Ladies who do physics

Go here, read up, see if it's any help.

http://www.npl.co.uk/educate-explore/protons-for-breakfast/course-structure/

More physics

Free online course to lead you through some fundamental ideas at FearofPhysics.com.

To be honest, when I chose the free online course, and looked through the notes, the fear came back.

My strategy would be to watch the videos first, look at some books, go web browsing, then come back to the notes supplied with your no-fear course.

(With that amount of preparation, the panic might have begun to lessen.)

Physics

Watch these videos, and think about a physics part of an IGCSE.

You can have a go at blowing stuff up in your fire pit, but remember to stand back and keep a bucket of water handy.

Centre of the Cell

In preparation for your visit to Centre of the Cell, play these games.

Have read about, and have formed some ideas about the following:

- the different types of cells in the body doing different jobs
- how you might go about diagnosing a disease
- what you understand by the terms 'clinical research'; 'screening programme'; 'risk factor'.

I'd also like to play the Double Blind Trial game, so let's leave time for that this week. (Comes with chocolate.)

xx

Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

Three line whip for the chemistry lectures on the RI Channel.

Watch them.

I have biscuits, hot chocolate, and a sharp stick. I find this combination a sure winner to academic success.

Astronomy

Links to Brian Cox without his shirt on (I wish).

Animal training

Look over the following materials around the workshop.

Animal training at Seaworld

Pavlov's Dog info on the Nobel Prize website

Training a Tiger for animal husbandry

Checking a hyena's teeth.

GCSE Biology Behaviour element

Colchester Zoo worksheet. Can you do it?

And, if you fancy them, the wiki pages on Ethology and Behaviourism.

Finding out about particle accelerators. STEM lecture 2

Lecture given by Dr Suzie Sheehy, particle accelerator designer, from Rutherford Appleton Lab.

Did I get this info right?!
Two like charges repel; two opposite charges attract.
To make an accelerator you must have a charge.
The accelerator has to work in a vacuum.
The closer to the speed of light you go, the more energy is required, this creates more mass.
How do you stop a beam? Use graphite.

To make an accelerator you need:
particles
energy
control
collision
detection.

Other info:
Van de graaff generator explained on YouTube.
Look up Anatoli Bugorski. Article in Wired.
Ernest Walton on Wiki.
Large Hadron Collider on YouTube.
Black holes pop out of existence so quickly they cannot suck in matter. The world's not ending thanks to a particle accelerator.

Find out what you can about particle accelerators, and tell me!

Hidden life of the cell

Go to the BBC iplayer! Watch the Hidden life of the cell and try and recall the fab Ellen McHenry course.

Minute physics

Go to Minute Physics Youtube each day to be introduced to some key ideas that might be helpful to your physics studies.

Astronomy daily

Astronomy for kids site. Probably not your target, Squirrel.

Try Khan Academy instead. Watch their series of lectures in Cosmology and Astronomy.

Click around in Cool Cosmos.

The NASA site is somewhere to go regularly for news.

Let's revisit the Royal Institution.

Youtube is filled with GCSE Astronomy support videos. Set an hour aside to watch a range and find the ones that help you best.

Watch Brian Cox, pin up boy for Physics and Astronomy, give a lecture at Manchester. If you want to go straight to Brian and pass the puffery, go 8 minutes in.

Look out in second hand bookshops for books by Patrick Moore.


...and if you're looking for other things to do...

Check the sky nightly. Record your observations in a notebook.

Re-read the course materials.

Make a cake to teach us one aspect of the week's reading.

Find a word from your reading material that you didn't know before, and write a definition that makes sense to a non-astronomer like me.

Big Bang Science Fair

Diary date for the 14-17 March 2013.

GCSE Astronomy

Opening page for Planet Earth Centre. Click around to answer questions.

Try downloading the podcasts from Starlearner.

Book to help out.

Past exam papers.

Drowned landscapes

Go to http://drowned-landscapes.tumblr.com/ and find out.

Light a candle

What is a flame?

My first thought was 'it's an intemperate rant, usually personally insulting, that you can encounter anywhere in Planet Internet, on a comment section or discussion forum'.

Er, that just shows how disconnected I am from the stuff of human need.

Because of course flame means fire.

What is fire?

Answer here.

The RI channel.

Kids, be aware of the sacrifices I make for your science education. For example, the RI keep sending me messages about their TV channel. Maybe if you use it more, they'll stop sending me messages.

{Pause} for revision and definitions.

What's an organelle?
What's cytoskeleton?
What's ribosome?
What's ER?
Can you name any amino acids? Scroll down for the list.

Next week, Chapter 7!

Chapter 6: The nucleus, and how ribosomes are made

Let's find some answers to the following questions by reading Ellen McHenry's Cells:

'The membrane surrounding the nucleus is twice as thick as the cell's plasma membrane'. (Why?)

