Science Wows is all about sparking children’s natural interests in Science!
It is learning while having fun!Whatever the event, whatever the venue it is Hands-on Science for children. Party entertainment, school visits, fun days, corporate events …. there are even local science camps during school holidays.
If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself”
That is (apparently) one of Einstein’s many quotes. It took me a while to realise just how true these words are, but once I did I was able to marry a love of writing with a love of science. I discovered that once I broke things down to their most simple components
Dr. How’s Science Wows was set up by me (Naomi) in 2011. My background is biochemistry with a PhD in Molecular Biology; I have worked in the Medical Diagnostic Industry and lectured at third level colleges but the crux of what I do lies in many years working with children; from two to 20 they all have one thing in common…. curiosity!
Well it is official… Spring is here for sure… the Cuckoo was heard from our garden yesterday, not by me I’m afraid, not yet anyway, but it definitely marks the ticking of nature’s clock, the passing of the seasons. The cuckoo is calling, tick that box, all is well with the world!
I have to admit I love the anticipation of each seasonal landmark. The first snowdrop, the arrival of the golden daffodils, the synchronous timing of the budding of each tree, like a perfectly tuned orchestra, each player patiently awaiting it’s moment and joining the symphony at exactly the correct point in time.
My children have lived in this house all their young lives and I am charmed to see them remarking on these natural milestones too. They begin to remember their own landmarks of the passing of the seasons and ask me when a certain one will arrive. These things they have learned on their own… or more precisely, Mother Nature has taught them, tapping them gently on the shoulder to anchor the arrival of each new marvel.
We are lucky to live in the country where nature so beautifully illustrates the passage of the seasons. The hedgerow by our house, each plant revealing another milestone. A natural metronome tapping out the appearance of each… the colts foot, lesser celandine, cowslips, dandelions, herb roberts, speed-well, the flowering gorse, bird’s foot trefoil, angelica, meadow sweet, valerian. As one disappears another arrives and there is a feeling of familiarity and contentment in seeing an old friend emerging once again. Each a lovely reminder of our early years in this house, before we had children, when my husband and I would walk the lane together and he would point out the arrival of each new plant, teaching me it’s name. Now every time I see a familiar arrival I remember that special time.
It’s Friday so that can only mean one thing… another fun experiment to try, think you are going to like this one!
Nearly everyone seems to have heard of the classic “Coke & Mentos” experiment so we started with that…
You will need:
A 2 Litre bottle of coke (Diet coke is best as it doesn’t leave a sticky mess)
A packed of mentos mints
Basically you want to place the bottle of coke on the ground and add as many mentos to it at once as possible and then stand way back!!
How do you add the mentos?
Well you could pop one or two in quickly and it will work fairly well.
You could roll a piece of paper into a tube, sit it in the neck of the bottle and, gently pinch the base while you fill it with mentos (up to ten is about right) and then let then all slip into the bottle when you release the pinch at the base!
There are devices specifically designed for delivering mentos into coke…. I bought this one from my local book shop…
With this you insert the pin, load up with mentos, screw the devise onto the top of your bottle of coke and then pull the pin to release the mints into the coke. There is even a little ring of plastic that drops down and covers the pin holes so all the coke goes upwards only.
You can make your own devise, like we did here (thanks Hubby)… does pretty much the same thing.
This is the one the I use for kids parties and events and it goes down a treat. I don’t bother plugging the holes at the side so the coke fountains out the side as well as the top and it all adds to the effect!
This is what happens when you add the mentos to the coke…
Fun, isn’t it, but I thought we could shake it up a little (pardon the pun) … so I added two seven year olds home from school with a temperature and needing a bit of a distraction…
The “R & D” Department
Then I gave them these… and asked them to come up with something fun!
The Props
And this is what they came up with…..(That’s two teddies tied to the front of the skate board!!)…
What do you think? Not bad for two boys who had a temps of 38.5 an hour before….Oh the wonders of Calpol!
If you really want to scale things up you might get some inspiration from these guys (I love this video ;0) )…
“Coke and mentos powered car“.
So, do you want the bit of science behind the fun?...
