I blogged a while back about mapping out the hot spots in your microwave with fax paper, or marshmallows or chocolate chips. (Your food is not heated at the “nodes”, or cool spots, which is why we have those rotating plates).
Here is a decidedly un-yummy (but undeniably creative) take on that activity (as sent to my old teacher mentor):
I had a student read somewhere that you could use a cockroach to map out the hot spots. His home experiment (to my delight and of course horror) was to ink up the feet of several cockroaches and let them run around inside the microwave and produce a graph of x-y foot prints which mapped out the cold regions. It was working quite well he wrote in his experimental report – that was until his mother ascertained what he was doing. Gave him 8/10 for his report BUT took one mark off for not seeking an animal ethics and equipment approval from his mum.
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Ok, it probably wouldn’t be very yummy, but here’s another hands-on activity you can use that’s rather Halloween-like. Called “Make a ‘mummy’”, this Exploratorium activity is a great way to demonstrate how mummification works, by drying out the tissue in a fish using baking soda. Egyptians used a specific type of salt to do this, but baking soda will do the trick, giving you a tough leathery fish.
If you’d just left your fish out on a shelf, exposed to the air, bacteria and fungi would have begun to decay the fish, creating strong, unappetizing odors. Since all living things require water to survive, removing the water from the fish greatly inhibited the growth of these organisms, decreasing the unpleasant effects of rotting.
For an inquiry activity, try substituting salt for baking soda. Which one works best? (Hint: It’s not the salt).
Make him a little pyramid home. Imagine his little fishy afterlife. Bury some fishy mummy friends for him to play with.
From Platonides on Flickr
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With halloween fast approaching, it’s time to take advantage of a frivolous holiday to do some fun science stuff.
No post about Halloween would be complete without a reference to the Grossology site. Scroll down for “lab activities”: This gets high marks from one teacher who says, “It has the simpliest of the slimey things, glue slime, and fake blood.”
In that vein, read the post on “how to make slime” over at Schooner of Science. The Schooner also has a recent post on zombies — an interesting story about the origin of zombies and a toxin-like powder which may, or may not, have put people into a zombie-like state.
The “whoosh bottle” is also somewhat spooky as a demonstration. And you get to talk about gas laws and combustion, too.
Fire is always fun. If you google Exploding Pumpkin Experiment or Flaming Pumpkin Experiment, you can find some great things to do with those leftover jack-o-lanterns after Halloween. Here is Steve Spangler’s version of an Exploding Pumpkin that carves itself. Most people just have the pumpkin shoot flame from its mouth. You can get lycopodium powder (from Flinn Scientific, for example), and use a syringe to spray it along candles at the bottom of a pumpkin’s mouth, creating a fireball coming out of the mouth. Obviously, t there are safety measures to consider. The video below has the best explanation of how to do this that I found.
And here are a few suggestions from veteran teacher Raleigh McElmore:
Slime: If you can score a magnetic stirring hot plate you can easily get Poly vinyl alcohol at a chemcial supply store and make up some great slime at 40 gr/L and mixing it with a bit of Sodium Borate (known as “Borax” and in many supermarkets detergent aisle) at 40 gr/L.
Your own grossology: In elementary school I always filled a big pyrex bowl with peeled grapes that had been soaked in red food coloring. This brings out the “veins” in the grapes and I announced that “eyeball soup” would be shared with the students. A chunk of dry ice, the grapes and fill the bowl with cheap fruit punch gives you a seething and bubbling drink with “eyeballs” floating around. Or you can, for realism, use sheep eyeballs. Give them to your star pupils. I’ll keep an eye out for you.
And to keep them on their toes:
A great magic trick that Penn and Teller invented is to bring two cans of sparkling soda (not anything else as this is messy). Give one can to a quiet student tell them to keep the can totally quiet. Give the other can to a hyperactive sort and tell them to “shake the can as hard as you can without touching anything”. Did I mention that this should be done outside, oh yeah, do it outside.
Take the highly shaken can, put it in plain sight and say that this is the season for strange things. Tell the students that you will change fizz in the shaken can to the quiet can. Gently touch the quiet can and touch the shaken can. Mumble incantations about AYP and other scary things. Waste at least 30 seconds in mindless babble and then take the “quiet can” and hold it high while you open it. Curve your fingers behind it and squeeze the can as you pop the lid. It will shoot fizz all over everybody as you have secretly crushed the can. After you have sprayed everyone dramatically throw the can into a nearby garbage can to avoid students seeing the crushed can.
