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Friday 24th November 2006 Issue: 61

Welcome to another Wired Up! Thank goodness we’re here and not Down Under, either starving away or worse still, tucking into something unmentionable! Those ‘celebrities’ must be mad! They’re not the only ones - David Blaine, even as we speak, is suspended over New York in a gyroscope.  Enough is enough!  What have we got for you this week?

  1. The Wire – Bushtucker. Stir-fried cricket anyone? No?
  2. Try This! – Cloud in a jar
  3. Gear for Grabs – Giant Leaps book, you’ve never seen the like!
  4. Scinet – David Blaine – what is he up to now? Tut!
  5. Winners – Flipsides
1. The Wire  – Science news straight to your Inbox…

I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! is upon us again. Brace yourselves for the sight of ‘celebrities’ stuffing themselves with things you’d usually expect to be splatting with a rolled-up newspaper.

We may gag at these ‘Bushtucker Trials’, but entomophagy (or eating bugs) has been a dietary norm in some parts of the world for thousands of years - ancient Romans and Greeks dined on them. In Taiwan, you could be sitting down to a bowl of stir-fried crickets for starters or a meal of sauteed caterpillars.  In the poor, rural north of Thailand, insects are also traditionally part of the diet. Among the most popular are locusts, crickets and cicadas. Market stalls sell these by the pound, so you can choose what you want pick-and-mix style. Deep-fried, they are crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside. Somehow we’re just not convinced. For more details click here.

Or you might want to find out more about Bug Grub which tells you all about how nutritious insects can be. Heeeeeeellllllp! Get me out of here!

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2. Try This! – Science experiments for you to try at home...

Cloud in a jar

Imagine making your own little fluffy cloud.  How sweet!

Need adult supervision

You will need:

  • Matches
  • Glass jar
  • Small bag of ice
  • Hot water
  • Black paper (optional)
  • Sticky tape to secure the black paper around the back of the jar (optional)

What to do:

  1. Cut a small piece of black paper and secure it around the back of the jar with sticky tape.  This helps us “see” the cloud better.
  2. Pour hot water into the jar until it's 1⁄4 full.
  3. Light a match, place it over the opening of the jar and blow it out. (This must be done by an adult).
  4. Wait a second or two then drop the match into the water inside the jar.
  5. Quickly place the bag of ice on top of the jar covering the opening.  Make sure the ice does not go down into the jar but just across the top.
  6. Watch as the cloud begins to form!
  7. Lift the ice and watch the cloud come out.  COOL!

What’s going on?

The lit match creates smoke similar to dust particles in the air.  As the warm air rises from the bottom of the jar it grabs onto the smoke particles. The cold air from the ice cubes pushes down onto the warm air and causes condensation and forms a cloud.

Clouds in the real world form in a similar way to the one created in the jam jar. In this experiment the air is cooled by the ice. In the real world the main cause for cooling air is to force it to rise. As air rises it expands because the pressure decreases through the atmosphere - and therefore cools.

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

We’ve got a copy of the fantastic new book Giant Leaps to give away! It’s jointly produced by The Sun newspaper and the Science Museum in London.  It’s a whole new take on science books! Every double spread has a mock-up of a Sun front page on the right hand page. The left hand page has background, tables, graphics etc giving more explanation.  The book looks at all aspects of science and technology going back to the dawn of time.  What a brilliant idea! Headlines such as ‘Monkey Nutter – Barmy boffin Darwin reckons we are all descended from apes” accompanied by “Are you a chimp off the old block?”

But don’t just take it from us; Tony Blair says “This is a wonderful book, an extraordinary production… I also wish there had been a book like this to awaken my interest in science and make me want to find out more.”

For more information.

So if you’d like to win it, then send us an email with your name, age and address to: wired-up.news@nesta.org.uk with ‘SUNNY SCIENCE’ as the subject. The winners will be picked at random at 5pm on Thursday 7th December.

Good luck!

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4. SCINET – You don’t have to surf the Internet alone…

What is that crazy magician up to now? Well David Blaine has begun another one of his wacky stunts, spinning high above New York in a gyroscope and will be there for almost three days.

A gyroscope is made up of three steel rings which spin round and will flip Blaine in different directions as many as eight times every single minute.

See the Newsround for more details.

So what is a gyroscope? Anything which spins on an axis can be considered a gyroscope. A bicycle wheel, a basketball on the finger of a Harlem Globetrotter, a plate on top of one of those bendy poles that strange men set spinning on television magic shows for no readily apparent reason - all of these things can be considered gyroscopes.

And they are used for what exactly? Well because they resist movement they are useful as stabilisers in ocean-going ships. It can also be used as an artificial horizon in an aircraft, and as a navigational aid in all sorts of applications. If you spin such a gyroscope axis parallel to the Earth's axis, it will always point to the North Pole - the true north pole, not the magnetic north pole which has the unfortunate habit of moving about several hundred miles from the true north pole. It’s all a bit complicated so why not have a look at the BBC h2g2 site which explains it really well.

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

Remember issue no. 60?  We were giving away Flipsides and the lucky winners are Ning Yu (14) from Ilford, Class 3 St Matthew's RC First School from Northumberland, Jonathan Galley (10) from Newport, Akilaa Logeswaran (16) from Borehamwood and Eleanor Wood (9) from Bristol.

Well done everyone!

So keep entering – you never know! Next time - it could be YOU…

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THAT’S ALL FOR NOW

Got Wired-Up? Got clued up!

Don’t forget that Wired-Up will be hitting your inboxes every fortnight from now on, but in the meantime, send any questions, comments, jokes or experiment ideas to: wired-up.news@nesta.org.uk

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Bye for now!