|
 |
 |
|
|
||
 |
||
 Guest Editor: Emma Lewis — back again! This week, I’m bringing you details of how to be very popular at school and how to win a Young Scientist CD-Electro Lab, Ian Francis causes a stink and there’s a chance to get involved with a fantasy football match as part of our analogy series... Here’s what else is coming up: 01. WE’VE ENGINEERED A QUIZ: and come up with some great prizes! 02. CELEBRATE EARTH SCEINCE WEEK: October 10th to 16th 03. Say Cheese! FOR A SCIENCE PHOTOGRAPHY COMP 04. Mouses at the Ready for a: YOUNG SCIENTIST CD ELECTRO LAB 05. ACTIVITY OF THE WEEK: DNA extraction in your kitchen! 06. WHERE’S THE SENSE IN THAT? Follow your nose... 07. Anyone for an ANALOGY IN ACTION? Let me pitch it to you... 08. RECOMMENDED WEBSITES OF THE WEEK: for Black History Month 09. WILD WINNERS: from last week’s draw 10. JOKES OF THE WEEK: Genetically engineered for your enjoyment! |
||
|
||
|
01. LET’S GET QUIZZICAL — Engineering Quiz for October
New to Planet Science this month is our October Engineering Quiz. It is designed to make you think about that most essential of professions, and in particular, to encourage you to investigate Rolls-Royce's new Science Prize competition, where teams of teachers, technicians, engineers and others step forward with plans for innovative science teaching projects, with the possibility of winning the dosh to actually put the plans into practice. It's open at Primary and Secondary levels, so go to http://science.rolls-royce.com/about/ if you want to find out more about it. Rolls-Royce have also very kindly come up with the quiz prize, which is an 'executive' globe puzzle that will appeal to even the non-executives amongst us — and what's more they've come up with 20 of them, oh yes, 20 winners will get a prize! We've also made the quiz super easy this month, so there’s no excuse not to enter it here.  |
||
|
||
| 02. PUT YOUR ARMS AROUND THE WORLD: Earth Science Week If you’re looking for ways to celebrate Earth Science Week (Oct 10th to Oct 16th) then look no further than the American website: http://www.earthsciweek.org/ The theme of Earth Science Week 2004 is Natural Hazards and so the website focuses on the ways Earth Scientists study hazards in order to understand their causes and minimise their impact on society. If you look in the teacher’s section then you’ll find more classroom resources and experiments than you’ll know what to do with on this carefully laid-out site. The only downside to the site is how the resources link to the American Science Education Standards and not the National Curriculum, but if you can get round this then the site is a winner! |
||
|
||
| 03. Science Photography Competition: IMAGINE... ...what it would be like to win £2000 worth of photography equipment for your school. You’re probably thinking of all the sensible uses you could put the equipment to right this minute, but think also of the popularity you would gain from your pupils or your fellow staff, as you lovingly capture them stuffing themselves with chips in the dining area or having a quick unflattering slurp of coffee in the staffroom and then posting the image on the school website. What larks. The Imagine Photography Competition 2004 has been set by BBC Science and Nature and the Wellcome Trust. They are asking the question "How is science changing us?" so they want photographic entries which illustrate how biomedical science is changing our minds, our bodies and our society. Think how developments in biomedicine have brought us new drugs and technologies that have changed our lives and try and capture it in a snapshot. Tricky challenge, but interesting! If you’re a teacher in a secondary school then you can send an entry, of up to seven images, representing the work of up to ten pupils. The entry will be judged as a group and schools can make more than one entry to the competition. First prize is £2000 worth of photography equipment of the school’s choice and a BBC media workshop for the winning group. Second prize is £1000 worth of photography equipment. All winning pupils will also receive £50 worth of photography equipment. There are a number of smaller prizes, like BBC backstage tours, DVDs and books for other entries deemed worthy of a prize. The winning entries will be displayed at the Royal Albert Hall and at science centres up and down the country in 2005. If you’re not part of a school then you can still enter in the under 18 section or the over 18 section depending on which category applies. Click on the following links for more details: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/imagine/index.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/competition/ |
||
|
||
| 04. MOUSES AT THE READY FOR: Young Scientist CD-Electro Lab Now for another competition, only this time you don’t have to take any photographs, you just have to enter the draw. The prize up for grabs is a Young Scientist CD Electro Lab — a fab piece of kit for home or for the classroom. Electrical circuits have never been easy to grasp, but the Electro Lab contains an interactive CD-Rom, which lets you design an unlimited amount of functional electric circuits on your computer. As your ‘young scientist’ designs their own circuits they’ll get to grips with series, parallel and short circuits. Once they’ve finished the designs on-screen, they can try their circuits out on the console provided to see if they work. The bits that come with the console include a voltmeter, ampmeter, lamps, buzzer, diodes, resistors and fuses. So if you know anyone who would appreciate a little help with understanding how circuits to work then make sure you send your name and address to: planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk with ‘I’M IN CIRCUIT TRAINING’ in the subject box. The draw will take place next Thursday at 5pm, so good luck! If you win then who knows? You could have a young Lewis Latimer on your hands within weeks! |
