Tag Archives: STEM

#TryThisTuesday: Valentine’s Day Optical Illusion

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Happy Valentine’s Day! Love can confuse your brain, and so does this week’s Try This Tuesday.

You don’t need any equipment to try this experiment at home – you just need to stare at your screen, or more specifically the + in the middle of the picture below. You can blink but don’t look away.

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If you stare long enough the pink dots should disappear!

The Science

It looks like the pink dots have disappeared due to a visual phenomenon called Troxler’s fading or Troxler’s effect. if you fix your eyes on a certain point, then anything in your peripheral vision will fade away and disappear after about 20 seconds. In this experiment our sight was focused on the + in the middle of the screen and the the pink dots in your periphery slowly fade and finally disappear. It works especially well in this experiment at there is such low contrast between the light pink dots and the grey background.

This is a type of optical illusion. If you want to see another, have a look at our spinning disk Try This Tuesday.

 

Engineering Education Scheme

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This week we’ve been helping out with the Engineering Education Scheme. Lots of year 12 students from the local area have been working with industry to come up with a project based on real scientific, engineering and technological problems. The students have come in and had a chance to work in the engineering laboratories and workshops that university students and researchers would use. After lots of problem solving and hard work, they presented what they had done so far. These are just a selection of some of the projects.

Mechanical Engineering – Lifting

This group was working on creating a lifting mechanism for a heavy item/box. The current method of lifting isn’t very good as its centre of gravity is in the middle so it wobbles when they lift it. They created a design with a cradle for the box which spreads out the centre of gravity. It is more stable and quicker to lift, saving the company time. The use of shackles mean the box can attached by hand, no tools are needed, again saving time.

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Mechanical Engineering – Shield

A mechanical engineering group created an extendable shield. This is important for keeping people safe in war. In general all shields appeared to be really big or small, but there were none that could adapt to the situation. Use of cogs allowed the shield to be extended or retracted, solving the problem.

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Electrical and Civil Engineering – Solar Power

The brief from WSP Global was to provide renewable energy through use of solar panels to the 350 people who work in the office. The students made a to scale model of the office based on blueprints and used a fixed angle light (as the sun) to look at the shading on the roof of the building. They also ran computer simulations to look at which areas would capture the most sun.

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Civil Engineering – Leisure Centre

The brief was to design a leisure centre on land near to St James Football Park. There were lots of problems to be overcome in the design. The centre was to be built on top of an old mine shaft, which might mean the building would fall into the ground. They calculated that it was too expensive to fill the land underneath with concrete, so calculations had to be made for how heavy each part of the leisure centre would be.

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Marine Engineering – Underwater vehicles

This marine engineering group was helped by engineers from BAE systems. They looked at making an underwater unmanned vehicle. They had to do some problem solving with getting the submarine to sink, working out the exact amount of weight required to make it neutrally buoyant. They used electromagnets to power the vehicle.

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Marine Engineering – Underwater pipes

This group worked with GE oil and gas looking at using flexible pipes underneath the seabed. They compared two different materials; thermoplastic and thermoset.  They did lots of tests, looking at things such as compression (squashing) and torsion (twisting) to find out its properties. They also looked at factors such as the price. Testing found that it was really important that there were no faults in the thermoplastic as it broke a lot easier. Underwater pipes are really important for transporting things like oil and gas.

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Dippy the Diplodocus

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Dippy is a famous diplodocus skeleton cast that has been on display in the London Natural History Museum since 1905. Today it was disassembled as Dippy is going on tour throughout the UK! Dippy is visiting eight places across the UK between February 2018 and October 2020. We are very excited as Dippy is coming to the Great North Museum between May and October 2019.

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History of Dippy

Dippy’s history begins when a skeleton was discovered in Wyoming, USA in 1898. It was a new type of diplodocus and at the time it was described as ‘the most colossal animal on earth”. Andrew Carnegie acquired the bones for the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg, USA, hence the new species was named Diplodocus carnegii  after him. King Edward VII saw a sketch of the diplodocus and mentioned how he would like a similar specimen for the Natural History Museum in London. Andrew Carnegie then made a cast of his specimen and Dippy was created.

Dippy was disassembled during World War II to protect it from bomb damage. It made the move to Hintze Hall (the main entrance hall of the museum) in 1979. Dippy was taken down today, as it is going on a two year tour of the UK.

The unveiling of Dippy in 1905
The unveiling of Dippy in 1905

Diplodocus Facts

  • They were up to 27m in length
  • They weighed about 10,800 kg (as much as a large truck).
  • Lived at the end of the Jurassic period (154-150 million years ago)
  • Its heavy tail was used to scare off predators.
  • They were vegetarian.
  • Diplodocuses lived in North America.
  • Its name means double beam, due to the unusual double row of bones on the underneath of the tail.
  • It was a slow moving dinosaur, moving at 5-9.3 mph.

