You there! Out on the moor late at night in the howling wind, over here, shelter in our large, dingy and unkempt house. Yeees, sherry? That’s right, brush the cobwebs off that velvet footstool, let our hound, Fang, rest his head on your knee, light a candle and listen to our story…Welcome to our Halloween special (early, but we thought you’d appreciate a little notice…), nature as you have never before seen her is at your fingertips...

The line-up this week:

1. Halloween Masks
2. Scicast Tip of the Week – Music to your Ears
3. Agri-Culture – Sheep Scheduling
4. Stump the Scientist: down or up?
5. Activity of the Week: Tin Can Bongos
6. Mouses at the Ready: Tickets for Thinktank
7. Noticeboard: FYI
8. Recommended websites of the week
9. The Winners’ Enclosure
10. Joke of the Week

Whatever our fevered imaginations can come up with in the way of zombies, ghosties, goulies, rattling skeletons, and general undeadness, nature has a way of topping this with some pretty weird and nightmarish creativity of her own.

And because you can divide the kingdom of all creatures into subdivisions, that means we can make them into masks that have the duel use of giving unsuspecting aunties and granddads a fright at Halloween, and serve to help introduce these categories to young minds. (We think of everything here at Planet Science.)

Artist and animator Ben Courtney kicked the whole thing off with five masks that are suitable for Halloween, a vampire bat (natch), a pumpkin (of course!), a toadstool an e-coli type bug, and an amoeba, which qualifies as an undead thing, in that it reproduces by splitting in two, so sort of the same one from a million years ago is still out there…

Eeeeeeeek!

2. SciCast Tip of the Week

Planet SciCast oracle Jonathan Sanderson has been doing a lot of research on your behalf about how to make sure you don’t fall foul of the rules on Intellectual Property when it comes to music, here’s a taster – please click on the link to the Planet Science Film School for the full monty. Take it away Jonathan...

‘Science is hard,’ people complain. Not compared to finding music to go with your SciCast film submission, it isn’t. We get more questions about music than almost anything else, so let me try to make some sense of your options.

Most obviously — and most obviously not an option, sadly — is ripping a track off your favourite chart CD and plastering that over your movie. Sorry, that’s straightforward copyright infringement, which the music industry seems to believe is a capital offence these days.

Your next option, if you’re in a school, is to use so-called ‘production music’. Many local authorities have a blanket arrangement with one of the music libraries — most often the brilliant Audionetwork — which allows full use of their vast archives in your school projects. Go online, audition some tracks, download the one you want, bung it in your movie — done. Right?

Wrong!

(But fear not, there are excellent solutions…go to the Planet Science film school for the answers!)

Guy Smith, our own favourite farmer, reveals the fertility of the flock and the transitory lamb. It’s all about introducing the ram to the ewe; Ram, this is Ewe, Ewe, this is…oh I see, carry on.
			Sheep farmers have been in the news a lot lately because of the trials and tribulations of movement restrictions due to attempts to prevent the spread of diseases such as Foot & Mouth and Blue Tongue. It is important to understand why these restrictions cause such problems. As the nights get significantly longer in late autumn the sheep’s annual fertility cycle begins. Most Ewes become fertile at this time and the farmer needs to be timely in introducing the Ram. The more of the flock that fall pregnant the more profitable and productive sheep farming is. Traditionally the farmer knows if a ewe has been served by a ram by the presence of a “tupping mark” which is applied by a dye known as raddle attached to a harness worn by a ram. As the Ram mates with the Ewe he leaves a colourful calling card on the ewes back. More modern techniques such as ultra-sound scanning can tell the farmer if the ewe is carrying a lamb. Furthermore with a gestation period of just under four months the farmer must time conception so that the lamb arrives when the farm, the grass and the market are ready for them. Once the lamb is born it will be left with the ewe to suckle on its mother milk for ten weeks. After that it will be fattened on grass until the autumn when it will go to market. At this point the lamb is either sent to slaughter or further fattened on another farm on grass or roots such as swedes. Traditionally sheep in Britain move off the hills in the north and the west where they were born and are fattened on lowland farms in the south and the east. Then in the hills the cycle is started all over again as the ewes annual fertility is induced by the shortening day. So we can see that successful sheep farming is all about timing and about moving sheep around according to the seasons. If at any point in this cycle sheep movement is restricted in attempts to stop disease spreading then the farming year is disrupted and the farmer’s carefully preconceived plan is ruined. Sheep farming is very important to the look of the countryside in the hillier areas such as the Lake District and Snowdonia. Without sheep the verdant grassy hill sides would be lost as the landscape is taken over by scrub, bracken and gorse. Sheep create a tussocky sward that is vital to species of bird and insect that need such habitat to forage and nest in.