'ER [endoplasmic reticulum] that has ribosomes stuck to it is called rough ER'.
(Is there a smooth ER?*)

'The nucleus is filled with a fluid similar to the cytoplasm found in the rest of the cell'.
(What is this fluid called?)

'How much DNA is there in the nucleus?'
(That's a good question.)

'DNA is covered with enzymes and chaperone proteins'.
(Then why do artists leave them out of the drawings?)

'Ribosomes are made of two halves'.
(Are they equal in size?)

The upshot is... Ribosomes are incredibly versatile (like your mother). They can do many jobs, like making proteins, synthesizing enzymes, and cooking dinner while dancing to Duran Duran.

Now watch How DNA is packaged.

Search on ribosome in youtube and watch some videos about this extraordinary bit of body kit. (More my level. Dramatic cartoon reenactment of a wandering ribosome with a lot of gnaaarr and aarggh. )


* Yes. From Wiki: 'Rough endoplasmic reticula are involved in the synthesis of proteins and is also a membrane factory for the cell, while smooth endoplasmic reticula is involved in the synthesis of lipids, including oils, phospholipids and steroids, metabolism of carbohydrates, regulation of calcium concentration and detoxification of drugs and poisons.'

**RNA - Ribonucleic acid. One of three molecules (the other two are DNA and proteins) that are essential for life.

Chapter 5: Lysosomes, Er, and Golgi Bodies.

Sounds unlikely. The Lysosomes sound like a 90s Goth band. Try watching their proton pumps here, and the lysosomes here, courtesy of McGraw Hill animations.

The Golgi Bros are on Youtube.

Ellen says about this next one (Protein modification) 'don't let the vocabulary scare you off'. She's right. Let the words pass. What you're watching is the equivalent of a shuttle bus.

Chapter 4: Proteins, DNA and the RNA's.

This chapter of Ellen McHenry's course on Cells covers a whopping amount.

Watch these videos:

DNA

Transcription and translation
DNA Transcription and Protein Assembly

The Secret of Life: a narrative of findings by Watson and Crick
Rosalind Franklin

The DNA song. Can you learn to sing it? And the Protein Song.

Protein transport

And the activities this week:

1. Make a protein pencil popper. Scroll to see the protein shapes, then click on the thumbnail of the shape you like ... and get out your pipe cleaners.

2. Building a double helix from carrots, raisins, blueberries, peas and marshmallows will make complete sense, right?

Chapter 3 ATP & Mitochondria

Make sense of ADP and ATP! Read the chapter, twist the ATP synthase, and watch these videos.

1. How diffusion works. Try the quick quiz underneath when you've watched the film.
2. The Electron Transport Chain.
3. Powering the cell; the brilliant animation that makes sense of the chapter; you should easily spot the ATP synthase.
4. The Cell Song.

Thank goodness for the workshops to help make sense of it all!

Chapter 2: The cell membrane and cytoskeleton

Read Ellen McHenry's chapter on what forms the cell. Watch The inner life of the cell. From the chapter we've read, can you identify the phospholid molecules, lipid rafts, microtubule highways and odd shaped proteins?

She also recommends white blood cell chases bacteria and videos on the cytoskeleton.

I'm not pretending to understand all of this... but that's not stopped me before. We'll follow the activity about marshmallows in water and make a motor protein pen.

And I think it will help at this point if we can collaborate to think up a recipe for a CELL CAKE.

Yippee! Ellen McHenry's Cells.

Chapter 1: How did we find out about cells?

Here's the video for the workshop: Lens on Leeuwenhoek. For Hooke, Brown, and Schwann and Schleiden's Cell Theory, try this video. It's very accessible.

Other videos which may be of use: Discovery of cells. Four laws of living organisms. Cell rap.

Ellen recommends this video on SEM technology; and this video for TEM technology.

On magnification and scale in general, Ditta recommends the classic short film Powers of Ten (1968) by Charles and Ray Eames, and the game Scale of the Universe.

Science's ten most beautiful experiments.

Soon we'll join the local group to help each other get to grips with the cell.

In preparation, let's research. Go to the Harvard multimedia website for a biovision.

Click around the site; there is an option to listen to the explanatory talk, rather than hear the music. (It's a different language, but one that we can begin to understand, right?)

Brownian Motion. Find out about it by watching these videos:

National Stem Centre (And if you want to find out what other science videos they do, visit here. Thanks to Big Mamma Frog)

Explanation on Youtube.

Evolution site from pbs.

The link above takes you to a dive window.

Click on the options to the right-hand side to visit different places. Tell me which pages are particularly interesting to you, or you consider are well presented.

(I went off to read Darwin's Diary and resolved again to visit Down House.)

Help me put Mrs Bones together! I need to label her skeleton and then you can put pom poms in for her kidneys.

This site might help, at abcya.com, as will teachpe.com. Here's vertebrae at Gray's Anatomy (via Bartleby).