#TryThisTuesday Mini Fire Extinguisher

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You will need: large tall glass, bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), vinegar, a candle and some matches

image11. Add 4 teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda to the glass

2. Pour in roughly 150ml of vinegar, the mixture will fizz.

3. Light the candle.

4. Once the mixture has stopped fizzing, pick up the glass. Without pouring out the vinegar, gently tip the glass from a few centimeters above the candle. Imagine that there is an invisible liquid inside above the mixture. The candle will go out!

The Science

You have produced a gas, carbon dioxide, by mixing the bicarbonate of soda with vinegar (also known as acetic acid). Bicarbonate of soda contains carbon dioxide, but it is attached to other molecules. When you mix it with vinegar the bicarbonate breaks down and releases carbon dioxide as a gas.

The following reaction takes place:

bicarbonate of soda + vinegar → sodium acetate + water + carbon dioxide

NaHCO3 + HC2H3O2 → NaC2H3O2 + H2O + CO2

Carbon dioxide is heavier than air so stays in the glass until you tip it over the candle. When you pour carbon dioxide on a candle it stops the flow of oxygen which is needed for a flame to burn, and the candle is extinguished.

Real fire extinguishers also use carbon dioxide to put out fires, it is compressed (squashed) into cylinders and sprayed at fires.

Our top STEM jokes!

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It’s nearly Christmas and that means it’s time for awful Christmas cracker jokes. Hopefully our favourite STEM jokes will be a bit more funny! Scientific explanations are underneath each one.

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Neutrons make up the middle (nucleus) of atoms and don’t have any electric charge, unlike protons (positively charged) and electrons (negatively charged).

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Light is made up of small particles, these are called photons. Therefore, a photon is travelling light.

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The chemical symbol for oxygen is O and potassium is K.

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H2O is water, but H202 is hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide would cause chemical burns and choking if it was drunk.

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Atoms are very small and make up everything, including us.

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Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment in physics, where a cat is kept in a box with a radioactive source and poison. Until the box is opened, the cat can be assumed to be both dead and alive.

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Helium is a noble gas, this means it is doesn’t react with other elements so is inert.

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Extrapolation is when you estimate what the result may be beyond what you measured. The joke is that some people can’t extrapolate from data so can’t work out the end of the joke

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Binary is a way of using two different symbols, 0 and 1, to represent any number, this is often used to create code for computers. 10 in binary is the same as writing 2. Therefore, there are two types of people, those who understand binary and those who don’t.

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If an atom loses an electron (a negatively charged particle) it will become positively charged.

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If time travel is ever invented, it doesn’t matter when as you can just travel back in time with the time machine.

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Anti gravity is a place or object that is free from the force of gravity, so would float around.                       joke13

This is a play on words, as the atmosphere in a restaurant is how you feel when you are there, but in science terms the atmosphere is a mixture of gases that surrounds the Earth. The moon has a much thinner atmosphere than the Earth and was originally thought not to have one.

 

Why Perfumes are not the Perfect Christmas Present…

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Many animals rely heavily on their sense of smell for finding food, getting a whiff of the competition and even sniffing potential mates. You might not often see humans checking the scent of their partners, but scientists have found it does play a subtle role in helping us chose mates – as do perfumes.

All animals are made up of a collection of genes that are inherited from parents, these code for all sorts of things like eye colour and taste buds. All mammals, including us, have a section of genes called the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) which affects how well your immune system fights diseases. It is also linked to your natural scent.

There have been experiments on mice, mandrills, meerkats and many other animals showing that females tend to mate with males that have a different MHC to their own. This ensures that their offspring have a more varied set of genes and so will likely have a better immune system and survive for longer – which is what every parent wants for their child.

When tested in humans, the usual method is to get a group of men to wear a t-shirt for several days to get it nice and sweaty and smelly. Women will then smell each of the t-shirts and rate the odours in order of which they find the most pleasant. These experiments have consistently found that women tend to prefer the scent of men with MHC genes different to their own.

So what happens when you wear perfume and cover up that lovely natural odour of yours? Two researchers, Wedekind and Milinski wanted to find out. They asked over 100 people to rate a selection of perfumes based on whether they would like to smell like that. They found a correlation between the type of MHC and the scents selected, suggesting that we choose perfumes for ourselves that will enhance our natural odour. However, when asked to rate perfumes based on whether they would like their partner to smell like that, they found no significant link.

It appears that we are great a picking out odours for ourselves, but not so much at selecting the perfect perfume for others. Maybe a gift card would be better this year…

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#TryThisTuesday: Making Snow

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We’re feeling very festive this Tuesday so we thought it was the perfect time to make snow with science. All you need for this one is some shaving foam and bicarbonate of soda.

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Simply mix the bicarbonate of soda and shaving foam together in a bowl until you get a powdery consistency.

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Pick it up and have a play – you might notice that your fake snow actually feels cold too. This is due to the reaction between the bicarbonate of soda and the shaving foam. The reaction is endothermic meaning that it requires heat to occur, it takes this from the environment and so decreases the temperature around it.

