Your monster is powered by air pressure — and air pressure is surprisingly strong.

Here's what's actually happening inside the bottle.

• When the match burns, it heats the air inside. Hot air expands — the molecules speed up and spread out, pushing harder against everything around them. Some of that hot air actually escapes out the top before you place the balloon.

• The moment you place the balloon over the mouth, you seal the bottle. The fire goes out — it runs out of oxygen and the heat disappears. The air inside starts to cool rapidly.

• Here's the key: cooling air contracts. The molecules slow down and huddle closer together, taking up less space and pushing outward with less force. The pressure inside the bottle drops.

• But the air outside the bottle hasn't changed at all. It's still at full atmospheric pressure — the weight of the entire column of air above you pressing down. That outside pressure is now much greater than the pressure inside.

• So the outside air pushes the balloon inward, trying to equalise the two pressures. And it's strong enough to pull the balloon right past the rubber's resistance and into the bottle.

That same outside pressure is doing something equally impossible-looking in [The Magic Water Cup] — where it holds an entire cup of water in place with nothing but a card — and something just as surprising in [The Chatterbox Tube], where a single breath inflates an entire tube by letting the atmosphere do the work.

Curiosity spark: What do you think would happen if you used a bottle that had been sitting in the sun and was already warm inside — would the monster eat faster, slower, or not at all?

Find out in The Crazy Scientist Lab.