Thanks for that Guy.

What season do we traditionally associate with lambing? Send us the right answer and you could win a packet of seeds from Garden Organic, the leading charity dedicated to researching and promoting organic gardening, farming and food.

Simply email us with your correct answer and your name and address, and the words GONE 2 SEED in the subject line, to planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk. The winner will be picked at random on Wednesday 14 November at 5pm.

Talking of sheep – for a little light relief tune in to Shaun the Sheep’s Bleat Box.

Craig Brown of Chew Valley School, Somerset tells us:

And any answers for John Mapperley who asked

If you can help or have a burning question of your own then send us an email with STUMP THE SCIENTIST in the subject line to planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk

Did you enjoy your little tour? Deed you soak up all theee blood, I mean information? Perhaps I can geeve you a queeez to see what you have learned?

5. Activity of the Week: Bongo Horror

Can’t think of a genre for your SciCast film? This team thought of horror, with a nod to Hitchcock’s Psycho. It is just possible that bongos as a subject aren’t horrific enough though, see what you think.

Special Safety Advice!!

Be very, very careful with the can opener and the sharp open cans – help younger children. The team in the film chose a really sharp way to bind the cans, cutting slits and lacing the cans together, but you can just tape them together without doing that – you don’t really want a bloodbath! Also, there’s no need to waste good food of course. If you save your cans up for recycling anyway you'll already have a supply.

You will need:

• Lots of empty food cans. Look for the ones which have crimped lids at both ends - so top and bottom look identical. You'll need 4 or more cans per musical instrument.
• A can opener.
• Tape. Ordinary sticky tape will do, but best of all is electrician's insulation tape - you can stretch it a bit to make it really tight.

What to do:

1. Be very, very careful of sharp edges. Good can openers will leave a smooth edge, but it still can be sharp. Take care when handling the can!
2. Keep one can back - we'll come back to it in a moment.
3. Wash the cans out, and remove both ends from them.
4. Join the cans end-to-end, and tape them very tightly, so you're making a single, rigid cylinder.
5. A cylinder three cans long is enough, but four, five or six cans will work too.
6. Go back to the can you held back, and add it to the end of your cylinder so you have a tube, closed at just one end.

It may not look like much, but you've just made a musical instrument. Hold it lightly, and bash the closed end on the ground - you should hear the cylinder ring with a surprisingly pleasant note. It seems to work best on carpet, and if you tilt the tube slightly so you're bashing the rim at an angle rather than the end, flat-on.

If you make a number of cylinders of different lengths you'll find they play different notes - so you can drum away to your heart's content.

What’s going on?

Hitting one end of the bongo causes the cans to vibrate, this vibration is transferred to the air inside them. The frequency of vibrating air determines if it is a high note or a low note. At the beginning all notes are played in the tube but soon many die away. A closed pipe like this has a natural frequency, this is the frequency which the pipe 'encourages'. While the other notes are lost, this note dominates and that is what you hear.

Longer cylinders have a lower natural frequency - a lower note.

Our assumption is that the main wavelength of note produced is a little over twice the length of the tube, but without investigating with a spectrum analyser it's hard to know - let us know if you try. More mysterious is why the sound produced is so pleasant, when you'd expect a ghastly metallic clank. But then, musical instruments - even ones made out of old soup tins - are more an art than a science.

Keep checking back for new films and how about submitting one of your own?

It’s got to be half term coming up - look at all the stuff Think Tank has on offer free for think tank ticket holders ‘til the 28th October. Yes, that’s right – all you need are Think Tank tickets, and just in time, Planet Science has Two Family Tickets to give away!

Rocket Launcher Workshop, Alien Tales, Bubbles and Bangs!, Live Silversmith Demonstrations.

Now, about those TWO family tickets we have to give away…

If you’d like to win one then email us with your name and address, and the words THINK HARD in the subject line, to planet-science.news@nesta.org.uk.

The draw will take place early at 4pm on Tuesday 24th October and we’ll let you know if you’ve won by email then.

If you want to ask scientists questions you can try the naked scientists.

You can even get the enjoyable sensation of listening to them squirm on live radio if the question is particularly 'interesting'... because the site is based around a radio program.

There is loads of other stuff from interviews with scientists, to experiments to do at home and if you can't wait a week for the answer to your question you could try the onsite forum.