Monthly Archives: April 2017

International Girls in ICT Day 2017

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There is a huge shortfall of ICT professionals worldwide, with many companies looking to increase the number of women working for them. However, many girls don’t even consider a career in ICT. We decided to celebrate some influential women in ICT from the times computers were invented to now.

Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace

Ada was an English Mathematician who worked on the ‘Analytical Engine’, one of the first designs for modern computers.  She recognised that computers could do a lot more than was previously thought and designed the first algorithm that could be carried out by computers. She is often called the first computer programmer for designing this.

Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray

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Joan was an English cryptanalyst (analysing information systems to breach cryptographic security systems) who is best known for her work as a code breaker at Bletchley Park during World War II. She worked on the Enigma project, which cracked the German system of encoding their messages and led to WWII being much shorter and saving thousands of lives. The Enigma project was a very early form of ICT.

Grace Hopper

grace-hopper

Grace was an American Computer Scientist and a United States Navy Rear Admiral. She was the first person to develop a compiler, despite being told by many people that it would never work. A compiler is a programme that changes what you write on a computer into a language that can be understood by the computer. This allows computers to work with words rather than just numbers as was previously done. There is now a yearly Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, giving women in computer science a chance to share their research.

Anita Borg

anita

Working as a computer scientist  she developed ways to analyse high speed memory systems in computers. She founded Systers, a network for women in technology, and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. In 1997, she founded the Institute for Women and Technology (now the Anita Borg Institute), to increase the number of women in technology and their impact on the world.

Marissa Mayer

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She joined Google as employee number 20 and as their first female engineer after studying computer science at university. She oversaw the layout of Google’s home page and became Vice President of search products and user experience. In 2012 she became president and CEO of Yahoo! and led them to buy Tumblr in 2013.

Earth Day 2017

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It’s the planet that we live on and home to 7 billion people as well as billions of plants and animals. But with climate change and other issues such as pollution, we need to do more to look after our home. Earth Day gives the opportunity to come together and work toward a greener future, showing support for the environment. earth-day

Why is it important?

Humans are using resources at an alarmingly fast rate, currently using more resources than the Earth can produce. Today humans use 1.5 planets’ worth of resources every year!

Climate change is a huge problem for the future of our planet. It will lead to things like increased sea level and flooding, drought, and a rise in temperature. This will make it more difficult for plants and animals to survive and hence humans. Scientists agree that we can reduce the impacts of climate change, but we need to act as fast as we can.

There are lots of other environmental issues such as deforestation, pollution and ocean acidification that are affecting the environment.  These problems can lead to a loss in the number of animal and plant species causing the Earth to have reduced biodiversity (the number of species). Lots of plants and animals are interlinked in food chains, so losing one can have a knock on effect on other species. Biodiversity is vital to our survival, for supporting the ecosystem, finding things like new medicines and for providing humans with lots of raw materials.

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How can we help?

There are lots of things we can do to reduce our footprint on the Earth. These are just some things you could try and do:

  1. Shop for locally sourced produce
  2. Eat food that is in season
  3. Eat less meat
  4. Bring your own shopping bags
  5. Use a reusable water bottle rather than bottled water
  6. Don’t drive if there is an alternative
  7. Take holidays closer to home
  8. Recycle
  9. Use energy saving lights
  10. Unplug your electronics when not in use
  11. Plant a tree
  12. Use a reusable coffee cup

 

#TryThisTuesday: Easter Eggsperiments

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As Easter is coming up we’re treating you to four experiments instead of one this week! And a little video showing Ellie and Clare demonstrating each of them (or at least attempting to!)

1. Hard-boiled Egg Test

Our first eggsperiment requires a hard boiled egg so we’re going to show you how you can test if an egg is hard boiled or not.

Lay a hard-boiled and a normal egg flat on their sides and spin them. Put your finger on the eggs to stop spinning them and then let go. The one that starts spinning again is the raw egg.

This is all due to momentum. When you spin the eggs you spin their insides too. In the hard boiled egg, the insides are fixed to the shell so it behaves as you would expect. In the raw egg the insides continue to spin after you’ve stopped the shell. When you let go, the momentum of the spinning yolk carries the shell and the whole egg starts spinning again.

 

2. Egg in a Bottle

Now we know which is our hardboiled egg, we need to peel it for next experiment. This one requires a glass bottle, a match and of course, the egg.

If we place the egg on top of the bottle it doesn’t look like it’s going to fit in. But if we light the match and drop it into the bottle then after a second place the egg on top, the egg will squeeze into the bottle.

The match heats up the air in the bottle, causing it to expand slightly. The egg creates a seal so more air cannot enter. As the air cools inside the bottle it decreases the pressure and forces the egg into the bottle.

