Are you stuck for a quiz to enter? We must have read your mind.  Here’s the Sticky Quiz with more questions than you can shake a stick at. Are you up for it, or stuck for time? Stick around and find out.

Answer all ten questions correctly and you could win a set of floor/garden/park/beach-sized pick up sticks!

Ready? Steady? Get stuck in!

It's 11 Million takeover day on 23rd November, where children can take over from adults. Fancy a go at science lesson? Here is one we've prepared earlier!

Forces for 11 to 14 year olds, don't forget to ask your teach first.

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Well we’ve heard of a spider in the bath but a snake? And what’s worse – it was put there on purpose together with another 86 of the varmints. Jackie Bibby - who is known as the Texas Snake Man - completed the strange feat to break his own world record. He reclined with 87 of the slippery creatures for 45 minutes, beating his previous best by 12 snakes. He said keeping still stopped him getting hurt.  Last year, he set another record by holding 10 rattlesnakes by their tails in his mouth. There are some ve-ry strange people in the world….  Run us a bath would you?  Hold the bubbles – just add a few vipers and a boa constrictor and that’ll be fine.

Did you know that more than billion texts fly through the air every single week in the UK, which is the same as 4,000 every second?

That's a quarter more than were being sent a year ago, and we now send as many texts in a week as were sent in the whole of the year 1999.

Oh no, watch out if you’ve got an Xbox 360!  Apparently the company behind the console have come up with a new piece of technology called the Family Timer that can turn off your console on its own! This means that your parents could stop you if they think you’ve been spending too much time gaming.  Whaaaaaat! The timer will let parents or adults decide how many hours you can play a game for - either per week or even per day. Is there no respect?  The console will warn you before it switches off, to give you enough time to finish a level or save your game. Small consolation eh?

The Family Timer will be available as a download through Xbox LIVE from December.  Quick.  Do NOT let them read this section.

This week we’ve got a little card game for you.  Supported by the Institute of Physics (IOP) it’s called ‘TOP CAREERS in science’.  So if you fancy playing a great card game, and finding out what sort of exciting career might be right for you, then this is the game for you!

If you’d like to win it then send us your name, age and address to: wired-up.news@nesta.org.uk  with ‘TOP CARD GAME’ as the subject. The winner will be picked at random at 5pm on Wednesday 21st November 2007.

Good luck!

Playing Card Showdown

Science meets the great Wild West.  What a combo.  Howzabout moseying down to the ol’ Saloon and having a lookie see?

What you need

• A pack of cards.
• A top hat. If you don't have a top hat, find a friendly Victorian gentleman and ask if you can borrow his. If that doesn't work, try an inferior sort of hat or - at a pinch - a cardboard box or saucepan. Just so long as the opening is fairly close to the ground, and about 15-20 cm wide.

What you do

1. Try to drop the cards from approximately waist height into the hat. Go on, have a go.
2. No luck? Try challenging somebody else to do it.
3. They're not managing, either, eh? Shame. OK, skip ahead to the explanation, then come back here and offer them some sort of bet. Maybe they'll tidy your bedroom if you can drop five cards in a row into the hat?
4. Then proceed to drop every card, one after the other, into the hat. Which you can do, now you know the knack.

What's going on?

As you drop them the playing cards appear to defy gravity. Cards dropped horizontally fall slowly while those dropped edge on don't even fall straight to the ground. They are clearly experiencing other forces due to the air they are passing through. If there was no air, both cards would fall straight to the ground.

As the cards fall, the force of gravity is pulling on each card seemingly from a single point - its centre of mass. The motion of the air around the card creates vortices - tiny swirls of air - which add an uneven resistance at varying places over the surface of the card.

Once dropped the horizontal card may tip slightly, but the tipping motion creates a vortex off the lowest edge of the card, which increases the resistance to motion at this point of the card. The result is the card re-stabilises back in the horizontal position.

The card dropped vertically starts off in an unstable position. Once a slight deviation from the vertical occurs, the card starts to turn. In this case, when it reaches the horizontal position (seemingly stable) the card has so much rotational momentum that it keeps on turning. And, instead of tumbling down in a straight line towards the open hat, a combination of the uneven resistance forces cause the card to tumble and flutter in the air, and move away from its straight downward path.

The conclusion? If you want to get your card in the hat, start in the stable position - with the card held horizontally.

Watch as yet another team of Scicasters shows how.  Yeee harrr!  And while you’re at it, why not think about contributing your own film to the site?

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