Calling all science teachers, scientists and lecturers! This could be your big Saturday morning break!

We have been approached by production team who make MOM (Ministry of Mayhem), ITV’s Saturday morning kids’ show, because they’re looking for telegenic science talent with a flair for crowd-pleasing, wow-factor demonstrations.

As you’ll know if you’re a regular Saturday sofa-dweller, a regular feature on MOM is entitled The Lab and it features a chacter called ‘the Dr’ who takes on all comers (ie. science experts) in a no-holds-barred “science off”. The challenge is to execute a better experiment or demo than the one that went before …

To find out more, it’s probably best if you take a look at the programme – the Lab takes place around 11am each Saturday.

Then if you’re interested in taking part and showcasing your own science experiments on the show, ring or email Keith Cotton on 01622 684561 / keith@foundationtv.co.uk for further information.

Oh go on, the cameras will love you darling!

And so to birds. It’s that time of year when our feathered friends are looking for good nesting sites, and if you’ve got a nesting box in your garden, you could get 5-star accommodation rating from local blue tits, great tits, coal tits, marsh tits, and both house and tree sparrows.

The British Ornithology Trust gives instructions for building and positioning a simple wooden nesting box on its site at:
http://www.bto.org/notices/nnbw2005(2).htm

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You may also be interested in a scientific paper that was published this week reporting on new research into how young birds perfect their songs – and the effect of sleep on the learning process. Here’s the story on the BBC’s website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4271511.stm

PS if you’re a bird-lover, have a look at this week’s free prize draw – coming up late.r

No, not brute force, FRUIT FORCE! Can you move a grape without touching it? And if so, is it magic?  No, it’s science. Read on…

• an empty film canister and lid
• a drawing pin
• a drinking straw
• scissors
• two large grapes
• a neodymium magnet (a very small but very strong magnet)

Note: Do not place magnets near TV screens, computers, floppy disks, credit cards, watches etc.

What to do:

1. Push the drawing pin through the centre of the film canister lid from the back so that when the lid is put on the point of the drawing pin is sticking out.
2. Cut the drinking straw so that is about 14 cm long.
3. Find the midpoint of the straw and cut a small hole approx. 0.5 cm by 1 cm.
4. Push a grape onto each end of the straw.
5. Place the straw over the top of the drawing pin so that the point is in the hole and the system is balanced. This is a bit fiddly and you may have to push the grapes further up the straw to balance.
6. Check that the system is balanced by giving one of the grapes a gentle push.  The straw should spin round freely and easily.
7. Now take the neodymium magnet and place it close to one of the grapes (but not touching!) The grape should start gently to move away from the magnet and spin around.
8. Remove the magnet and wait for the grape to stop spinning.
9. Turn the magnet over and place it close to the grape again.  Once again the grape should move away from the magnet.

What’s going on?

Water is ‘diamagnetic’. This means it will be repelled by both north and south poles of a magnet. The diamagnetic force of repulsion is very weak though, so we need a very strong magnet to induce it. One such magnet is the Neodymium-Iron-Boron (NIB) supermagnet, otherwise known as a neodymium magnet.

If a magnet is brought close to a diamagnetic material it will generate orbital electric currents in the atoms and molecules of that material. According to Lenz’s Law: when a current is induced by a change in magnetic field (i.e. the orbital currents produced by the magnet approaching the grape) the magnetic field produced by the induced current will oppose the change. Hence the grape is repelled by the magnet because it contains water which is diamagnetic. Other fruits and vegetables that contain a high percentage of water will show this effect too, for the same reason. Fancy a spinning cucumber, anyone?  Or a watermelon?

And if you’re attracted to the weird world of magnetism, how about the incredible story of the Levitating Frog (including photos!)

Here’s where you’ll find it:
http://www.hfml.ru.nl/phystod.html.

As you may already know, many of our favourite hands-on activities can be found in the online database known as The Little Book of Experiments.

The collection was originally also published as a book too (if you’re a teacher, you may have seen the free copy that was sent you your school during Science Year). With no more books in the store cupboard though, and the requests for copies still rolling in, we thought the best solution was to make the book downloadable and print-offable.

So now it is. Click to:
http://www.planet-science.com/experiment
and scroll down to ‘DOWNLOAD LBE’.

You’ll never be experimentless again!

Back to those birds.