Then quietly open the shaken can. The gas will have gone back into solution by then and it won’t do anything. Explain to the students that teachers are given these powers, but only to be used for the good. Drink the calm can and draw attention from the garbage can with the crushed evidence.
Need more ideas? Here are some links here and here and here.
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Over at Schooner of Science — Smelling the Moon. A fictional pregnant woman swears she can smell moonbeams. Do pregnant women really smell things more strongly?
What’s really cool is that the women THINK they smell better now they are pregnant, but there’s not the evidence there to say that this is REALLY the case. Is it just that this test wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up the change in smell which seems so noticeable to the smeller, or do they just feel like things smell different now? Is there a change, and does it effect the nose or the brain? Science, alas, is yet to have an answer.
Smelling moonbeams seems a little far-fetched though. But if you’re curious on what the moon smells like, astronauts say it smells like burnt gunpowder. After a moonwalk the dust sticks to their clothes and they say it smells very strong (they’ve even, accidentally I’m sure, tasted some!) Once the dust gets back to Earth it doesn’t smell anymore. Weird, right?
Then half the volunteers were given a piece of chocolate, and the unlucky second group got a glass of water. 1 minute later, they reported their mood once again. This was repeated for each clip (the clips were shown in a random order for each participant)…. the effect of chocolate depends on the type of movie the viewers watched. If the movie was sad, then eating chocolate led to a significant improvement in mood, significantly better than water. For a happy film, there was no improvement in mood, and the difference between chocolate and water was only marginally significant. For a neutral movie, there was no significant difference in the effect of chocolate and water.
All that active learning during class must mean you can’t cover all the same content, right? Although I find the term “cover” problematic, I understand these questions. … One response is to move some of the learning that would have taken place during class to out-of-class time. One way to do this is by having our students read their textbooks before class, which I’ve done in my math courses for several years now. …. However, since studies show that only about 30% of students will read their textbooks before class without some kind of incentive, it’s helpful to have students complete pre-class reading quizzes online. This semester, I’m having my students do so via our course blog.
A geometry teacher tells the entire class that the girls would probably do the worst in his course because they lacked spatial reasoning ability. A guidance counselor shunts female students into “practical math” classes where they learn how many ham slices each guest would need at a wedding. A physics professor insists on checking his female students’ work before they can leave the lab, yet doesn’t feel the need to check the work of his male students. A computer science professor dismisses any questions from female students as “lazy little girl whining.” And a calculus teacher thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to measure his female students’ bodies and use those measurements as part of his volume calculations in class.
If all you (as an instructor) are doing is stuff that could be a podcast, then why not have it as a podcast? …The above article mentions that some professors have their lectures on iTunes university, but limit the number of downloads to encourage students to come to class. I don’t get it. If they can get everything they need from the podcast, why come to class?
I think technology is cool. However, just using technology because you can is a bad idea. In this, case, I don’t think the technology is used incorrectly. If you have a class that is just a lecture, the podcast makes a lot of sense. You can pause it and replay it. That should be useful. The problem is (in my opinion) with classes that can be podcasted. Maybe there is a need for some classes that have very low level learning (like memorizing stuff), but I think there should be more classes that engage students at a higher level.
Hear hear! He even advocates using clickers. Go Rhett. And more recently he has a nice post about clickers — how they’re used, and some low tech alternatives.
Why is it incredible we only recently recovered images and film?
Scientists have known for over a century that giant squid from the beaks and pieces they dredged out of sperm whale stomachs. Dead specimens had washed up on shores in Newfoundland and New Zealand, from which one lucky specimen even made it to the Rev. Moses Harvey’s bathtub.
Bathtub technology has advanced considerably since 1873.
Because these creatures live in one of the most inacessible habitats on Earth — the cold, black benthic zone — live specimens eluded photography (and, for the most part, capture) for another 125 years.
As worrisome as all I’ve said so far may be to consider were one, say, out on a pleasure swim at 1,500 meters in squid-infested waters, consider this: not only is the colossal squid considerably larger and bulkier than the giant squid (although its arms are generally shorter), it also possesses hooks on its tentacles. Some swivel. Some have multiple prongs.
*Shudder*
And lastly, the Science and Entertainment exchange found a neat YouTube video with a review of clips of special effects since 1900.Very neat.
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Our latest podcast in the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears webzine has been posted. This is a bimonthly webzine for elementary educators, to integrate polar science into their teaching. This month’s webzine is on arctic peoples, and the podcast features a story on how light disappears and reappears in the arctic each year, that you can play right in your classroom. Plus, suggestions on how to use this story with your elementary students.
