Five benchmarks on what matter is and what heat does to it. The show's two most-watched episodes live here, and so does the strangest idea in the whole grade: that everything is built from parts nobody can see.

SC.5.P.8.1

Compare and contrast the basic properties of solids, liquids, and gases, such as mass, volume, color, texture, and temperature.

Watch
Go
States of Matter: BasicsPhET, University of Colorado

SC.5.P.8.2

Investigate and identify materials that will dissolve in water and those that will not and identify the conditions that will speed up or slow down the dissolving process.

Watch
Go
Sugar and Salt SolutionsPhET, University of Colorado

Forms of Energy & Energy Transfer6 of 6 with an episode

Six benchmarks on energy: the six forms it takes, how it changes from one into another, and why electricity needs a complete loop. Four episodes cover this ground, including the one with no battery in it anywhere.

Forces & Changes in Motion4 of 4 with an episode

Four benchmarks on pushes, pulls, mass and balance. The gravity episode covers the first three; the fourth — why a thing can have enormous force on it and not move at all — is the whole point of The Bone Crusher.

SC.5.P.13.4

Investigate and explain that when a force is applied to an object but it does not move, it is because another opposing force is being applied by something in the environment so that the forces are balanced.

Watch
Go
Forces and Motion: BasicsPhET, University of Colorado

Earth Systems & Patterns5 of 7 with an episode

Seven benchmarks on water, weather and climate — the most Florida-relevant group on the list. Barometric pressure, wind, precipitation, climate zones, and a family plan for the storm that is eventually coming.

Earth in Space & Time0 of 3 with an episode

Three benchmarks on the solar system and our own galaxy. No episode of the show covers this yet — so this group is entirely external, and every destination in it is one NASA built.

Living Organisms & Their Environments1 of 4 with an episode

Four benchmarks on bodies and survival: every major organ and what it does, how plants and animals solve the same problems differently, and what happens to a population when its environment changes.

Florida NGSSS, Science, Grade 5 (2016 standards document). Benchmark text is quoted verbatim. Benchmark wording belongs to the Florida Department of Education and is reproduced here so students and families can read what is actually being asked of them.

Full index

The Complete Archive

Every public film on the channel, in the order it originally aired. Search by title, topic, or the science inside it.

23 films · 21 show episodes · 3 h 33 m · 81,872 views

  • Food science
  • Asking a testable question
  • Chemical change
  • Reaction rate
  • Thermal conduction
  • Insulators
  • Air pressure
  • Properties of matter
  • States of matter
  • Phase change
  • Water cycle
  • Condensation
  • Sublimation
  • Dry ice
  • Lab safety
  • Gravity
  • Free fall
  • Air resistance
  • Dissolved gas
  • Pressure
  • Air pressure
  • Volume
  • Energy transformation
  • Induction
  • Static electricity
  • Electric charge
  • Season one highlights
  • Polymers
  • Absorption
  • Enzymes
  • Decomposition reaction
  • Density
  • Polarity
  • Atmospheric pressure
  • Weather
  • Chemical change
  • Combustion
  • Microwave radiation
  • Conductors
  • Vortices
  • Tornado formation
  • Demonstration
  • Science communication
  • Course trailer
  • 2026–2027
  • Scientific investigation
  • Evidence vs. opinion

SC.5.N.1.1 · SC.5.N.2.1 · SC.5.N.2.2