This week we’ve pooled all our pocket money together to buy two family memberships for the British Trust for Ornithology. This is a charity that carries out important work in monitoring bird populations and movements around the UK, informing conservation bodies so that they can take action when necessary.

As a member, you’ll be invited to take part in surveys such as Garden BirdWatch, the Breeding Bird Survey and the Nest Record Scheme. You’ll also receive a welcome pack which explains more about the work of the BTO, a bi-monthly edition of their new magazine, discounts on BTO books, and contact with your local BTO representative.

Family memberships are worth £35 but we have two to give away to the winners in this week’s draw.

If you’d like to be in with a chance of winning one, send an email entitled ORNITHOLOGY OFFER to planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk. Please include a note of your name and address.

The draw will take place at 5pm on Thursday 24th Feb.

Good luck!

Get me a science photography competition, and make it snappy!

OK then: here’s a quick mention for the 2005 Visions of Science Photographic Awards. The competition is now open and accepting entries.

This highly prestigious award aims to encourage on ongoing dialogue about science, and the type of work the judges are looking for is

“an attention-grabbing image that gives new insight into the world of science and the workings of nature. It may show something never seen before, it may explain a scientific phenomenon, it may illustrate scientific data or it may simply be an image that shows the beauty of science.”

Find out more or just check out the pictures captured by past winners at their website:
http://www.visions-of-science.co.uk

The closing date is 6th May.

Good luck!

Who invented the telephone? The credit always goes to Alexander Graham Bell, a Scot who had emigrated to North America in 1870. But he wasn’t the only one, as Ian Francis has been finding out …

Back in 1831, Michael Faraday had shown that vibrations of a metal could be converted to electrical impulses in a wire. A logical extension of this idea was to turn it into a practical device for carrying the vibrations created by a human voice down wires over large distances. Many set to work on the challenge, including Johann Reis in Germany and Antonio Meucci in Italy. But it was Alexander Graham Bell who filed his patent at the New York Patent Office in 1876 on Valentine’s Day.

In a stark example of there being no prizes for coming second, the name of Elisha Gray has become a mere footnote in the story of this invention. But Gray had also filed a claim to the invention of the telephone, at the SAME patent office, on the very SAME day in 1876 - just a few hours too late.

Gray was not only a couple of hours later than Bell, but the document he lodged wasn’t the full patent application, more an intention to lodge a patent for a device to “transmit vocal sounds telegraphically” within a certain timescale. It was a caveat, a sort of ‘first dibs’. These two impediments would appear to weaken Gray’s claims to depose Bell as the inventor of the telephone, that is, apart from the minor matter of whose invention could actually do ‘what it claimed on the tin’.

The device that Gray proposed was technically much more effective than the one Bell patented. Unfortunately for Gray, the workability of an invention wasn’t a major consideration back then (it was still possible to patent designs for ‘perpetual motion machines’ that were, and will forever remain, physical impossibilities).

The working telephone that Bell eventually produced used an electromagnet and diaphragm that looked remarkably similar to what Gray had proposed, and nothing like the liquid-containing set-up that Bell had detailed in his patent application.

Predictably, legal battles ensued, going all the way to the US Supreme Court. Bell was the victor and the man who nowadays gets the glory. Gray died in 1901, with an understandable disappointment at not getting the recognition he felt he deserved.

But he did invent (and get credit for) the ‘telautograph’, a device for electrically reproducing writing at a distance. He also invented one of the first electronic musical instruments, a device looking something like a keyboard that produced sound from an oscillating electromagnetic device hooked up to steel reeds.

Ready to have your mind bended?!

Here’s a travel website with a difference … Instead of travelling across the surface of the planet, this one takes you from 10 million miles beyond the Milky Way – then closer, closer, closer to life on Earth – until you’re eyeball to eyeball with the quarks in the centre of an atom of a leaf on an oak tree in Florida.

This odyssey is called: SECRET WORLDS: THE UNIVERSE WITHIN and it can be found at:
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/

Just click the window to ‘Auto’ and before your eyes, one image shrinks (or expands, depending on your direction of travel) to reveal the next, again and again and again – taking you from the Outer Edges of the Universe to the Inner Mysteries of Matter …

Each image is 10x zoomed compared the next one, and you can vary the pace and even take a closer look at individual pictures, by setting the control to ‘Manual’.

Happy zooming!