Tag Archives: science

Your Questions Answered!

As we have reached the end of the school year, here is a little round up of some of our favourite questions that children have asked us during STEM workshops.

1. Why doesn’t the energy ball give you an electric shock?

The energy ball is a little device we have that looks like a ping pong ball with two metal strips on top. Inside there is a light, a buzzer and a battery. If two people touch one metal strip each and then with their other hands touch each other, the ball lights up and buzzes. This works because we are conductors of electricity – electrons from the battery flow through us and back into the ball to complete the circuit.

The reason you don’t feel a shock when touching the energy ball because there isn’t enough electricity flowing through you to be able to feel it, and certainly not enough to harm you!

2. What do plants poo and wee? – St Wilfrids, Blyth

All living things have seven things in common – movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition. The sixth one, excretion, is a scientific word for producing waste. In humans, and many animals, that is our poo and our wee. They are the leftover waste products that our body doesn’t need so gets rid of.

Plants are living things, just like us, but you may have noticed they don’t poo or wee like we do. Rather than eat food like us, they make their own through photosynthesis. This produces a waste gas called oxygen which we breath in. Plants excrete oxygen rather than poo or wee.

3. Why does the moon control the sea? – Grange First School

Gravity is the force that keeps us close to the Earth, all really big things like planets and stars have a gravitational pull that attracts things near by. Because the moon is so big and so close to Earth it has quite a strong gravitational pull on our planet. The moon causes the water in the oceans facing it to pull towards it, resulting in a high tide. The pull of the sun’s gravity and the Earth’s own gravity also have an effect on the tides.

4. I’m the only one who can touch their nose with their tongue, is that because of my genes? – St Marys, Jarrow

Touching your nose with your tongue is known as Gorlin’s Sign. It is associated with a genetic disorder but not everyone that can do it has the disorder. About 10% of people without the disorder can touch their nose with their tongue and it does not appear to be due to genes you have inherited from your parents.

5. Why do we get goosebumps? – Billingham South Community School

We often get goosebumps when we’re cold, but they don’t do much to help us warm up, so why do we get them? Before we evolved to be modern humans, our ancestors were much hairier, we they got cold, getting goosebumps would cause their hairs to stand on end. As they had much more hair than us, they were able to trap a layer of air in the hair by doing this, providing them with extra insulation to keep them warm.

Although goosebumps are no longer helpful to us, we haven’t lost the trait through evolution because it doesn’t harm us. Therefore if a person was born with a mutation in their genes meaning they didn’t get goosebumps, they wouldn’t be at an advantage because of it so the non-goosebump genes wouldn’t necessarily be passed on more than the goosebump genes.

 

If you have any STEM related questions that you would like us to answer, just leave a comment in the box below!

#TryThisTuesday: Rock Candy

This weeks Try This Tuesday takes a while, but you end up with a tasty treat!

You will need:

  • A wooden skewer or chopstick
  • Peg
  • 1 cup of water
  • 2-3 cups of sugar
  • A narrow glass or jar

pic

Clip the wooden skewer into the peg so that it hangs down inside the glass and is a couple of centimetres off the bottom.

Put the water into a pan and bring it to the boil. Pour about a quarter of a cup of the sugar into the boiling water and stir until it dissolves.

Keep adding more and more sugar, each time stirring it until it dissolves, until no more will dissolve. This might take quite a while!

When no more sugar will dissolve remove it from the heat and leave it to cool for about 20 minutes.

Pour the sugar solution into the glass or jar almost to the top. Then put your skewer back into the glass so it hangs down and doesn’t touch the sides.1st

Leave your glass in somewhere it won’t be disturbed. The sugar crystals will grow over 3-7 days. Once these have grown you can eat them!finished-product

The Science

By mixing the sugar and water together when they were really hot, you have created a super saturated solution. This means that the water contains much more sugar than in could in normal circumstances. As the water cools back down the sugar leaves the solution (mixture) and becomes sugar crystals again, forming on the skewer.

Supersaturated solutions are used in real life. In a sealed fizzy drink the drink is saturated (full) with carbon dioxide, as the carbon dioxide is put in using pressure. When you open the drink, the pressure of the carbon dioxide is decreased, which causes your drink to be supersaturated as there is much more carbon dioxide dissolved than there would be at normal pressure. The excess carbon dioxide is given off as bubbles.

