Talk Science

‘Cause the power you’re supplying, is electrifying…

Have you ever looked out the window in the wee hours of the night and seen street lights glowing and absolutely nobody in the street benefitting from them?  These days we hear a lot about our energy consumption and the size of our carbon footprints pretty much everywhere we go.  So, witnessing the waste that goes on right outside my front door whilst I am made to feel guilty for leaving my television on standby makes me feel a bit fed up with the whole issue.

My interest is reinvigorated, though, when I hear of the progress being made by scientists working on the development of new technologies that use  renewable resources to meet our energy needs.

One development, in particular, has caught my attention and is one that could help my local council with the street light problem.  This is the energy harvesting paving slab.

It is a paving slab that generates electricity as you step on it whilst you shop for the latest designs from Top Shop! It works by harnessing the  kinetic energy created by your footstep pressing down on the slab and converting this energy into electricity which can either be used immediately or stored in a battery for later use.

Turning footsteps into power! Energy harvesting paving slabs in East London

The slab itself is made from old rubber tyres and the internal components are made from recycled aluminium.  It moves just 5mm when it is stepped upon but this is enough to generate up to 2.1 watts continuously when it is frequently in use.  This power can be used to operate many different appliances, from street lights to information display stands.

The slabs are made by a company called Pavegen and have already won the award for the most innovative product at Ecobuild 2010.  The slabs have already been tested in East London and Pavegen now have plans to install them in train stations, shopping centres and airports, so I guess it’s only a matter of time before we can all start to generate electricity by just going about our daily lives.

So, would you walk the long way home in order to step on these slabs? 

For the moment, these slabs have been tested in London, where there are loads of people but what about more rural places?  Where do you think these paving slabs should be placed here to be most effective?  Hopscotch, anyone?

The energy harvesting paving slab is on display in Atmosphere on the 2^nd floor of the Wellcome Wing. 

-Kate Davis

Any of you out there using Twitter? What about to follow education or science tweets?

Science tweets- short and sweet

Here’s a just few great accounts for you to follow…

@sciencemuseum  to find out whats going on in the Museum, new events, competitions, thoughts, friendly chat

@lottolab the Science Museum’s resident lab, open neuroscience research going on within our very walls…

@scienceweekUK for loads of science & engineering events, going on right now!

@sciencenewsorg for breaking science news- from physics to medicine.

@wiredscience tweets Wired magazine’s science awesomeness (robot sharks with lasers- yes please).

@nysci the New York Hall of Science twitter account gives an interesting comparison to science learning and museums over here.

oh, and one I couldnt resist: @scitechFB  who tweet, in their words ‘daily brain food of amazerific & fantacular science & technology updates from around the web’. Well, if you put it that way…

Browse any medical forum post from someone seeking advice on Magnetic resonance imaging (or MRI scanning as is commonly abbreviated) and you will notice their queries often highlight feelings of apprehension, uncertainty and fear, despite the relative safety of the apparatus involved in such testing.

Using MRI allows doctors to get highly refined visuals of the bodies’ interior by using strong magnets and pulses of radio waves to manipulate the natural magnetic properties in the body, which in turn generates the image. The process is dependant on the patient lying very still while slowly passing through a noisy machine in a claustrophobic process lasting up to half an hour.

Further to this slightly daunting prospect, scans are enhanced by using surface coils, placed around the region of interest (i.e. the head for a brain scan) as conductors, to increase magnetic sensitivity. Having pieces of copper tubing taped to your face (as was initially done) may have created a beautifully detailed image but did nothing to ease your nerves!

Now imagine yourself as a child, preparing to lie down and go through this huge machine in the 1980’s when its exact purpose and safety assurance were less understood.

Ian Young at the Hammersmith Hospital tackled this tricky problem by creating an experimental helmet to get the best possible pictures of a child’s brain, designed in such a way that a child would feel enticed, rather than afraid to wear it!

Jedi Helmet- making MRI scans for children a lot less frightening!

The helmets were cleverly named after and resemble those used for training by apprentice Jedi knights in the popular ‘Star Wars’ films. The coils on the helmet acted as ‘aerials’ for picking up the MRI signals. It enabled clearer diagnoses of diseases and injuries affecting the brain, without any need for invasive surgery or radiation that was commonly used in other methods of examining such delicate areas.

The Jedi helmet was a great example of turning something seemingly quite unpleasant into something far more bearable through an aesthetically appealing design and clever wording.

Can you think of any scientific instruments or devices that could be redesigned or renamed to make them seem more appealing?

Our Jedi helmets can be found in the Health Matters Gallery on the Third Floor of the museum. 

-John Inch

March 5th is a particularly good day for science… On this day were born several scientists whose discoveries have made their way into our everyday life in some way.

Edouard Joseph Louis-Marie van Beneden studied the number of chromosomes in body cells, working out that half of them come from the male sperm and half from the female egg. Standard knowledge for us now!

23 pairs of... chromosocks?

Sir Charles Wyille Thomson was a marine biologist who led the HMS Challenger, the first expedition to trawl the ocean depths for new forms of life. We still know so little about the bottom of the oceans, and research continues in great depth (haha).

