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1. E-numbers and poisonous foods
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 Oh go on, they’re good for you.
Well, good for your general knowledge anyway.
As you might know, our favourite nutritionist, Simone Baroke, has contributed many an item to previous newsletters exploring what’s actually in that food on your plate.
These chemical tales with their human subplots of drama, passion, intrigue and even (gasp) murder have now been brought together in a permanent home in the Planet Science Diner.
Browse and digest them at your leisure here (bottom of page).
Bon apetite!
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2. National Be Nice to Nettles Week
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It’s not a joke, it’s an annual event, and we here at Planet Science have been ardent supporters for many a year now.
NBNNW is the focus of a full-on campaign to promote a much derided plant which is surely only much derided because we’re all stung by them as children – and yeowch it really hurts when you’re that age!
Nettles though are as useful as a truckful of boy scouts. Not only do they support other species, such as the beautiful red admiral butterfly, they can be used by us humans for soup, manure, medicine, cloth, dye, flavouring, beauty products … even a nice cup of tea.
The week runs from 17 to 28 May, and at www.nettles.org.uk you’ll find all sorts of nettle-related activities and resources.
But hey, don’t limit your appreciation of our spiky friend to just those dates, those nettles are cool every day of the year!
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3. Who Needs a Shredder?
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 While you’re out in the backyard, preparing your nettle patch, here’s another tip from nature: work with your local worm population to beat identity fraudsters.
The worms can’t help apprehend those lurkers who rifle through the refuse looking for credit card statements (they’re not tall enough) but if you stick all those personal documents in the middle of your compost heap, the worms will do your shredding for you
Read all about it here
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4. Activity of the Week: Rattleback
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 It sounds like a snake, but it’s actually a brain-boggling tabletop demonstration
Over to our tv science producer, Jonathan Sanderson.
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 Take an ancient Celtic axe, place it on a flat surface, spin it, and you'll find two surprises. Firstly, it doesn't behave as you'd expect. Secondly, you have an ancient Celtic axe? Really
No, I thought not. This week, we'll use household junk to make a rattleback, something with the same weird dynamic properties as a Celtic axe. It's a bit less good at chopping your leg off, but in most circumstances that's a plus.
What you need:
- A plastic spoon. Preferably a large one, like a dessert spoon. Not a desert spoon, that's something quite different.
- Some plasticene, modelling clay, blutack, or similar. Play-dough is too light, sorry.
- A plastic ruler. 30cm is fine, but 20cm is better if you can find one.
What you do:
- Snap the bowl off the spoon (be careful to aim it away from yourself when you do this, in case it fires splinters), and fill it with a big blob of plasticene. You want it to look like a heaped spoonful of plasticene.
- Now imagine you hadn't snapped the handle off, and line the spoon up with the ruler. Slide one over the other until the bowl of the spoon is dead-centre of the ruler. In a moment, you're going to push the two together so the plasticene sticks them, but just before you do, twist the bowl of the spoon. Just turn it, ever so slightly - five or ten degrees is plenty. Now squidge them together
- You'll have to juggle everything around a bit so that when you put your rattleback on a table, spoon-side down, it balances nicely. You want the ruler to rest parallel to the table, without one end touching or one side being especially lower than the other. Smudge the spoon around until you've got that. Done? Good
- Now, spin your rattleback. Give it a good flick with your fingers so it spins several times, and see what happens. When it stops, try spinning it in the other direction.
What's going on
What you should see is that your rattleback is quite happy spinning in one direction (either clockwise or anticlockwise), but if you spin it the other way, it objects. It'll start to rock, and then rattle, and then - amazingly - it'll stop spinning, and simply rock back and forth like a see-saw. If you're lucky, it'll even start to rotate the other way.
It's around about now that you'll want an explanation. Which is, unfortunately, extremely hard. The hand-waving argument is that the asymmetry of the rattleback is crucial. Remember you skewed the spoon? If you unskew it and spin the thing again, you'll find that it'll go either way quite happily.