International Girls in ICT Day 2017

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

joan-clarke1

 

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

marissa

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

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.

coral

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

 

Ten Amazing Facts about the human body!

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.

STEM on Tour: Hong Kong!

Recently myself and my fellow STEM Graduate Ambassadors, Ellie and Will, were lucky enough travel to Hong Kong to take part in the British Council organised Science Alive Festival at the HK Science Museum. As the festival’s theme this year was This Pale Blue Dot – we also took two Earth Science students, Hannah and Elizabeth.

Will, Elizabeth, Clare, Hannah and Ellie at the Hong Kong Science Museum

To take full advantage of this wonderful opportunity we also reached out to some schools with the help of Anthea, Newcastle’s Hong Kong Recruitment Manager. With 20 STEM workshops booked in, we took to the skies with our bags packed with as much kit as we could carry including a drill, over 20 metres of rope and a dinosaur costume.

16992250_407736942893573_9006364662072727951_o
Hannah and Elizabeth delivering our Thinking Like a Scientist workshop

During the first three days, our time was spread amongst seven schools. We were delighted to see how bright and engaged the children were throughout our workshops, particularly in the primary schools. Each school was extremely welcoming, many of them gave us banners with their school logo on and other gifts. The Vice Principal of one school even took us to a nearby bakery after the visit to treat us to a local delicacy – a warm egg tart.

p1020495
Elizabeth science busking

The weekend snuck up on us and before we knew it we were performing our science show: The Story of Earth, at the Science Alive festival. I was setting Will on fire (don’t worry, it didn’t hurt him although I did actually singe his arm hair at one point) and Ellie was freezing flowers with liquid nitrogen. Meanwhile Hannah and Elizabeth were science busking; entertaining and educating children with science demonstrations.

The Story of Earth Show

We also ran training workshops for teachers. We taught primary school teachers how to think outside the box to raise aspirations and teach science in a more interactive and fun way. At the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, we trained the students on good science communication practices, from science busking to written texts. We explained how they could simplify their language to make their research more accessible and easy to understand.

Ellie in her element at the beach on the HKUST campus
Ellie in her element at the beach on the HKUST campus

During our ten days in Hong Kong we had an absolute blast, educating thousands of children and adults and learning all about their culture and styles of teaching. From bursting a 3-foot confetti-filled balloon to teaching children how to make honeycomb, from visiting the highest bar in the world to seeing 10,000 Buddha statues in one room, it was an unforgettable experience.

The 10,000 Buddhas Monastery
The 10,000 Buddhas Monastery

We feel honoured to have been given the opportunity to share our activities with another part of the world and hope next year’s team will be able to have a similar adventure.

View of Hong Kong Island from the Star Ferry
View of Hong Kong Island from the Star Ferry

Exoplanet discovery

Recently NASA have found the TRAPPIST-1 Solar System (named after the TRAnsmitting Planets and Plantisemals I Small Telescope). It is 40 light years away in the constellation of Aquarius and has seven Earth size Exoplanets (planets that orbit a star that isn’t the Sun) that have the potential to support life.

This is a big discovery as it is the largest amount of Earth sized planets ever found around a single star and it might help in the search for life on other planets. trappist

How did they find the TRAPPIST-1 Solar System?

  • The Star in the centre of the solar system glows brightest in infra-red light which can’t be detected by the human eye
  • The infra red light was detected by an infra red telescope called the Spitzer. This telescope is in space and follows the orbit of the Earth.
  • The radiation (light) detected from the TRAPPIST-1 star would periodically dim and then brighten again; this could show that a planet could be passing in front of the star.
  • The dips in light were not always the same amount, showing that there were actually seven exoplanets orbiting the star.
  • NASA used the dips in radiation to calculate the size of each planet in the solar system.
  • Space in between the dips in radiation means they can work out how it takes for a planet to orbit the star.
  • The planets were found to be very close together with orbits that interfere with each other due to gravity.
  • They used the estimated size of the planets to work out what the density of each planet is, to work out what the planet might be made of.
  • All seven planets may be suitable of supporting liquid water, with three in the habitable zone capable of having oceans.
spitzer
The Spitzer Telescope

What next?