Nearly there... her clavicle is held on by sellotape, her ribs fell out and both knees are wobbly.

Build molecules! See if this program works on your machine. Explore the site at Molecularium.

So this week our water supply was cut off, mostly due to the way we live in a building site where no-one tells us anything. More fool us, we ethnic minorities, we should learn Cantonese.

Find out how water towers work.

Actually, it's quite interesting once you get into it.

How Christmas lights work.

Clean out your room and you can put some up.

Choose one or all of these food stuffs from the menu in Have You Eaten Rice Yet? by Doc Elizabeth Stevenson. Read and follow them through to remind yourself of her talk.

Tight lipped mussels in a curdled sauce.
Problems with your mussels? Like all marine creatures, they are susceptible to red tides. Some humans can also be allergic to tropomyosin, a protein that helps the mussel shell contract.

Protein is made up of a long chain of amino acids arranged into coils. Cooking disturbs these chains, and this is denaturing. The amino acids stay linked together, but their arrangement changes. Denaturing can be reversible, but often with cooking, it is not. (People have built a whole subculture from modelling protein chains by computer. Watch this one for the graphics.)

As an example of protein 'unfolding', add vinegar to soya milk and see what happens. The proteins come together and form curd.

Roast meat.
The Maillard Reaction is the chemical process that is responsible for the colours and flavours of food. The reaction is between proteins (chains of amino acids) and sugars.

For us vegetarians, the same applies. We can have fried onions on toast.

Unnaturally green veg.
Soaking plants in copper sulfate to gain a greener colour then cooking them is a bad idea says the Doc. Why? Because at the centre of chlorophyll - the part that makes plants green - is the element magnesium. Heating copper sulfate plus magnesium produces a compound that is toxic in large doses.

Side salad.
No, you can't have lettuce from the freezer. A lettuce leaf is 95% water. Freezing the water causes the water to expand and burst out of the cell wall. So your lettuce leaf loses structure and goes all floppy.

Haggis.
Basically, don't eat haggis. Just don't. Offal, onion and spices cooked in an animal's stomach has nothing to recommend it. It's not the Doc saying that, it's me.

Incidentally, if you want at this point to research the history of the microwave, then start with Percy Spencer. The first microwave was the size of a small car and the weight of a baby elephant.

Microwaves are increasingly used by chemists to cook their haggises and heat their waters. But bear in mind that microwaves will heat polar compounds, but not non-polar compounds!

A polar compound is where there is an unequal sharing of electrons.

Water is polar, you can heat that. In water, the oxygen has a greater pull on the electrons in the bond than the hydrogens. See? Polar. Hmm. Nope, I'm not really getting this.

Except don't eat haggis and don't cook it in any means at all.

Neeps and tatties.
Starchy foods? Test for starch! With the iodine test!

You did this already. Exciting. Yesindeedy.

Fast ice cream.
With liquid nitrogen. How else.

Your choice of fizzy drink.
Except that the standard is Coca Cola with a Menthos mint. You can do that.

Outside, please, not in the front room. And don't tell your sister to stand over it 'to get a better view'.

Try the Science Kids site. Scroll down the bullet list on this page to pick a fact; go and explore it.*

The bar across the top of the page is also worth exploring; I found this video annoying and helpful.

*Come on, three interesting facts from each of you about the human body and I'll buy you a pack of Oreos. (That is a bribe. Not a reward in advance.)

Find out what homeostatis is.

Go on, I dare you.

Go to Kelly's space and scroll down the right hand side until you arrive at the links under The geek in me.

She has a good selection of science links here. You might find some too easy and some just right. Will you find any too hard? Choose a place that is different from your sisters and tell them whether you would recommend it.

Of course I'm going to recommend the interactive rock cycle!

(And to better answer that question, Why does skin form on heated milk? explore WiseGeek.)

I had a great time with this.

Click around the sites from Science Spot Kid Zone and find something else to thrill us all!

Watch the BBC programme, Shock and Awe, the Story of Electricity. On my machine!

Want to learn about cockroaches?

Or explore Switch Zoo. (Very silly.)

There are hundreds of programmes on youtube for flowers, pollination, fruit, plant botany.

I found a song about photosynthesis!

Can you find one to recommend to me?

Talk to me about plant biology. I love hearing words like stomata.

Watch this video. I know the voice is difficult to follow, and it's a bit academic, but it's from the Hong Kong University, and identifies some of the ferns you can find on the paths we walk.

And why don't plants have things like hearts and brains or lungs?

Or maybe they do? What's your idea?

Conduct some experiments on leaves you can pick up outside.

Remove or add water, soil, sunlight. Examine the CGP book on plant cells. Can you see any of these features in the leaves you can find in a sub-tropical environment?

I notice that the leaves here seem more waxy than at home. What do you think?