Got a unit on circular motion? You may want to use an activity with a centrifuge, to show how it separates substances of different densities. Even if you’ve got a commercial centrifuge, how might you instead do a hands-on activity to show the same thing?
Try mixing red colored sugar in cooking oil in a syringe (10 ml). You can use the holiday colored sugar, or dye your own with food coloring. Attach string to the syringe (very securely!) and swing it around your head. This simulates a hematocrit test, which measures blood count, and the mixture looks a little bit like real blood. The sugar represents the packed cells, and the oil is the color of plasma.
Thanks to Karen Kalumuck of the Exploratorium for this idea. If you want a copy of her write-up of the activity, write me (stephanie at sciencegeekgirl dot com).
Another low-tech centrifuge is a salad spinner, which you can get at any thrift shop. Separating vegetables from water is not quite a density-driven process, as the vegetables are large and the water is driven to the outside because of its fluidity. Though, you will find that carrots end up on the outside and lettuce on the inside.
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Have you ever had this unusual occurrence in your freezer? This one observant science teacher says:
We had a single stalagtite form from one cube in an ice cube tray. It rose about an inch, no more than an eighth of an inch in diameter, and tapering to a sharp point. How did that form?
Paul Doherty (physicist extraordinaire) answered that this is called an ice spike.
The water in an ice cube freezes from the outside in. Once the outside is sealed the water inside freezes and expands.
So the interior water is pressurized.
If it freezes at just the right rate the pressure can push the liquid water out of a hole in the top surface and freeze it.
It helps if the water is clean and free of nucleation sites i.e. distilled
See this website here for a bunch more information and great pictures.
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One of the things that I miss most about the Bay Area is the intensive culture of geekery and delightful playfulness that goes with the unabashed celebration of membership in the pocket protector set. I invited Alan Rorie — an artist and a scientist at the Exploratorium (who happens to hold my old job) — to present to our seminar group at the University of Colorado. He gave a wonderful presentation about how the science/art connection in the Bay Area has shaped his transition from scientist to artist.
Here is a link to his presentation (which was made with a wonderful new tool called Prezi — I have to try this out).
In the Bay Area there are many venues where you can express your creative scientific side:
Maker Faire is an event created by Make Magazine to “celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. The annual Maker Faire attracts thousands of amateur inventors and scientists, displaying their home-made prototypes and gadget hacks. In a world where the technological race is speeding up, the Maker movement has revealed that the do-it-yourself culture is in no danger of dying out.
The Crucible is a non-profit educational facility that fosters a collaboration of Arts, Industry and Community. Through training in the fine and industrial arts, The Crucible promotes creative expression, reuse of materials and innovative design while serving as an accessible arts venue for the general public.
And of course Burning Man. It’s more than just a party in the desert, it’s a huge community-driven art installation, many with tech/science aesthetic and aspects.
And then a bunch of small art/science endeavors and workshops, such as
The mission of False Pro?t Labs is to create better art through science. We are art engineers who fabricate, machine, weld, and construct sculptural, larger-than-life art installations designed to create inspiring experiences for spectators and participants.
A place to create the impossible, the new, the ridiculous, the exiting and most importantly, the never seen before. It is the largest do-it-yourself industrial art space in the Bay Area with over 40 different art groups and craftsmen in the shop.
What I think that all these environments have in common is that it democratizes science and art. These become something that everyone can participate in. Alan made the point that these are inclusive communities. I think this is important in terms of people’s empowerment to both create and to understand science, technology, and aesthetics. It creates a culture of geek chic, an inventor/DIY culture and garage science that attracts and involves people who might never go to a science museum or a university — the culturally accepted bastions of science education. It also engages the mind and brings us wonder in a way that we might not experience through more didactic and authoritarian presentations of science and technology.
Alan really emphasized this inclusive nature of these communities, where we are encouraged to participate and share, and collaboration between artists and scientists is encouraged through openness and communication. His art particularly focuses on creating fake, fantastical machines that are made to look real (such as the Neuron Chamber and the Dihemispheric Chronaether Agitator). His works have a heavy physical presence, with mechanical bolts, fasteners, and welding. His website is at almostscientific.com.
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Here’s a provocative question about the atmosphere, from one of those most curious citizens of the world — 6th graders.
“At sea level you take a breath and fill a sandwich bag with it easily. On Mt Everest, not using bottled air, could you do the same thing? I guess the question is “How full are your lungs at 28,000 feet?”If you filled a sandwich bag on top of Mount Whitney, would it still be full when you brought it back down?”
