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01. BLACK HISTORY MONTH
To celebrate Black History Month, profiles of two more trail-blazing black scientists have been added to the Planet Science website. The gallery of fame is therefore now called '10 Inspiring Lives'. The newcomers are: Daniel Hale Williams, the first person to successfully perform open heart surgery, which was not going bad considering he started his career as a shoemaker. And alongside him, Granville T Woods, an irrepressible inventor who devised everything from chicken incubators to the third electrified rail on subway systems. In fact, every time he turned around, Woods came up with a new use for the power of electricity, so it's fair to say he was somewhat prolific! Read all about Williams, Woods and our other eight inspiring lives here. And once you've done that, you can test your new knowledge by taking our latest quiz, which is all about those featured in 'Inspiring Lives'. Get all the answers correct (and let's face it, the answers are all there on the site, so it's not like that's going to be impossible!) your name will go into a draw to win £30 worth of CD vouchers. Here's the quiz  |
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| 02. ACTIVITY: PLAY THAT PLUNKY MUSIC! Make your kitchen come alive with the sound of music - and demonstrate your grasp of physics while you're at it... You will need: 8 empty, clean, glass bottles - all the same shape and size if possible water a pencil some paper plenty of puff! What to do: 1. Line up the bottles and number them 1-8 (write the numbers on pieces of paper in front of them. 2. Pour a small amount of water into the first bottle - filling it to 2 or 3cm. 3. Pour slightly more water into the second bottle... 4. Pour increasing amounts of water into the third, fourth, fifth and all the rest of the bottles in the row. 5. Now try tapping up and down the row of bottles with the pencil - you should hear something approximating to a musical scale... 6. If you're feeling musical, have a try at tuning your bottles up - adding and removing water to adjust the pitch of the note you get when you tap. Can you make a scale? 7. When you've got a groovy selection of notes in a row, try blowing across the tops of the bottles - pan pipes or what?! 8. Using the numbers in front of the bottles, you can now work out and write down the sequence of notes needed to play sweet music... Try some old classics (ok slightly premature, but 'Jingle Bells has quite an easy first six notes to get you started!) And then PRACTICE, possibly more than once - most musicians believe this aids performance... 9. Now assemble your friends and family for a recital. Or, if it's not sounding so good, you can assemble them for a fingers-on-the-buzzers game in which they try to guess what tune you're trying to play. Or you can play a two-team game where everyone has to try and play a tune until their team recognises it... (best put a time limit on rounds or you may be there a while!) What's going on: All sounds are produced by vibrations, which travel through the air to your ears. When this vibrating air hits your eardrums, it's perceived as sound. The pitch of a sound ie. the 'note' you hear, is determined by these vibrations. When you HIT the bottles, you cause the bottle and the water to vibrate. If there's just a little water in the bottle, these vibrations will be faster and the pitch will be higher, and when there's more water, the vibrations will be slower and the pitch lower. When you BLOW across the bottles, it's the air in the bottle you're making vibrate. When there's a short column of air - ie lots of water taking up most of the room - you'll get a high note, and when there's a larger column of air, you'll get a lower note. So the scale will go up if you hit your way along the bottles, whereas it'll go down if you blow your way along it... |
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| 03. MOUSES AT THE READY: THINK TANK FAMILY PASSES If you're in or around Birmingham and looking for a great family day out, here's your chance to win a family pass to the Thinktank science centre. There are three new exhibits about to be launched in its Futures Gallery - and if you make it there in time for half term, you might catch a few Creepy Crawlies too... Get your head and your eyeballs around their new arrivals: * The Bondesque 'MAV' - is a machine that can fit in the palm of your hand. It carries a tiny camera, it flies, it hovers and it even navigates for itself! * 'eMo' is an "emotional" robot that can demonstrate a whole range of human expressions from happiness to sadness, anger to surprise. Interact with eMo and make his/her/its day... * The power of a telescope that lets you see machines so small that a particle of dust could destroy them. For half term the theme is 'Creepy Crawlies' and visitors will have the chance to get to grips with itsy bitsy creatures of all sorts, through bug-themed activities, handling sessions and talks from the experts. Meanwhile, the in-house IMAX cinema will be screening its brand new film 'Bugs!' which uses the latest film technology to let you feel like you've almost become one of them... If you're not so good on minibeasts, don't worry because Thinktank has ten themed galleries in all so there's plenty more to look at... You can explore Thinktank online at http://www.thinktank.ac. As you'll see, many of the exhibits are free, but if you fancy a family pass for the whole lot, all you have to do is send an email to anne@planet-science.com with the words THINKTANK PLEASE in the title and a note of your name and address. The draw will take place on Wednesday 29th October at 10am and your tickets will be dispatched asap to enable you to catch those creepy crawlies at the weekend while they're sill around... |
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| 04. JUNIOR WEB GURUS - SHOW THEM WHAT YOU CAN DO! Are you under 18 and full of great ideas for online projects that could benefit other young people and maybe even change the world? Or do you know someone who is? If so, here's your chance to win a place at web-school and a grant with which to make it all happen... Childnet International (http://www.childnet.org) is a registered charity that aims to make the internet a "safe and great" place for children. For the last six years, they have organised a competition to find the best young web developers from around the world, and to bring them together to brew up ideas, experiment with new formats, and work together to create brilliant new resources and websites. And the 2004 competition has just opened for entries. They say: "The competition is open to young people (aged 18 or under), who are developing exciting web projects - either as individuals or in conjunction with a school or not-for-profit organisation - and to people with exciting and innovative new ideas for using technology to benefit other young people. The competition's 'New to the Net' category is specifically for those with new ideas and those from disadvantaged communities and developing economies. "The prize is a place at the 'Cable & Wireless Childnet Academy' and an all-expenses paid trip for two people to participate in the Academy's programme, which will take place in London in April 2004. Winners will also receive a grant from a £30K web development fund to help them further enhance their web project." Participants at the Academy will be offered: * specialist web support, technical advice and leadership training * exclusive access to a team of Internet experts and mentors drawn from education, business and the public and voluntary sectors * ongoing web development advice and guidance from the Childnet team * the opportunity to interact with an online community of winners There's more information about the programme, the entry criteria, the categories and the judging panel online at: http://www.childnetacademy.org. And you can enter directly through the online entry form too. The deadline is 10th January 2004. Good luck! |
