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1. Get Clobbered! Griller now available
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 Attention all science teachers! A few weeks ago we launched the latest Planet Science game, 'Get Clobbered!' - widely thought to be the most fun way ever to learn about health and safely vestments requirements in the lab (in our office anyway).
We hope you and your students have been enjoying honing your skills and brushing up your knowledge, because here comes another challenge: the Get Clobbered Griller.
As you'll know, the idea behind our Grillers is to give teachers a quick end-of-lesson activity that's quick and upbeat, but also designed to extend students' understanding of whichever Planet Science resource they've been using that week.
Here's the link for Get Clobbered!
And here's the link to the Get Clobbered Griller
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2. Activity of the Week: A Hatful of Cards <pic of a deck of cards?>
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 Once again, Jonathan Sanderson, top tv producer, shares the secrets of a highly visual science demonstration that will get you invited back to dinner party after dinner party ...
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 Back in the days before the web, before television, before radio and even - gasp! - before mp3-playing megapixel-camera quad-band push-to-talk mobile phones, people would spend hours amusing themselves with tricks like this. They're still worth a minute or two of your time today.
You will need:
- A pack of cards.
- A top hat. If you don't have a top hat, find a friendly Victorian gentleman and ask if you can borrow his. If that doesn't work, try an inferior sort of hat or - at a pinch - a cardboard box or saucepan. Just so long as the opening is fairly close to the ground, and about 15-20 cm wide.
What to do:
- Try to drop the cards from approximately waist height into the hat. Go on, have a go.
- No luck? Try challenging somebody else to do it.
- They're not managing, either, eh? Shame. OK, skip ahead to the explanation, then come back here and offer them some sort of bet. Maybe they'll tidy your bedroom if you can drop five cards in a row into the hat?
- Then proceed to drop every card, one after the other, into the hat. Which you can do, now you know the knack.
- Hurrah! You've won the bet, showed the blighter who's boss, and generally saved the day. Time for a swift round of croquet before listening to pater's tales of his expedition to discover the source of the Thames, then hot milk and early to bed, all the better for more adventures tomorrow! Hurrah!
What's going on:
Pretty much everybody will try to aim the cards, dropping them vertically. Unfortunately they'll tumble furiously, and only the very occasional card will hit the hat. They tumble because they fall quickly, and the flow of air around them becomes turbulent, buffeting them around.
The trick is to drop the cards so they fall slowly. Hold them flat, by the edges, and let them gently parachute down into the hat. One or two might miss, but with a little practice it can be remarkably reliable.
When they're falling flat, the cards present a larger face to the air. Hence, they fall more slowly, and slip smoothly through the air. They'll still start to tumble if they pick up too much speed, however - it's worth testing your cards first to spot how high a drop is required for that to happen.
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Science in School
Euro-teachers united. A new journal has just been launched to bring together inspiring teaching ideas, research, resources and cutting edge science from across the EU.
It's called Science in School and it covers not just physics, chemistry and biology but also maths and earth sciences. It's available both online (in several different languages) and in print form (in English - phew, we were lucky). What's more it's completely free and you can help yourself to virtually all the material, and copy and distribute it as you like.
Here's where you'll find it online: Science in School.
To receive an alert when each issue is published, send an email with the subject 'Subscribe to Science in School' to scienceinschool@embl.de.
And if you'd like to be sent free printed copies, include your postal address (NB supplies are limited, so hurry hurry hurry).
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Free if you're in Dundee
The Sensation science centre in Dundee is about to open a range of very groovy new exhibits and shows. Like the 'Secret Sight and your Brilliant Brain' zone where visitors can explore the world of eye-brain co-ordination; a sensory zone for pre-school and special needs children; a range of science shows, and loads of demonstrations, including keyhole surgery for beginners ...
If you'd like your child to get in free, then get them signed up to the Atoms Club and print off a coupon. It's at: www.atomsclub.co.uk
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4. Mouses at the Ready for two great offers
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Dr Bunhead on tour
 Duck! Science showman Dr Bunhead is on the loose again, and you know what that means, don't you? Exploding underpants, the world's fastest chips, the Strange Case of the Luminous Gherkin and altogether a barnstorming couple of hours you'll never forget ... All in the name of science too.
