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1. Inclusive Views: Your brain power working for everyone!
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 There are some great new innovations in learning technology: subtitles to radio broadcasts for hearing impaired students, or text-to-speech software for people with dyslexia. But there is always room for more. Do you have any great ideas? Ideas for technology to provide access to learning for everyone? This is inclusive design, and if you have an idea for hardware or software to give everyone a chance to learn, then you’ll be interested in Inclusive Views and they’ll be interested in you.
Inclusive Views are looking for ideas they can take through to market over a two year period, with their partners Inclusive Technology Limited. They’ll support up to four ideas, each to a maximum value of £22,000 over the first year, and Inclusive Technology will continue to develop the ideas through to the market.
They want to hear from teachers, students and designers about their ideas and will offer support and royalties for any sales! If you are interested, or know anyone with a head for design, have a look at:
http://www.nesta.org.uk/inclusiveviews
The deadline for applications is 4pm on Friday 30 September.
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2. Activity: Water, water, everywhere…
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 Heading off on holiday? Ever worry you might end up stuck on a desert island with no fresh water? How would you survive until rescue arrives? No need to fear. Planet Science is here to help. Just make sure you pack the essentials...
You will need:
- A large bowl
- A small glass, shorter than the height of the bowl
- Plastic clingfilm
- Sticky tape
- Food colouring
- Water
- Salt
- A few coins
What to do:
- Firstly make your own seawater by partially filling the bowl with water and dissolving a couple of teaspoons of salt in it. Then add some food colouring.
- Place the empty glass in the centre of the bowl.
- Cover the bowl completely in food wrap, leaving the wrap very slightly saggy. Use sticky tape if necessary to seal the bowl.
- Place your coins on the middle of the wrap, so it sags slightly towards the empty glass but doesn’t touch it.
- Put the whole thing in a sunny spot and wait.
- After a day unwrap and have a look in your glass!
What’s going on?
In the heat of the sun the water evaporates and then condenses on the plastic wrap. With a little help from gravity, drops of water run down the wrap and drop into the glass in the centre. You can taste the water in the centre, it shouldn’t be salty and should be clear. This is because neither the salt nor food colouring will evaporate. Not only is this a clever way of extracting fresh water from seawater, it also explains why the dead sea is so salty – water evaporates in the heat leaving the salt behind.
You can try this with lots of different liquids like orange juice or fizzy drinks but you may want to skip the tasting bit if you’ve left them in the sun all day!
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3. Mouses at the Ready for: Nature at its best.
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 Summer is now well underway and minds turn to things like flowers, caterpillars, bees and frogs. Evans Publishing Group have reissued their popular Rainbow nature series; four fab books - The Flower Seeds, The Caterpillar Story, How Bees Make Honey and Frog’s Eggs - which explain each of these subjects to early readers. They’re simple but have all the information you could possibly need.
A must on any bookshelf, Evans have been kind enough to give us ten sets of the four books to give away. To get into the draw please email planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk with the subject title “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, and please include you name and address! The draw will take place at 5pm next Thursday, 11th August.
Of course if you aren’t lucky or can’t wait, you can call Evans on 020 7487 0920 for more information. Or to order, call the distributor, TPS, on 01264 343 072.
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4. Sport Science: Can being impulsive make you a better sport star?
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 What do a well-known ‘all over perfume body spray’ and Kevin Pietersen (when hitting Aussie bowlers for six) have in common?
Impulse… it’s not just a pretty smell. Scientifically speaking, it’s about a change in motion; for example, when speeding up, slowing down or changing direction. A large impulse causes a big change in motion, producing an unstoppable ace in tennis or a crunching tackle in rugby.
When the motion of an object is changed, the size of the force involved and the time that the force acts are both key. There will be a bigger change in motion when a bigger force is used, but there will also be a bigger effect the longer the force is applied.
So what has this got to do with sport? Cricketers, golfers and snooker players all know to ‘follow’ through on a shot. This makes the time in contact with the ball longer and means a given force can produce a bigger change in movement. As even the dullest of sports involve at least some movement, a sports scientist with a super slow motion camcorder can help the athletically challenged - as well as the athletically gifted - to up their performance by considering the timing over which forces act.
 But impulse isn’t always about creating a bigger movement. Imagine what happens when catching a ball. If you increase the time you spend catching you lower the force as the ball lands. Impulse explains why some people are bad catchers; those who manage to let a tennis ball bounce out of their hands when making a catch, or maybe the people who get stinging hands when they catch a cricket ball or baseball. These people don’t do the equivalent of following through, or ‘cushioning’ the catch. So for these bad catchers the ball’s motion is changed in a really short space of time, the force is greater, and may be enough to bounce the tennis ball back out or break a finger with a hard ball.
This won’t be a problem for England’s fielders in the second Test, (unbroken) fingers crossed.
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7. The Winners’ Enclosure
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The two lucky winners of family passes to the Glasgow Science Centre are…
Sue Lister from Upper Weardale
and
Calum MacLeod from Dundee.
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8. Jokes of the Week
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And just in case you do get stuck on a desert island here is a joke to keep you entertained.
A chemist, an engineer and a mathematician were stranded on a desert island. Eventually their food supply dwindled to a single can of beans which they could not open.
The engineer proposed that he could calculate the exact trajectory necessary to slam the can into a sharp rock without spilling a bean.
The chemist said that this was too risky and that she could set the can in the sun to get the gases to expand so that it would gently pop open.
The mathematician said, "No, no. You're both trying too hard. I have the easiest answer: assume a can opener…"
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And that’s all for another week. Please send in your jokes, activities, news and offers to planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk and we’ll share the fun.
PS if you would like to unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time, just reply to this email with the word 'UNSUBSCRIBE' in the title.
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Despite remembering songs that we learned 10 years ago it can be a struggle to remember which pole of a magnetic attracts which. So if we learn our science in a song maybe we can keep it in our heads for the rest of our lives! 