Firstly, this is not thought to be a chemical reaction between the coke and the mentos. It is most likely a physical reaction known as nucleation; The coke is full of carbon dioxide gas, to give it it’s fizz; the mentos are full of tiny little craters on the surface of the sweet, the carbon dioxide gas is able to form bubbles in these “craters” producings thousands of tiny bubbles all at once; these bubbles of gas are under a lot of pressure within the bottle of coke and so come shooting out the mouth of the bottle. If anyone knows anything about Newton and his laws they will know that every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction (Newton’s third law of motion)… so the coke comes shooting out of the bottle in one direction and the force of this propels the skate board forward in the opposite direction. PRETTY COOL!
Now it’s your turn to go off and try it out, if you come up with any of your own ideas and experiments I’d love to hear about it!
From the moment I get up in the morning the questions start rolling…. the three year old is going through a “what happens if” phase with an alarmingly gruesome theme these days; “Mammy, what will happen if your eye ball falls out and you stand on it and squash it?” is just one of his recent gems! Before I have even had my morning cuppa I have attempted to answer a fair whack of questions. The process continues throughout the day… from the back of the car, while we do the shopping, during meals and all the way through to bedtime… he can literally fall asleep mid question!
But why the incessant bombardment of questions?…
“Mammy, what will happen if…?”
There are over 100 billion cells in the brain of a newborn child. These cells need to start forming networks and connections with each other or else they will be “deleted” by the body in favour of more active cells . It is the child’s interaction with its surroundings and its social contact that greatly influence the amount of connections made within its brain.
The brain of a three year old is two times more active than that of an adult!
By the age of three the child is often actively developing its ability to think and question what is happening around it in every aspect of life! This is when the real deluge of questions come! This phase of heightened questioning supposedly lasts until the child is about ten years old. So I am blessed with three children in this busy questioning stage of life.
As exhausting as it may be, listening, answering and encouraging these questions is highly important to the development of the child’s brain…. it literally “Lights it up!” I think it is equally important to promote this questioning so that the child develops it as a habit they carry with them right through life! If you were to think of some of the scientific greats, who pops into mind…. Da Vinci, Darwin, Einstein, Newton maybe? Now would you say their work has left an impression on you because of their ability to learn or their sensation for questioning? Newton, at the age of 19 abandoned the norms of college learning and instead set himself a list of 15 questions that he explored for the rest of his life!
Questioning Minds – Einstein, Newton, Darwin and DaVinci…. notic any common feature? (hint – the hair)
Interestingly, I find that my own ability to question life has been greatly enhanced since my children were born. I consider this a blessing and hope to continue learning how to question as they do. However, there are times, I must admit, when the answer to one of their questions is “just because!”… well I am only human!
Did you guess this weeks CAN YOU NAME THIS CREATURE? It is a PEACOCK SPIDER!! Well done to Michael from Nature Learn and to Sonja Koprek for getting it right!
What is not apparent from the photo above is the size of these spiders, they are tiny, growing to no bigger than 5mm! It is only the males that have this splendidly coloured stomach flap… the females are brown in colour with black markings. When the male spots a female it raises it’s legs and flashes it’s brightly coloured flap in an unusual dance like sequence…. a spectacular mating ritual!There are about 20 know species of peacock spiders but less than half of them have been formally identified! This one is the Coastal Peacock spider (Maratus specious). Peacock spiders are found in south eastern Australia they are also know as gliding spiders and are a type of jumping spider.
With all the excitement of the Easter bunny we forgot about our last egg- experiment…”the bouncy egg” so I thought it might be a fun one to start off this new blog spot… “Fun Friday”, where I will share a new experiment for you to try!
So firstly, this is how we set up the experiment….
We left the eggs in the vinegar for two days and then removed them and gently washed them in a bowl of water … unfortunately, when I was washing the egg from the plain vinegar experiment, I burst it… Ooops!
No harm done as we substituted the other just to show you how the “bouncy” bit worked!
The result…(we had a very cautious scientist in the video but you can get quite a bounce out of the egg!)
What has happened to the shell?
The vinegar is an acid (acetic acid); it reacts with the calcium in the egg shell (calcium carbonate) and breaks it down, producing a gas as it does so. You may have observed the gas as bubbles being formed, during the experiment. Effectively the vinegar (acid) eats away at the egg shell until it is all gone.
The fluorescent bit
Then for a bit more fun I turned on a UV light! Ok, I know, most of you don’t have one of these lying around at home but as I’m a Mad Scientist I do ;0) …and I was curious to know what would happen if we left it sit in fluorescent vinegar.