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The Science of Shaving Foam

Do you think shaving foam is a liquid or a solid? It’s actually a colloid. A colloid is a substance which has droplets of one state surrounded by another state. There are lots of different types of colloids with different combinations of states making up the droplets and the surrounding. In the case of shaving foam, the droplets are gas and the surrounding is liquid making it a foam colloid.

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#TryThisTuesday: Pop or not?

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Today we will be experimenting to see what happens when you put a lighter or a flame underneath a balloon filled with two different states of matter: air and water.

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You will need two balloons, some water and a lighter

  1. Blow up one of the balloons with air and tie it up.
  2. Fill the other balloon with a little bit of water, blow it up the rest of the way and tie it up.
  3. Hold the lighter under the balloon with the air in it and see what happens. Be careful as it should pop!

    Balloon with air in
  4. Light the lighter under the balloon with some water in it, be careful to hold the lighter under the part of the balloon where the water is. The balloon won’t pop!

    Balloon with water in

The Science

This happens because water can absorb heat a lot easier than air and is a better conductor of heat. Water keeps the heat away from the balloon. This is called its ‘heat capacity’ and is why water is often used to cool things down in places such as power plants. The air is not very good at absorbing the heat, so the balloon heats up and pops!

 

Marine Projects Society

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There are loads of societies that you can get involved in at Newcastle University. These are clubs based around your interests or what course you study. One of our newest STEM ones is a hands on engineering society: the Marine Projects Society.

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It all started when a group of Marine Technology students took part in the International Submarine Race in 2014 in Washington DC, USA. Students who were interested in working on it the following year took over and decided to form a society around it to enable students to partake in a variety of Marine related projects. The society remained focused on marine engineering so a a variety of engineering students across the university could collaborate on projects.

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Working on the submarine
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Last years submarine team

This academic year (2015/16) they are working on building an underwater ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle), which are underwater robots important in studying deep water habitats that we otherwise couldn’t access . The society aim to take part in the MATE (Marine Advanced Technology Education) ROV competition in Long Beach, California, USA in June next year. The competition is based on acting as entrepreneurs selling the prospective client a product (in this case an ROV). To achieve this they must draft technical reports, marketing displays and engage in community outreach as well as build an ROV to demonstrate that it can perform certain set underwater tasks.

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Working on a prototype

This years team consists of about 30 members, some of whom are a part of the core team and others are ancillary members who have the opportunity to learn from more experienced members and contribute in their own capacity. The current members form 3 sub groups, namely- 1) Structures & Chassis  2) Mechanical Systems  3) Electrical & Computing.

  1. The Structures & Chassis team is responsible for designing the outer framework of the ROV and responsible for waterproofing and making certain design calculations (buoyancy, weights, center of gravity etc.).
  2. The mechanical systems team is responsible for designing & building a manipulator (mechanical arm) in order to enable a person from the surface to control it remotely to perform certain underwater tasks such as picking items up.
  3. The electrical & computing team is responsible for coding the control architecture or the ‘brain’ of the ROV. They are tasked with controlling the motor speeds, manipulator & underwater video-cam transmission.
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Essential calculations for the ROV

This society is a really good opportunity for anyone who is studying engineering to get some practical experience. The students across the different sub groups come from a variety of engineering backgrounds (Electrical, Marine, Mechanical, Computer science). We wish them the best of luck with the ROV competition!

 

Celebrating Marie Curie

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Marie Curie was born 149 years ago today. We think she is one of the most inspiring female scientists as one of the first women to make an outstanding contribution to science. Her work overturned established ideas in physics and chemistry and helped overcome societal barriers for women.

Marie Sklodowska was born in Poland in 1867. In 1891 she went on to study physics and maths at Sorbonne University in Paris. She met Pierre Curie, professor of the School of Physics, who she married in 1895, becoming Marie Curie.

The Curies worked together investigating radioactivity, the process where atoms decay by emitting radiation. With help from other physicists they discovered new elements, polonium (named after her home country, Poland) and radium in 1898. This work was extremely difficult as they were constantly exposed to radioactive elements, which made them feel ill, an effect known as radiation sickness. They received the Nobel Peace Prize in Physics for their work in 1903. Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Unfortunately, Pierre died from being knocked down by a carriage in 1906. Marie Curie took over his professor post and became the first woman to teach at Sorbonne University. She received a second Nobel Peace Prize in 1911 for her work in chemistry where she determined a way to measure radioactivity.

Her research was crucial in development of X-rays. Marie developed small mobile X-rays that were used in World War One to diagnose injuries. She worked with her daughter at the front line to help diagnose injuries.

Marie Curie died due to exposure to radioactivity during her work in 1934. The Marie Curie Hospital was opened in 1930, specialising in radiological treatment of women suffering from cancer. The Marie Curie charity was established in 1948 which now offers care, support and guidance for people with a terminal illness.

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