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| 05. THIS WEEK IN SCIENCE HISTORY: TELEVISION'S FIRST PICTURES No-one nowadays is in the least surprised at the fact that a large black box in the corner of the room zings to life at the push of a button, offering up pictures of events from around the world and even outer space. But when the first flickering moving television image was transmitted on the 30th October 1925, it scared the model so much that he had to be bribed to stay put in front of those bright lights... Inventor John Logie Baird produced the first tv images in his attic using bits and pieces he managed to buy with his very small budget. Unlike modern televisions Baird's television was mechanical and it was based on an idea that had been patented by Paul Nipkow in 1884. It took two geniuses to invent... and might take another one to explain clearly how they did it! However, here's the rough idea: The model whose image was to be 'televised' was brightly lit in the studio. Light reflecting off the model was sampled through pinholes in a spinning cardboard disk. This light then triggered a photosensitive cell, a device that lowers its electrical resistance when light is shone on it. This caused an increase in the electricity flowing through it... which lit another lamp that shone through a second spinning disk, which with the aid of lenses, shone onto a single spot on a screen. The whole image was built up with the disks continually scanning different parts of the object and reproducing them on the screen dot by dot. This is the reason for the flickering picture - it's a series of dots, not a complete image like projection. It's just handy that our brains interpret the dots as one picture. Baird perfected Nipkow's ideas, making them work in practice and producing crowd-pleasing effects. His major problem, and that of Nipkow, was to get the disks to spin synchronously - if they don't then the image is destroyed. Today televisions are electronic with whizzing electrons and flat plasma screens. But it was Baird's ideas that started off the television revolution and we can relive these early days when reception is bad and even the very best televisions still flicker and blink. Find out how Nipkow's disks worked: http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site= http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/NIPKOW%5FDISK.html |
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| 06. RECOMMENDED WEBSITE OF THE WEEK: ARKIVE Thoroughly making the most of the age of telecommunications is the website/treasure-trove called ARKIVE. (Or ARKive, as they like to be known, in reference to Noah's Ark...) We've flagged up ARKive before, but as it's just launched two lush learning zones for primary school kids and teachers, it's definitely time for a repeat mention... It's a media-based conservation charity which has undertaken the huge task of bringing together the world's first-ever digital bank of films, photographs and sound recordings of endangered species, and they've got all sorts of amazing footage, as you can imagine with organisations such as BBC, Discovery, National Geographic and WWW-International involved, and David Attenborough as Patron. Have a look and you'll feel like a kid in a sweetshop! The main site can be found at: http://www.arkive.org. What they've launched this week are two new sites which have effectively raided ARKive's extensive vaults and packaged up selected elements with expert information to create specially tailored resources on the subjects of: living things, life processes and habitats. The materials are specifically designed for seven to 11-year-olds, and adults who work with them whether at home or in schools or clubs. The site for children is called 'Planet ARKive' and it can be found at http://www.planetarkive.org. It features all sorts of colourful games, project ideas, fun facts, species profiles, and a changing menu of 'creature features'... It can take a little while to load up on screen, but it's worth it. For teachers, there's an accompanying site, ARKive Education at http://www.arkiveeducation.org. This provides background briefings, lesson plans, detailed project ideas, links and other downloadable resources which link the material not just to science but to subjects across the curriculum such as literacy, numeracy, geography, IT, design, PE and Personal & Social Health Education. |
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| 07. EVERYONE'S A WINNER... Well, lots of people are anyway! Back on the subject of tv technology, the three colours which make up television pictures are red, green and blue. And the two winners of tickets to the INTECH Christmas Lectures who got that right and were randomly selected in the prize draw are Lorna Thorne of Birmingham and Gay Hoban from Leek in Staffordshire. Congratulations! And the winners of the Planet Science 'Renewal' quiz are John Waring from Bristol, Karen Loneragan from Hampshire and Michael Bryan from Lancaster. On their way to you are a solar battery charger AND batteries (no expense spared, us) - well done! And finally, the winners of the family passes to Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh are: Christine Hodges from Falkirk, Elizabeth Akhurst from Romney Marsh, and Gillian Boyle from Ripon in North Yorkshire who will be in Edinburgh for half term. Your tickets went off to you yesterday, so enjoy your trip! |
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| 08. JOKE OF THE WEEK First of all a quick reminder that we're still looking for your nursery rhymes, traditional ditties, retold for a science-loving audience. Send them to Katie Walsh on katie.walsh@nesta.org.uk . And on with the jokes... Nancy Dobson from Skipton Girls' High School, thank you for sending us more more more! Nancy says, "Here's a couple of jokes to get the pumpkin rolling for some more Halloween howlers next week." Ready? What kind of ghosts haunt chemistry laboratories? Methylated spirits! What did the antibody go to the Halloween party dressed as? An immuno-goblin! That's all for this week. Please get in touch if you have any contributions for next week or beyond. Send them to Anne McNaught on anne@planet-science.com. Thanks very much... have a great week! |
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