 

3. Naked Bouncy Egg

To make a naked bouncy egg you will need an egg, white vinegar and a beaker. Place your egg in the beaker and pour in enough vinegar to cover the egg. Leave you egg here overnight.

The egg shell is made mostly of calcium carbonate, this reacts with the acid in the vinegar and dissolves to leave a naked egg. It also produces carbon dioxide gas, so as your egg is soaking you may see little bubbles of CO2 forming around it.

After a day, carefully remove you egg from the vinegar and wipe away any remaining shell. You should see that it’s now quite rubbery and bouncy as well.

 

4. Bouncy Elastic Egg Drop

For this final eggsperiement you can use your bouncy naked eggs but we’re cheating a little bit and using rubber eggs. For this you will need to take two rubber eggs and join them together with a piece of elastic or a string of elastic bands.

When you hold your eggs next to one another and let go they both hit the floor at the same time as you might expect. But what do you think will happen if we just hold the top egg and let the other hang below it, which will reach the floor first when we let go?

Gravitational acceleration is the same no matter the weight or mass of an object, but when we add elastic between the eggs, this adds an extra force that speeds up the drop of the higher up egg as the elastic pulls them together.

 

#TryThisTuesday: Skipping Stones

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During our time as STEM Ambassadors, we’ve visited several beaches together. From Newcastle in Northern Ireland to Clear Water Bay in Hong Kong and even beaches closer to home in Whitley Bay and Tynemouth, we always ended up skipping rocks somewhere!

But how do we do it!? Why don’t the rocks just fall into the water?

Skipping rocks in Whitley Bay

The key is to get a nice flat rock and throw it quickly at the right angle. The large surface area allows the stone to bounce off the water’s surface.

You need to throw it fairly hard to give it enough speed to gain momentum before it hits the water. When the rock hits the surface of the water it pushes the water down whilst the water pushes the rock up. If the force pushing the stone up from the water is greater than or balances the weight of the stone then it will bounce on for another skip rather than sinking. This is why it helps to have a nice small stone.

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It is also important to get the right velocity. Velocity is the speed of something in a give direction. So we have the speed covered, now for the direction. Scientists have discovered that the optimal angle at which the stone should hit the water should be around 20 degrees. As you probably won’t be able to measure this on a causal day trip to the beach, just aim to throw the stone sideways rather than up or down.

Hopefully you’ll manage more than my measly two skips. Try beating the world record of 88 skips in a row!

Will skipping rocks in Northern Ireland
Will skipping rocks in Northern Ireland

Ten Amazing Facts about the human body!

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You take it everywhere you go, but I bet that there are a few facts about your body that you didn’t know!

1. There is enough DNA in the human body to stretch from the Sun to Pluto and back – 17 times! 

There are about 37 trillion cells in the human body, all of them containing about 5cm of of DNA (when uncoiled). DNA is made up of lots of different nucleotide pairs that can decide some of our features such as eye and hair colour.

2. The average human body contains ten times more bacterial cells than human cells.

However bacteria are much smaller so don’t take up that much space. Lots of these bacterial cells are important, such as intestinal bacteria that help keep our immune systems healthy.unravelled-dna

3. Except for identical twins, each person on Earth has a unique smell.

Just how we each have individual finger prints we all have our own smell. This is determined by your genes, and can be used by other animals to identify individuals.

4. An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body. 

The average heart pumps about 70ml of blood out with each beat and a healthy heart beats around 70 times a minute.

5. By the time you go to bed at night you are about 1 cm shorter than when you woke up that morning.

This is because the cartilage between your bones is compressed throughout the day.

6. Nerve impulses to and from the brain can travel as fast as 250 miles per hour. 

A nerve impulse is an electrical signal that sends messages to the brain when the nerve is triggered by a stimulus. It is really important that they travel fast, for example, if you burn your finger it’s important that your brain gets the message to stop touching it quickly.nerves

7. There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee.

Humans are not quite the naked apes that we’re made out to be. We have lots of hair, but on most of us it’s not obvious as a majority of the hairs are too fine or light to be seen.

8. The human body is estimated to have 60,000 miles of blood vessels.

To put that in perspective, the distance around the earth is about 25,000 miles, so your blood vessels could travel more than two times around the Earth if laid out.blood-vessels

9. Babies are always born with blue eyes.

The colour of your eyes depends on the genes you get from your parents, but at birth most babies appear to have blue eyes. The reason behind this is the pigment melanin. The melanin in a newborn’s eyes often needs time after birth to be fully deposited or to be darkened by exposure to ultraviolet light, later revealing the baby’s true eye colour.

10. Every day an adult body produces 300 billion new cells.

Your body not only needs energy to keep your organs up and running but also to constantly repair and build new cells to form the building blocks of your body itself.