The results were Fab!! A fluorescent egg… check it out! (I hope you can hear me in the video, sound is a bit low!)
So there you go, it worked better than I expected… the egg is completely fluorescent…. and bouncy, just for that extra bit of fun!
What is fluorescence?
In case you are wondering “WHAT IS FLUORESCENCE?”….let me explain… it is the emission of light from an object after it has absorbed light (or electromagnetic energy)…. usually the light absorbed has a short wavelength (in this case the UV light) and the light emitted has a longer wavelength.
When I shone the UV light onto the egg it “glowed”, even in daylight it looks bright – just like a fluorescent pen!
My daughter asked me the other day if you cut an earthworm in two will it grow back again? And will you have two worms? Suddenly the whole family is in on the act with talk of geckos tails and why we can’t grow back a limb. So to dispel a few myths and legends I thought I’d take a look for this weeks blog!
The short answer is NO, so please don’t go trying! It is true that the anatomy of the earthworm is very different to our own and if part of a worm is cut off, one part may survive. The part that can survive is the “head” end. First let’s look at some of the unusual features of the inside of an earthworm.
The earthworm’s body is made up of segments called annuli. These segments are stuck together just like a series of rings all lined up; each segment contains little bristle like hairs called setae and these allow the earthworm to move. Earthworms are invertebrates meaning they don’t have any internal “boney” skeleton.
The earthworm does not have one heart as we do… it has FIVE! These hearts help pump the blood through the worm’s body. The worm needs oxygen just as we do but it has no lungs to fill with air, instead it has time pores on it’s skin which absorb oxygen from outside it’s body. In order for this to happen the worm needs to keep it’s body moist, which is why they often feel a bit slimy. Too much moisture though and the worms can drown; when it rains earthworms will move closer to the surface to prevent them from drowning!
Earthworms have a “head” and a “tail” but no eyes, ears or nose, so they can’t see, hear or smell as we can. However their skin is covered with sensors for light and movement so thy can react to too much light (sunshine) or movement (rain falling or soil being disturbed by digging predator).
SO WHAT HAPPENS IF WE CUT AN EARTHWORM IN TWO?
Firstly, cutting up earthworms or any other creature is a very cruel thing so please don’t do it! However if an earthworm’s body was to be cut into two parts its survival would depend on a number of factors:
Where in the body is the earthworm cut? The earthworm would have a better chance of surviving if it’s body is cut closer to it’s tail end. This end does not contain the vital organs. Research by Dr. Thomas H. Morgan (1901) found that the head end of the earthworm may survive if the head end contained at least 16 segments. It is possible that some of the tail end will even be regenerated. Some repair and regeneration is also possible at the head end, but usually only within a small number of segments.
Chance of infection: the earthworm can pick up a bacterial infection just as we can. If the earthworm can seal the cut or regenerate the segment before infection sets in it has a better chance of surviving.
The speed at which the earthworm heals: regenerating part of the body would require an awful lot of energy for the earthworm, the quicker it can heal the quicker it can get back to eating and refuel its body. If the earthworm does not have enough energy to complete the process it will die.
THE ROLE OF EARTHWORMS IN OUR GARDENS
The earthworm is often called “nature’s plough” as it digs through the soil , turning and rotating as it goes. Earthworms are herbivores, they feed on leaves, root and other decaying plant matter. The earthworm deposits this matter through out the soil through its faeces. An earthworm can eat up to one-third of its own body weight in a day!
The burrowing of earthworms helps the soil in two ways, it allows air and water into the soil through the channels it forms and it moves different layers and types of soil around, distributing nutrients and making the earth more fertile. Although earth worms often stay close to the surface of the soil they can burrow down as deep as two metres.
EXPERIMENT: Make your own wormery
A wormery (or worm farm) allows us observe the work that worms do within our soil.
Fill a large see-through container with alternative layers of soil and sand.
Put a layer of leaves and vegetation on the top.
Add enough water to keep the soil damp.
Collect some worms and add them to your wormery.
Cover the outside of your bowl with a large piece of card or paper to block out the light.
Put your wormery in a safe place and check on it every day – remember to keep adding some water to keep the soil moist.
You sould notice very quickly that the different layers of soil and sand are getting mixed together, the work of the industrious worms.