It’s really rare to find this many planets that may support life in one solar system so its important to find out more about them. NASA are going to use transmission spectroscopy to study the composition of the seven exoplanets. This is a technique that gives information about the chemical composition of a planet and whether a planet has an atmosphere.

They are using more telescopes to study some of the other ultracool dwarf stars (like TRAPPIST-1), to see if they also have exoplanets that could support life.

#TryThisTuesday: Making coins shiny again

New coins are always bright and shiny but they quickly become dull and tarnished. Today we are going to make our coins shiny again!

You will need 100ml of vinegar, some tarnished copper coins and a bowl.vinegar

Pour the vinegar into the bowl and add the salt. Mix until the salt is dissolved.

img_4336

Try dipping a coin in and holding it there for 5 minutes. See how half becomes really shiny!

half

Put all your coins in and leave for 30 minutes. If you put lots of coins in the vinegar may turn green.img_4337

Make sure you rinse all the coins with clean water.

The Science

Coins become dirty due to oxygen in the air reacting with the metal to form copper oxide. They become darker as they age as the oxide layer increases. Vinegar is an acid (acetic acid) which can be used to clean up surfaces and remove the unwanted oxides. Acids release positively charged hydrogen atoms, also known as Hydrogen ions (H+) which react with the negatively charged oxygen in copper oxide and produce water (H2O). The copper that was linked to the oxygen dissolves leaving a nice shiny surface.

If your vinegar turned green this is due to all the copper dissolving and producing copper acetate.

Real World Applications

Iron that is used to make cars, trucks and boats can also react with the oxygen in the air and oxidise, producing rust. If a car gets rusty, mechanics can use phosphoric acid  to remove it. It reacts with the rust, removing the oxide and replacing it with a layer of iron phosphate. This also protects the metal from rusting further.

Phosphoric acid is also found in coca cola, which is why it is so good at dissolving your teeth!

#TryThisTuesday: Oil and Water

For this experiment all you will need is a clear bottle or jar with a lid, water, cooking oil and some washing up liquid.

img_4313

Fill the water bottle half full with water.

Pour about 100ml of oil in to the bottle and observe what happens.

The oil should float on the water. Try and mix them together or challenge other people to mix them! It is impossible, the oil and water always separate out again.

Add a squeeze of washing up liquid to the bottle and shake. The oil and water now mix together.

The Science

Oil is less dense than water so floats on top. Oil and water don’t mix together as the water molecules are more attracted to each other than the oil molecules. Oil molecules are hydrophobic or ‘water-fearing’.

img_4315

Washing up liquid molecules are attracted to both water and oil. When you add a squirt in, one end of the washing up liquid molecule attaches to a water molecule and the other end attaches to an oil molecule. This creates a mix of water with oil droplets spread throughout it. This is because one end of the washing up liquid molecule is hydrophobic (water fearing) and one is hydrophilic (water loving).

The washing up liquid acts as a stabiliser and creates an emulsion. This is a mixture of two liquids that wouldn’t normally mix.

colloid1

Real Life Applications

We use washing up liquid when we are washing up as it attaches to the oil on the dirty dishes and lifts it off into the water.

Animals that live in the ocean also stay warm by producing an oily substance on their fur or feathers which keeps the cold water away from their skin.

#TryThisTuesday: DIY Sci-Fi Laser Sound

This week we will show you how to create sci-fi laser sound effects using a slinky and a cup.

16880217_10210650089140843_1066614229_o

The first step is to try and listen to the noise a slinky makes on its own by moving it up and down so the bottom of it bounces off the floor as shown in the picture below.

16901523_10155289747075695_1891472516_n

The next step is to place the cup in the top of the slinky as shown below and try the same movement.

16833383_10210650212743933_948670898_o

The Science

Sound is actually particle vibrations and travels in waves. This means it relies on particles colliding to transfer the sound energy. In a gas such as air the particles are really spread out which means they are less likely to collide. In solids the particles are much closer together which means the particles collide a lot more and the sound energy is transferred more effectively.

partic

This is why the sound is much louder when the sound waves travel through the solid cup as opposed to the air. Rumour has it that they actually used this same technique to make the laser sound effects in the original Star Wars movies back in 1977.