So where did January go? Never mind, Randomised is jumping straight into February! By the way, it’s the Chinese Year of the Rat this year so for all you Rats born in 1996, way to go! By the way your best friends should be Dragons and Monkeys whereas your mortal enemies are Horses! Neigh lad!

  1. Sooo Random – Asteroids and shoes
  2. Sci-text – Newton and the theory of gravity
  3. Gear Giveaway – Explore-At-Bristol
  4. Over 2U! – Dancing Ice
  5. Winners – Glasgow Science Centre and Flipsides

1. Sooo Random - Science news straight to your Inbox...

It seems that an asteroid some 250m across has swept past the Earth. Hmmm.  We wondered what that whooshing noise was. Actually it wasn’t that close, about 538,000km away which is just outside the Moon’s orbit. The asteroid went by the imaginative name of 2007 TU24.  Apparently scientists who study these things say that similar-sized rocks come by every few years. However, detailed studies of how asteroids are put together will allow us to find ways of defending ourselves against future, more threatening rocks. Though moviemakers seem to favour the explosive approach, the best method will probably be to nudge it away gently.

The average interval between actual Earth impacts for an object of this size would be about 37,000 years, Nasa states. And what about in 1908 when an asteroid about the size of a football field exploded in Earth's atmosphere with the force of a 15-megaton bomb, levelling an 800 square-mile (2,000-sq-km) area of Siberia? Want more fascinating asteroid facts.

And now for something completely random…

Scientists have found out that people were wearing shoes as far back as 40,000 years ago.  They were examining the toe bones of a 40,000-year-old skeleton in a cave in China. Apparently wearing shoes alters the shape of the toes because wearing shoes makes people walk differently.

Scientist Erik Trinkaus said: "Modern shoe-wearing Americans have wimpy little toes. Barefoot native Americans have strong, large toes. Shoe-wearing Inuits (people who live in the Arctic) lie somewhere in between."

So in years to come - how will they tell who wears Nike?

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2. Sci-text – what would they say?

Imagine if our most famous discoveries and inventions had been communicated by text.  Take Isaac Newton for example.

“Soz i 4got 2 fon u. Woz unda tre. Apl fel on hed. LOL. J Thnk mte hve dscvred grvty. 1st tme afaik. Cu soon. Izk

Got any better ideas?  Or got another text from a scientist/inventor/discoverer?

Send it to us at wired-up.news@nesta.org.uk  with ‘SCI-TEXT’ as the subject.  We’ll print it – u neva no!

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3. Gear Giveaway – You’ve got to be in it to win it...

Boy or girl? High risk or healthy? Innocent or guilty? A little DNA can make a big difference...

Inside DNA is a brand new exhibition exploring the human genome and how current research will affect our lives in future. Collect DNA evidence to solve a murder, find out how similar or unique you are compared with other exhibition visitors, compare yourself to a primate or Neanderthal, and explore issues such as selecting babies' characteristics, medical testing and the use of DNA databases. You will also have the chance to feed your opinions into government policy.

Inside DNA is in Explore-At-Bristol until 2 September 2008; call 0845 345 1235 or visit www.at-bristol.org.uk. 

Developed by At-Bristol on behalf of Ecsite-uk, with funding from the Wellcome Trust and support from the Sanger Institute. www.insidedna.org.uk

We have TWO family passes for Explore-At-Bristol!  If you’d like to win one then send us your name, age and address to: wired-up.news@nesta.org.uk  with ‘INSIDE DNA’ as the subject. The winner will be picked at random at 5pm on Wednesday 13th February 2008.

Good luck!

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4. Over 2U! – Science experiments for you to try at home...

Dancing ice

What you need

  • a tall glass or plastic container
  • some vegetable oil
  • ice (try adding some food colouring to make it easier to see).

What you do

  1. Fill the glass with oil.
  2. Drop a block of ice into the glass. The ice should float in the middle of the oil.
  3. Watch the ice as it melts.
  4. You will find drops form on the ice, then drop off to fall slowly through the oil. As the drops form and fall, the ice will rock from side to side and move up and down.

What's going on?

This activity is all about density and buoyancy. The density of a material is how much a given volume of that material weighs. For example, one cubic metre of liquid water weighs 1000 kg, so it has a density of 1000 kg/m³.

When you drop an object into a liquid, it feels the forces of:

  • gravity, which pulls it down
  • buoyancy, which pushes it up

When you drop something into a liquid, it displaces some of the liquid (pushes it out of the way). An object placed in a liquid feels an upward force equal to the weight of the liquid it is displacing. This force is called buoyancy.

If the weight of the object is less than the weight of the liquid it is displacing, it will float. If it is greater, it will sink. Another way to say this is that if the object is less dense than the liquid, it will float, but if it is denser it will sink. This is even true for liquids. Liquid water is denser than oil, so the oil floats on the water.

Water is weird stuff. We don't normally notice it, because water is so common, but water does some things that almost no other chemical will do. One of the ways water is strange is that it is less dense as a solid than as a liquid.

Ice and vegetable oil have almost the same density, around 920 kg/m³, so a block of ice dropped into oil will barely move. As the water melts, it turns into denser, liquid water. The water tends to stick to the ice for a while before it drops off. If there is enough liquid water on the ice, then the density of the ice and water together is greater than the oil, so they will sink. Once the drop of water falls off the ice, the ice floats up again.

It's a good thing that ice floats on water. In winter, some rivers and lakes freeze on the surface. If ice was denser than water, then the rivers and lakes would freeze from the bottom up, which would kill plants growing in them and starve most of the fish and other marine life.

This activity came from Science by Email.

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5. Winners – Has your name been picked out of the bag?

Remember issue no. 1?  We had TWO giveaways. A family pass to the Glasgow Science Centre was won by Tom Hargreaves (8) of Moffat.  Good work Tom!

There were also ten packs of three Flipside magazines and the winners are Joshua Wilson (11) of Leeds, Hannah Daly (10) of Hertfordshire, Chris Lloyd (14) of Shrewsbury, Simon Bellows (12) of Shropshire, Lachlan Mulholland of Cheltenham, Fiona Sanderson of Northumberland, Conor Bryan of Peterborough, Jago Edyvean  (11) of London, Katie Medlin (10) of Warwick and Steven France (8) of Welshpool. Well done one and all!!

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THAT'S ALL FOR NOW

You've been Randomised!

Send any questions, comments, jokes or experiment ideas to: randomised.news@nesta.org.uk

Bye for now!