If you think about the rattleback rocking back and forth, and the way the skewed spoon twists the ruler, it's fairly easy to see how it might start spinning from the rocking motion. Everything else is about the rattleback transferring energy from one sort of motion (rotation) to another (oscillation - rocking) and back again (rotation in its 'preferred' direction).
The full explanation was only worked out in 1986, by a physics professor from Cambridge, and I haven't understood it personally since 1994. But if you want to look it up, you'll find more about these curious toys at these sites:
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Thanks Jonathan.
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6. Alchemy
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 Ian Francis, our man with a million wrong ideas (and lots of right ones too) is back with another (golden?) goodie...
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 This week it’s more a ‘wrong take on the world’ than a mere ‘wrong idea’. Alchemy was an unequivocal failure in its central quest, but the spin-offs were golden. While the exact origins of the word are the subject of much debate, there’s no question the impact that the mystical ‘science’ of alchemy has had on science in general, and chemistry in particular. Although modern chemistry acted as alchemy’s executioner, it did inherit the practical expertise gathered over those centuries of bubbling pots and magic incantations and helped it set up numerous chemical industries producing wonderful new substances.
Alchemists had several bonkers ideas. Gold was seen as the perfect metal and alchemists believed they could transmute other less perfect metals (base metals) into gold, if only they had a substance called the Philosopher’s Stone. Not having either Mr Potter or Mr Jones they (of course) failed. They also looked for a panacea that could cure any disease and hence give you immortality. But whereas now we see science as a continuum of development, with current work based firmly on foundations of the past, alchemy was shrouded in secrecy, all codes and funny handshakes. Many of its proponents must have come to untimely and unnecessary ends from poisonous processes when a climate of greater openness could have warned them off.
Alchemy wasn’t always a shameful blot on one’s CV. Famous alchemists of the past include the medic Paracelsus, and Isaac Newton - who is often cited as the first of the modern scientists. A footnote to alchemy is that thanks to the wonders of nuclear science, we can now indeed transmute other metals into gold. But it’s not worth the effort, as you can see from the absence of stockpiles of gold at your local nuclear physics lab or power station.
For more about alchemy, and in particular about the dimensions that go beyond those we’d recognise even as pseudo-science, click the link!
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8. The Winners Enclosure
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It was a triple whammy last week, with three glorious sets of freebies up for grabs.
The randomly selected winners are...
...for a copy of the book Napoleon’s Buttons:
Peter Mizen of Biggin Hill
Radhika Majithia of Leicester
Sujata Patel of Preston
...for family passes to Molecules Matter in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Gardens:
Kirstie Urquhart of Waterbeach
and
Claire Komar of Biggar
...for a family pass to T-rex: the killer question at the Life Centre in Newcastle:
Jon Ward of Gateshead
Darren Nuttall of Maltby
Radhika Majithia of Leicester (yes, again!)
Congratulations to all of you.
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9. Joke of the Week
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It was a beautiful May evening, and Bert had agreed to meet his friend Jeremy at the golf club for a quick round. When he turned up, he saw that Jeremy was already there – and so was a gorilla, dressed in golf gear, and toting a full set of clubs.
“Meet Lionel!” Jeremy said, introducing the gorilla. “Do you mind if he joins us for a game?”
“Er, well no ok that’s fine …” Bert replied, as Lionel shuffled off for a few practice swings, “But I mean, come on, he’s a GORILLA. Can he play?” he whispered.
“You’d be surprised!” replied Jeremy
With Lionel out of earshot, Bert bet Jeremy £100 the gorilla couldn’t get round the course in less than 100.
They teed off.
Lionel nonchalantly executed a beautiful shot 85m up the course.
His second shot was another 85m long, landing the ball a short distance away from the flag.
“Listen mate,” whispered Bert to Jeremy as they strolled towards the hole, “Let’s not spoil the game by betting on our friend Lionel, it’s not really on, is it?”
“Ok, if that’s how you feel …” replied Jeremy.
“Right, no bet. How is he at putting, anyway?”
“Oh, they’re all about 85m …”
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That's all for this edition of the newsletter, hope you've had a good time scrolling!
If you've any news items, ideas for activities, recommended websites, or even a joke or two for a future newsletter, please send them to Anne McNaught on planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk
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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