Chemistry Week

The Royal Society of Chemistry are promoting chemistry for one week from Friday 4th November. In support of this there are some interesting articles on the following topics:

• FOOD
• SPORT
• FASHION
• ENTERTAINMENT

Click on the links to see what all of them have to do with chemistry - you'll be surprised! If you are really bored there is a tile sliding game at this link! Happy sliding :)

An Excellent Book

This really is a good read that I would like to recommend.
It's written by three English children whose mother takes them from England to live in Botswanna. There they enjoy many adventures and play an important role in the study of Lions. 'Better than any novel' says the Guardian Newspaper.
ISBN 184255 220 1

No more smelly pants?

Seeing Ghosts!

You will need:

2 sheets of white paper
A red felt tip pen

What to do:

Draw a ghost in red on one of the sheets of paper and colour it in.
Stare at it for about 30 seconds… you’ll start to see a green outline around it when your eyes are ready.
Now look at the second, blank sheet of paper.
You should see a ghostly green image hovering on the paper!

What’s going on?

Eyes get tired like any other part of the body. When you look at a red image the cells in your eyes’ retinas respond to the colour, but after a while they get tired and stop functioning as well. White light is made up of all colours, so when you then look at a white sheet of paper not all the red light is picked up by your tired eyes and you are left with an after image of green.

Click here to download some ghost drawings you can colour in & trace.

An Edible Solar System

Here’s one we made earlier… but if you missed it here is your chance to get all space age in the kitchen. What could be nicer now it is getting wintry than a hot chocolate and a solar system biscuit!

You will need:

• 175g plain flour
• 100g butter or margarine
• 50g caster sugar
• Four different sized biscuit cutters
• Items to decorate – coloured icing, hundreds and thousands and liquorice

What to do:

• Pre-heat the oven to 150°C/300°F Gas 2 (get an adult to do this!)
• Cream the butter or margarine and caster sugar together until they are light and fluffy.
• Stir in the flour and, once mixed, knead the dough together until it forms a ball.
• Add a sprinkle of flour if the dough is sticky.
• Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface until it is about 5mm thick.
• Use the smallest biscuit cutter to cut three biscuits from the dough (Pluto, Mercury and Mars).
• Use the next-size-up biscuit cutter to make two biscuits (Venus and Earth).
• Use the next larger biscuit cutter to make another two biscuits (Neptune and Uranus).
• Use the largest biscuit cutter to cut the last two biscuits (Saturn and Jupiter).
• Place the biscuits on a baking tray and bake in the centre of the oven for 25 minutes or until golden brown.
• Let the biscuits cool before decorating.
• Keep track of the planets as you cut them out so you can decorate them correctly after they are cooked.

Now for the decoration:

• Mercury has a rocky surface and is orange-red in colour, so use coloured icing and hundreds and thousands to decorate this biscuit.
• Venus is covered with thick, yellow clouds so you will need yellow icing.
• Earth is an obvious one! Decorate with green and blue icing and a sprinkle of icing sugar to resemble the clouds.
• Decorate your Mars biscuit with red icing.
• Jupiter is a giant ball of yellow, orange and red gas arranged in stripes.
• Use stripes of coloured icing decorate with a red sweet in the middle to resemble Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
• Saturn looks yellow because of its foggy atmosphere and is famous for its rings, so use yellow icing and lay a few pieces of liquorice on the biscuit to resemble its rings.
• Uranus looks green so decorate with green icing.
• Neptune is blue with faint stripes so decorate with blue icing and make faint stripes with sprinkles of icing sugar.
• Finally for Pluto, sprinkle a little icing sugar on the top of the biscuit to resemble this icy, rocky planet.

Now all you have to do is arrange the biscuits in the correct planetary order, and serve!

An important message from 8V!

Neon, Vanadium, Erbium, Ruthenium, Nitrogen, Indium, Lanthanum, Boron, Sulphur. A very important message they pose. If you think you know the answer - ask someone in 8V that knows!

Guest speaker Dr Azeez Abdul Hakeem

If you were not lucky enough to see and hear the talk given to us by Dr Azeez Abdul Hakeem on the environmental projects at the Banyon Tree in the Maldives then don't worry, you can hear his talk by clicking on the podcasts icon or simply click here. Many thanks for Dr Azeez for his time and to Miss Brown for organising the event.

Be a young Galileo

Activity: Galileo and his Pendulums

One of the things that Galileo was most famous for was pointing out that something’s mass does not affect how quickly it falls to the ground. Tricky to see when there is air resistance and a lack of high places that are safe to drop heavy weights from!

You will need:

String
Modelling clay or plasticene
Weighing scales

What to do:

Take the modelling clay and make two pendulum bobs of different weights. Make one considerably heavier than the other, but not so great that the sizes are vastly different. Keep them spherical
Attach them each of them to piece of string of same length to make two pendulums.
Stick them in an open doorway or along a support, again make sure the string length is the same.
Pull them out to the same height at the same time and let go…
They should be swinging perfectly in unison, if you have made them carefully enough!

What’s going on?

Pendulums don’t just swing, the weights at the end are actually falling. The pendulum motion allows them to ‘fall’ for longer than they would if we chucked them out a window! Which means we can examine how different masses are affected by gravity.

When compared to a falling hammer or feather we might expect the lighter weight to fall more slowly than the heavier one. But if you watch your pendulums you’ll see this is not the case. It doesn’t matter what the mass is, all objects fall at the same rate, as long as you rule out air resistance. It is tricky to get rid of air resistance but you can minimise the effect by making the bobs similar sizes and spherical!

Do girls really have the X factor?

Have you been watching the X factor? Are the girls doing better than the boys? Well they should do because girls have double the X factor. That is to say female mammals have two X chromosomes whereas males have one X and one Y. What’s more, the X chromosome contains a thousand more genes than the Y. Hold on girls! Before you start your goal celebration routines it seems the female body switches off one X chromosome - quite randomly - in each cell, thus evening up protein production between the sexes. Our one chance to be the superior sex and nature decides to intervene!
So what does all this mean? Well did you realise that tortoiseshell cats - which are nearly always female - have a gene for one colour on one of their X chromosomes and a gene for another colour on the other X chromosome? This leads to the multicoloured patterning.
Also females are protected from many diseases because of their double dose of the X chromosome. A host of nasty diseases and disorders sit on the human X chromosome, including haemophilia. But because females have another - usually healthy - copy of the X chromosome, they are usually shielded from the full impact of these disorders. Males, on the other hand, have nothing to fall back on.
But wait for this - although the average IQ of men and women is equal, men are more frequently found at both extremes of intelligence. In a nutshell, you’ve either got it – or you haven’t! This is because, if you have very good intelligence genes on your X chromosome, it pays not to have them muffled by more average genes on another X chromosome.
For more details click here.

How good is your physics?

Try the BBC's online quiz (click the image left)

Levitating paperclips

How does the magnet attract the paperclip?
What is the resultant force?
Is the system in equilibrium?

What is lightning?

Did you sleep through the electrical storm last night? There were so many lightning strikes I simply pointed my digital camera out the window and took a few snaps (see image). Do you know what causes lightning? Have you ever heard of ball lightning? Do you know the safest place to be when it strikes? Some facts about lightning:

• A lightning charge contains 30 million volts at 100,000 amperes.
• The total energy in a large thunderstorm is more than that in an atomic bomb.
  

Use the links below to read more about this natural phenomenon.

http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/lightning_science.html
(how lightning forms)

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s520317.htm
(how ball lightning forms)

http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/lst.html
(how to avoid getting hit by lightning)