When you fill your lungs at high elevation, the air has the same volume, but it’s less dense.That means that there are fewer air molecules in a breath of air at 28,000 feet.So your lungs feel just as “full” but there is actually less mass of air there.So, the answer to the question depends on what you mean by “full.”The air pressure on Mt. Whitney is ½ the pressure at sea level.So, says Paul Doherty (my old mentor), it’s like someone ripped out one lung.You’re only getting half the oxygen as you are at sea level.
The same is true of the air in the sandwich bag – it’s less dense.But the air outside the sandwich bag is also less dense than it was at sea level.The bag fills easily because the air outside the bag exerts less pressure.If you blow up a balloon underwater, using pressurized air, the same thing should be true.
But then when you bring that sandwich bag down from Mt. Whitney, since it’s only got about ½ the air molecules in it that it would have if you had filled it at sea level, it looks a little deflated.It will have half its original volume.This is why your water bottle crinkles in on itself when your airplane lands.
Underwater, it’s the same story.You fill a sandwich bag with air at 100 feet.The air in your lungs is compressed to ¼ of its original volume.So you fill the sandwich bag with this compressed, dense air.As you come up, the air expands to 4 times its original volume.Says Paul Doherty,
Bang, it explodes.
And, adds Paul:
On a free dive your lungs don’t explode on the way back up. They just expand to their original volume.However if you took a breath from a scuba tank at 100 feet and then held your breath on the way up , DON’T DO THIS! your lungs would do what the sandwich bag did…not good.
I’m not a big art fan. I mean, I have nothing against it. I guess it’s like pot — fine for other people, but it just doesn’t move me. Though art, at least, doesn’t (usually) make me keep looking back over my shoulder and laugh nervously.
Anyway. But I do have an aesthetic drug of choice — a certain kind of playful art having to do with stuff. That illuminates, or plays with, some aspect of the world. Here is an example — one of Arthur Ganson’s machines.
One of the things that I find so delightful about this is both (a) the visual aesthetics of the objects and their movement (what a beautiful chair!), and (b) the self-referential nature of the thing itself. Here is a massive machine whose sole purpose is to pick up a chair and return it, gracefully, from whence it came. How ticklish.
And yes, of course, Ganson has worked with the Exploratorium as an art fellow, notably creating the Chain Reaction exhibit.
Here’s another thing I like — Theo Jansen’s kinetic sculptures that walk in the wind.
Again, I feel delighted. This is a technological marvel, but in this case the complicated structure is intended to play with, and iluminate, the natural forces of the wind. The way that it is powered, rather than its intention, is what causes me to feel a fuzzy brain smile. He gave a TED Talk that I hear is pretty neat.
Here’s another. I’ve blogged about this one before. This guy does x-rays of everyday objects. In this case, technology is giving us a literal window into something we can’t usually see… and there is a ghostly aesthetic to these shapes. I feel a certain calmness in these images (perhaps because they’re static, not kinetic as the previous examples). It’s almost zen.
And one last one — I’ve written about Ned Kahn’s work several times. Here’s one example of his work, which generally uses some simple mechanism to illuminate the natural world, generally to show something that is usually unseen. He is painting with simpler materials than any of the other artists, and the results are much more fluid. The aesthetics are not shapes, or function, but rather the curious and ever-changing dynamics and patterns that arise. His installations are deceptively easy, but they are fine tuned to a very delicate point to get just the effect that he wants. He got a genius award, after all.
So, what am I trying to say through showing these works? I think that was makes me feel joy in these works is that there is some illumination, or utilization, of something real. Paintings, in general, reflect the perspective and talent of that particular artist. I have an abstract appreciation of that. But I’m not moved by it. And I think that is the essential thing – that these artistic works make me FEEL something. And if science and technologically oriented art can make people feel some positive emotion — like awe, wonder, delight, joy, or amusement — that is very powerful.
And good. Think of the type of emotion that we feel, instead, in response to images of disaster, suffering, poverty, and war. The stuff of everyday journalism. In fact, the new psychology of positive emotions suggests that (duh) positive emotions help us flourish and add a lot to our lives.
So, this art adds a lot to my life. So did my experience at the Exploratorium, where I experienced, daily, wonder and delight.
What delights you?
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
I am a physicist, writer, podcaster, and educator in Boulder, CO. On this blog I get to wax on about science stuff I think is cool (like weird science, or stuff we think is true but isn't), K-16 science education, hands-on science activities, teaching pedagogy, and how to communicate science. Geek on. 8-)
No post about Halloween would be complete without a reference to the 
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