The earliest references to candlesticks date from 3000BC, so we know candles must be around for at least 5000 years! However, it wasn’t until the 1800s that French chemists worked out a process of combining paraffin (from crude oil) with stearic acid to produce the type of candle we know, love and mass-produce today. Ever watched the Royal Institution Christmas lectures for Children? They were started by Michael Faraday in 1826 and one of his most famous Christmas Lectures was in 1860 called "The Chemical History of a Candle" in which he taught his audience how to use the magic of capillary action to flood the bathroom while you were pretending to innocently sit someplace else doing your homework. Science Year would never condone such actions, so you’ll have to work out how this could work yourself!

	Candle-powered eggs!
	Planet Science have taken a simple Christmas candle and used it to do silly things to an egg. Incredibly, by doing so we’ve think we’ve solved that age-old question of how Santa gets down the chimney. Aren’t we clever? Want to try it too? Read on…
	You will need:
	One shelled, hard-boiled egg. A bottle with a neck that’s small enough so that the egg won't fall in. Some matches. A thin candle. We shouldn’t have to remind you to be careful with matches, but we will anyway. BE CAREFUL. Also, you’ll have to get the timing right for this trick; it might be worth practicing before you try to show anyone.
	What to do:
	Drop the candle into the bottle (upright) so you’ll still be able to light it (if this is going to be tricky then you can try dropping in lit matches).
	Allow the candle to burn for a while (or wait for the matches to burn out) and immediately put the egg in the bottleneck...
	...Where it should be sucked in, making a fantastic noise as it does so!
	Why?
	To be truly accurate, the egg isn't "sucked" at all - it's pushed. The answer’s all down to the air pressure. Before you started the experiment, the air pressure would have been the same inside the bottle and above it.
	However, the candle (or whatever you set fire to) will have heated the air inside the bottle. This decreases the air pressure (because hotter things are less dense so the air would have floated up and away thereby decreasing the overall amount of air in the bottle).
	However the air pressure around the bottle has remained the same, which means the air pressure above the bottle is greater than inside it. The air above will push down on the bottle, trying to equalise the pressure. The egg –as it’s in the way - gets pushed down too causing it to "magically" drop in.
	The slightly egg-shaped Santa travels down narrow chimneys, which often have a hot fire at the bottom of them. Is the answer behind his trick all about the difference in air pressure too? Or is he just magic?