||
|
||
| 05. ACTIVITY OF THE WEEK: DIY DNA! Time for something completely different now. This week’s Activity of the Week follows a request from Sue White, who wants to know the best method for extracting DNA from a kiwi fruit. We have covered a similar experiment in a previous Activity of the Week but that was many moons ago, so time to call in the experts... Luckily a contact in the Chemistry Department at York University has kindly allowed me to reproduce their method for extraction, which can be found on their website at: http://www.york.ac.uk/res/sots/. If you’re under 18 then please do not attempt this experiment without an adult present. You will need: * a bottle of methylated spirits * salt * cheap washing-up liquid (concentrated doesn't work as well) * kiwi fruit (preferably ripe) * ice cubes * hot water * sharp knife and chopping board * kitchen scales * measuring jug * two bowls (one small, one large) * saucepan * fork * sieve * glass What to do: 1. Put the bottle of methylated spirits into a large bowl of ice so it cools straight away. Do not put methylated spirits into a fridge or freezer as a spark could ignite fumes. 2. Mix 25g of salt and 80g of washing-up liquid with 900ml water in a small bowl. Stir carefully to avoid too much froth. 3. Peel a kiwi fruit and chop finely. Using a fork, mash the kiwi fruit into a paste. 4. Put the kiwi paste into a small bowl and add 100ml of the salt-detergent mix from step 2. Sit this in a saucepan of hot (not boiling) water for 15 minutes. 5. Pour the green paste through the sieve into a glass. 6. Drizzle the ice cold methylated spirits down the side of the glass so it forms a purple layer on top of the green kiwi paste. You will need an equal amount of methylated spirits and kiwi paste. 7. You should see a white string-like layer form in the glass between the green and the purple layers. This is your extracted kiwi fruit DNA! What's going on? DNA is found within the chromosomes inside the nucleus of the cells that make up every living thing, including your kiwi fruit. To extract this DNA, we have to separate it from all the other cell parts. By chopping and mashing up the kiwi fruit, then leaving it in the salt and detergent mix, we break open the cell walls, called membranes. This lets all the cell contents out, including the DNA. But the DNA is still surrounded by polymers called proteins. Luckily, kiwi fruit contain an enzyme called proteinase — this attacks and breaks up the proteins, freeing the DNA. The green kiwi paste now contains your freed DNA, but also has all the other cell stuff that you have released. Passing it through a sieve removes most of these unwanted bits. Then, when you pour the methylated spirits on top, the DNA turns into a solid, because it can't stay dissolved in the methylated spirits. You might get bubbles in between the purple and green layers. This is because of the different temperatures of the two layers. It makes the air dissolved in the green layer come out as bubbles. This experiment relies on an enzyme in the kiwi fruit to unlock the DNA. Enzymes are powerful polymer machines that help make things work faster. Apples and oranges don't have enough of these enzymes to work with this experiment, as the DNA won't be set free, however as you have seen, a kiwi fruit does! |
||
| ||
| 06. WHERE’S THE SENSE IN THAT? What really gets up your nose? Senses 3: Smell We detect a smell when we breathe in air containing molecules given off from certain substances. Not all substances are volatile, and so don’t emit these molecules and therefore we don’t notice a smell for materials such as glass. Once towards the top of the nose, the air-borne molecules stimulate tiny hairs (cilia) on about five million receptor cells which are the ends of nerves on layers of mucus-covered tissue. The ability to produce a certain type of receptor cell is under genetic control, which suggest it’s hard or impossible to ‘learn to smell’ some things- you can either smell them or you can’t. The receptors for a particular odour molecule appear to be randomly arranged over the smell-sensitive area of just a few square centimetres — not all the receptors to detect a vinegary smell will be next door to each other, for example. The receptor molecules themselves are thought to be proteins and may be similar to rhodopsin, the molecule responsible for converting light into electrical impulses in the retina of the eye. And in a similar manner to rhodopsin with light, a change in the protein molecule shape caused by binding with an odour molecule could be the trigger for sending an electrical impulse down the nerve fibres. The nervous impulses pass to a part of the brain just above the nose called the olfactory bulb. In humans it is quite small, hence we rely on our sense of smell to a lesser degree than other animals. In dogs, the olfactory bulb is relatively large which reflects the dog’s better ability for detecting and differentiating between different smells. The frontal part of the brain translates the nerve impulses into information about the odour, suggesting perhaps that the odour is a particularly smelly fart, and you should probably hold your nose, or it’s the gorgeous smell of baking and there could be yummy cookies appearing in the kitchen at any moment. A few smelly and nosy facts for your delectation… Pheromones