Remember to keep adding leaves and vegetation to the top layer and do let your worms safely back out into the garden once you have finished the experiment!
References:
Morgan, T. H., 1901. Regeneration. MacMillan, New York.
Chris Maynard, 2001. Backyard Science. Dorling Kindersley, US.
What is in a hug? More than you might think! We all know that a hug is a good way of expressing love, affection, jubilation, happiness, sympathy, comfort or friendship; hugs can cheer us up and strengthen relationships but the science behind a hug can go a lot deeper!
Hugs all round for health and happiness!
We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth
The positive bonds of a relationship can be greatly increased just by the physical proximity and contact bet ween the two people hugging. Studies have shown that couples that hug regularly are more inclined to stay together!
A good hug, as recommended, by social anthropologist Jean Smith, should last for 20 seconds or more. These hugs can increase oxytocin levels in our bodies making us happier and more relaxed. Increased oxytocin levels result in a lowering of blood pressure and other stress related symptoms. Oxytocin can also increase our social connections and is produced at many stages of bonding in life – such as at birth and during breast feeding. So we become happier, more content, healthier and more relaxed, all in 20 seconds – now that’s another miracle of nature, don’t you think?
Some people see them as the scourge of their flower bed, others as a natural and wild source of food and medicine but what exactly is a weed and are they really just a plant growing in the wrong place?
There is no biological definition for a weed, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary’s definition is a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants. I like dabbling in the occasional harvesting of the wild for the purpose of food, drinks and even mild medicine. Last week we gathered some young nettles and made a delicious pesto! I have to admit I got a great kick out of gathering something growing wild in the garden and changing it into something tasty and nutritious! Nettles can be used very much like spinach but contain higher levels of trace elements and minerals. They are good for detoxifying and cleansing the blood as well as reducing many ailments associated with inflammation.
Homemade nettle pest
Just on my doorstep (well almost) is the Corrib Lake, the second largest lake in Ireland. Unfortunately, certain parts of the lake are currently under invasion from a non-native species – the curly-leaved waterweed (Lagarosiphon major). This weed has become a real problem within the lake and has a negative impact on the population of brown trout for which the lake is renowned.I can’t deny I grumble about weeding, but overall I like plants that have a function other than just aesthetic pleasure and to me weeds often fall into this category. However, there is the flip side! Just as within the animal world, it is often not a good idea to introduce non-native species to a new environment!
So which side of the fence do you sit on when it comes to defining weeds, or are you like me, jumping back and forward depending on the weed that’s in it?
Did you manage to guess last weeks CAN YOU NAME THIS CREATURE? …. I got two correct answers… from Dave at The Wedding Artist and from Michael at Nature Learn; Well done because it was a tricky one I thought.
So what was it? It was a YETI CRAB (Kiwa hirsuta)… a deep sea crustacean newly discovered in 2005.
These wonderful looking creatures are deep sea dwellers. The are found on the ocean floor off Easter Island. It is thought that the “fur” on their legs might actually trap bacteria given off by hydrothermal vents.
In 2006 another species of yeti crab (Kiwa puravide) was discovered off the coast of Costa Rica, living in deep methane filed fissures.
Bacteria were also found on the silky hairs of the Kiwa purivida and it is thought that the crab literally farms the bacteria on the hairs of it legs, feeding them, maintaining them and ultimately harvesting and eating them. It is likely that bacteria on the Kiwa hirsuta arrive at a similar fate!
Farming food on their own bodies…another marvel of nature!
We found this little visitor in our house the other day… a nice big Bumble Bee… all Apiphobics look away now!
I think the poor guy woke a bit too early and was taking refuge in the warmth of our house!
There are about 20 different species of Bumble Bees in Ireland. Although they do not build the large hives like their relatives, the honey bee, they do still live in colonies (usually with about 50 bees per colony) and are important pollinators of crops and cultivated and wild plants. Due to the increased use of pesticides within gardens and agriculture, bee populations are declining at an alarming rate. This is leading to a call in some countries for legislation to ban certain pesticides know to be detrimental to bee populations.
We can also make small changes within our own gardens: as well as the obvious switch to organic gardening we can choose to grow bee friendly plants and even prepare simple structures to encourage bees to come live in our gardens!
A great eco-friendly project to get your children involved with, don’t you think?