The Recipes for Disaster tour takes in Jersey, Peterborough, High Wycombe, Nottingham, Northampton, Sheffield, Manchester, Blackpool, Stoke on Trent, Cambridge, Bradford, Halifax and Chelmsford - full info on places, times and dates can be checked at www.bunheadonstage.co.uk
We have four family (ie 2 adults/2 kids) passes to give away and to get into the draw, all you have to do is send an email entitled EXPLODING UNDERPANTS 4 ME! to planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk. To qualify for the draw, you must must must state the date/venue you'd like to attend, and of course you must send us your name and address so we can get the tickets to you.
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5. Wrong Ideas: new series
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 This week, we begin a new series of historical journeys in science. Journeys of ignorance this time.
Ian Francis has been researching some of the wrongest ideas scientists and medics have cherished over the years. Some of them enough to make your blood run cold ... or spurt out of your body and onto the floor in the following case.
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 Silly Bleeders
In one of the 'Star Trek' movies Doctor 'Bones' McCoy time-travels to a 20th Century hospital and is aghast at the butchery shown by the medical profession, still actually cutting people open to cure them.
Maybe such 'butchery' will one day be consigned to the film archives. But what's done in any historical era in the name of medicine is usually assumed to be the best they could do for patients at the time. But that's not always the case ...
Doctors of yesteryear weren't actually in the business of killing their patients, but they undoubtedly did their bit dropping sick people off right outside those pearly gates. How? By their obsession with blood-letting (a.k.a. phlebotomy). Through this practice, countless people who needed every drop of plasma and every corpuscle in order to fight disease were routinely deprived of litres of the red stuff, through blood-sucking leeches, or knives and other pointy objects of dubious sterility.
Treatment was often only stopped when the patient passed out, and fatalities were regularly explained by saying that the patient had probably just not been bled enough.
Sadly, bloodletting was in no way a passing fad, but had been routine since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Their physicians believed that an imbalance between four bodily 'humours' caused disease. One of the humours was blood, and being easier to drain from the body than phlegm, yellow bile or black bile, this was the humour most readily drained by the doctor seeking to put the humours back in balance. Galen did much to promote the practice and his almost god-like status in the profession meant his bonkers ideas went unchallenged. A few centuries ago, doctors might even have delegated the task to barber-surgeons who got good use out of their cut-throat razors (the famous red and white striped pole of course representing blood being drained).
In the 17th century William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, raised objections to the practice and together with other voices of dissent helped stem the flow (bad pun, sorry). Nowadays phlebotomy is still done in hospitals, but don't sweat too much when the doc mentions it, the name refers to the taking of small samples for analysis in the lab.
For more on this precious bodily fluid, visit http://www.blood.co.uk/
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7. Winners Enclosure
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Last week our giveaway was a full set of the books on the junior shortlist for the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize for Science Books. Two winners to be randomly selected would win three books each.
And those winners are...
Nick Peet of Southsea in Hampshire
and
George Lee of Shaftesbury in Dorset
Congratulations to both of you, your books will be on their way just as soon as they arrive here.
The winners of the March quiz who win a copy of the game N-Tropy are:
James Allen of Golspie, Sutherland
Joan Stevenson of Wigan
John Parker of Torquay
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8. Jokes of the Week
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Jennie Hargreaves has been in touch, on the subject of (?) genetic engineering:
When Mary had a little lamb, the Doctor was surprised,
When Old MacDonald had a farm, the Doctor nearly died.
Thanks Jennie!
Meanwhile, they're no joke really, but Chris Parry has some paradoxes and misconceptions about science, as pointed out by pupils ...
- To most people "solutions" mean finding the answers. However Chemists say "solutions" are liquids that are still mixed up.
- We say that the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things, people forget to put the top on.
- Lime is a green-tasting rock.
- A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go.
- Talc is found on rocks & on babies.
- When people run around and around in circles we say that they are crazy. When planets do it we say they are orbiting.
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And that's enough running around in circles for this week. Sorry, orbiting.
The next newsletter will be along in seven days' time. Meanwhile any news items, activities, ideas, jokes or other contributions should be sent to Anne McNaught on planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk
Have a great week!
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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We’ve not forgotten that sixth formers are looking forward (?) to exams this summer too. Today, Ian Francis, our web-wise science teacher, gives an honourable mention to Mark Rothery's site at 
Where do pears come from?