are chemicals released by some species in order to communicate. A male moth can detect the pheromones emitted from a female moth several kilometres away. The scientific word for ‘smelling’ is ‘olfaction’. Dogs can detect odours millions of times fainter than humans can. A researcher at Dr Scholl’s is listed by the Guinness Book of Records as having sniffed the most in the course of her work- over 5,600 pairs of feet and an ‘indeterminate’ number of armpits. The smelliest substances on earth are man-made and detectable at 2 parts in a million. It’s possible they could be used to disperse riots. The nose flute is an instrument played in Polynesia and countries of the Pacific rim. You jab the flute up one nostril and close the other nostril with your thumb. Anosmia is the inability to smell. If you were ansosmic, you wouldn’t have warning of a gas leak and would be unaware your old trainers had become a health hazard. But on the other hand, it could be a useful attribute for someone working in the sewers or looking after skunks at a zoo! Thanks Ian. Thought I should mention, on the subject of noses, that our delightful What Really Gets Up Your Nose colds and flu feature is still lurking in the Out There section of the site ready for the virus friendly chilly weather. Click to it here. |
||
|
||
| 07. ANYONE FOR AN ACTIVE ANALOGY? From fruits of nature to pearls of wisdom with an analogy I was introduced to during a year 7 science class. It helps the pupils understand the way particles behave inside a solid, a liquid and a gas... Think of the people sitting in the stands at a football match. They each have a fixed place with the same space between each seat. The people don’t move around easily. You can think of them as the particles in a solid — they too have a fixed place in a regular pattern. Now think of the people standing in the terraces. They don’t have fixed positions and it would take quite a long time for one person to walk from one side of the crowd to the other. They are like the jumble of particles in a liquid — pushed together with no spaces between. They also move freely but slowly. Lastly think of the players on the pitch. They move around freely, they don’t form a pattern and they’re not touching. They move quickly across the pitch, just like the particles in a gas move quickly and in a random manner. Thanks to Mrs Hunt for her inspiration! I also received the following analogy from Gwenael Le Doare, who has another take on last week’s analogy involving the fractioning column: "I have a box labelled 'sticky smelly crude oil' and it is full of socks — my baby’s socks, mine, ski socks etc. I show on the floor a tower that I have drawn with chalk. I stand at the top of the tower and shake the box (shaking=boiling) and 9 out of 10 times small socks come out first (!). I carry on shaking moving down the tower to a middle level and magically mostly normal socks come out (a few big ones). I then explain that this is a model but we can see than differently- sized molecules condense at different levels. Students seem to remember the concept well and they scream each time a sock comes out!" The same thing happens to me when I eventually get to the bottom of my washing basket — believe me! |
||
|
||
|
08. RWW: Celebrate Black History Month |
||
|
||
| 09. WINNERS WINNERS WINNERS Two draws took place this week. The first was for the family ticket to the IMAX theatre in At-Bristol, congratulations to Keren Worsnop, Bath, for winning the pass. The second draw was for the family ticket to Wildwalk in At-Bristol, and that pass will be making its way to Nicki Spilman, in Kingswinford. Those prizes should be in the post next week so look out for them! Finally, there’s just enough room here to also mention the winners of the August/September quiz. They were: Ryan Swain, North Yorkshire, Jane Ladson, Sheffield, and James Andrews, Brighton. Skateboards on their way. |
||
|
||
| 10. JOKES OF THE WEEK This week there has been a severe lack of anything funny in my inbox. In fact the only emails that made me laugh were my online banking statement and spam offering me a gender reversal opportunity. So I am throwing open the gauntlet in a new ‘genetic engineering gone mad’ challenge. You know the style of joke, what do you get when you cross a something with a something? It’s genetic engineering with hilarious consequences. Here goes: Q) What do you get when you cross a hen and a science kit? A) An egg-speriment! Q) What do you get when you cross a dinosaur with fireworks? A) Dino-mite! Q) What do you get when you cross a chicken with a cement mixer? A) A brick layer! Q) What do you get if you cross an elk with a cocoa bean? A) A chocolate mousse Q) What do you get if you cross a hyena with a crocodile? A) I don't know, but when he laughs, you'd better join in. And along the same theme: Did you hear about the geneticist who wanted to develop a chicken with bigger drumsticks? After many failed experiments he finally crossed the chicken with an ostrich. Its drumsticks were large enough but it kept hiding its head in the carrots! That’s quite enough bad jokes for one newsletter so anyone who thinks he or she can do better (and I have a feeling there’s going to be lots of you) can email Anne at: planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk with ‘GENETIC ENGINEERING GONE MAD’ as the subject and the best jokes will be included in next week’s newsletter. - o - O - o - Anne will be back with you next week but in the meantime if you’re bitten by a creative bug then send any contributions or ideas to anne.mcnaught@nesta.org.uk Meanwhile, have a great week! |
||
|
||
 |
