Water can travel against gravity!

We have been investigating the material properties of water. Yesterday we learnt about capillary action - the ability of water to be absorbed into a paper towel. We learnt two new words - cohesion and adhesion; water has both of these properties.

We set up three cups. One with yellow dye, one with blue dye and a middle cup with nothing inside it. We folded two paper towels up and placed one end of each into the coloured dye and the other into the empty middle cup.

Our experiment looked like this:

We asked a question and made various hypotheses about what we thought would happen.

This morning when we arrived at school this is what we found:

The water travelled from the two outside cups into the middle cup and stopped transferring when all the water levels were equal.

We wonder if water transfers the same way when different materials are used to bridge the cups - will the water still transfer? If we started with more dye in one cup than the other, would we still see the same results at the end of the experiment? We will have to investigate further to find the answers to our questions.