Etienne Jules-Marey studied how blood moves in the body (he invented a device called the sphygmograph to record variations in blood pressure) and later observed the way animals move using a high-speed camera to produce some of the earliest slow-motion film.

What’s my point? That every single day we can be reminded of discoveries and innovations that changed the way we observe the world and what we know about it. There isn’t a day in the year without a scientific advancement to recall, and that’s quite a powerful thought. Check Today in Science for people and events that made science history, and marvel at how many researchers names you are totally unfamiliar with, yet recognize the technology or ideas they contributed!

Powerful images can be great stimuli to use in the classroom- they can hook in students, generate opinions and help give them some knowledge to bring to a discussion. Some great galleries to find strong scientific pictures are Wellcome images, Science photo library and  galleries like Popsci’s most amazing science images.

Prettier than it should be: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

On a different level, you could even get your students to seek out science in the world around them and take their own pictures to use in the classroom – which could be a nice way to engage them with a topic and get them thinking and talking science outside the classroom.  With mobile phone cameras being so good now, your students will already have the tools they need at their fingertips.

If you do try this out, your students can even enter their images into the Young Scientists Journal photography competition- it’s open to anyone aged 18 and under. The categories are energy, camouflage, science behind the Olympics and the result of science. Find out more here!

Happy snapping

We’ve come a long way since Sputnik 1, the first man-made satellite, was launched by the Soviets in 1957. There are now hundreds of satellites orbiting above our heads, making our mobile phones, traffic signals, TVs, internet and loads of other communications, actually work.

Along with the working satellites, there are the dead ones, the fragments of broken ones, the rocket parts from past missions, and myriad other chunks of junk orbiting at breakneck speeds, looking for something to collide with. And when they do, working satellites are destroyed, the Space Station could be damaged , the astronauts’ lives put at risk, and a whole new cascade of junk fragments  go careening off in all directions. Sound serious? Quite!

 BUT! The Swiss with their great efficiency and tidy ways, have been pondering this massive problem. They are developing CleanSpace One, a little ‘janitor’ satellite to deal with space junk by capturing it and dragging it back into the atmosphere to burn up.

A Swiss janitor satellite to tackle space junk

This comes not a moment too soon, as space agencies now really have to consider how to de-orbit the satellites they launch, if they don’t want to make the junk problem worse and end up being cut off from space.

So who is responsible for the junk up in space? Is it you and me, as users of the services they provide, or the companies that launch them? Would you pay extra on your mobile phone bill to help clean up space?

Explore space junk and other big issues in Futurecade, our brand new digital game… If you’re a teacher, try it as a starter for a classroom discussion, and use the in-game questions to get your students talking about how science impacts on their lives.

Good luck

SO! It’s half-term. Many of you are busy taking a well-deserved rest (STOP WORKING!) and some of you might even be thinking of visiting the museum.

If you do, make sure you head to the Antenna gallery, on the ground floor, to check out Robots to the Rescue, a live event featuring an incredible robot that will do incredible things, and meet the University of Warwick engineers who’ve developed it.

The future of seach and rescue?

 This hardy little ‘bot is designed to navigate rough terrain and hunt for signs of life - searching  dangerous disaster zones such as collapsed buildings, making it easier and safer for rescuers to find their way to survivors.

They are only here until tomorrow so make haste!

If you can’t make it to see them, Futurecade’s Robo-Lobster game might make you feel better. Control your mine-seeking robots to keep the harbour safe from attack! The game is based around the idea of robots doing dangerous jobs so humans don’t have to, just like University of Warwick’s rescue robot will do one day.

So will robots just keep improving our lives? What kind of tasks are you happy for robots to take on?

There is much excitement in Talk Science team this week- Futurecade launches this Thursday!

Can science save humanity?

Futurecade is a suite of online games based on current and developing research in the fields of robotics, space junk, geo-engineering and synthetic biology.  Most importantly, Futurecade’s four games Bacto-Lab, Robo-Lobster, Cloud Control and Space Junker, are designed to be fun to play- so are an immediate hook to get your students engaged- and they use questions to provoke thought around the way technology might impact our future.

We’ve also worked with scientists to create background science notes and questions for each game, which we hope you’ll find useful to support you using the games in the classroom.

We haven’t been able to stop playing the games (it’s all ‘testing’ of course!) and we really hope you’ll try using Futurecade with your students, as a great hook or stimulus for a discussion around the themes of the games, to explore the applications and implications of science with your students, and help teach How Science Works.

Three… two… one… See you Thursday!

Faced with mounting concerns over climate change and global warming, we look to the scientists for answers, to explain what exactly is going on and what can be done to remedy it.

This is how we know what we know about climate change today: scientists, like good detectives, have to look  into the past to find clues to help them form a better picture of what is taking place now. By doing this they can ascertain what environments and climates were like on our planet millions of years ago, and so helping us understand where we stand today.

Can scientists travel through time?

Yes, but not in the “Doc Brown” way you are imagining.

 In a technique that is similar to the way we determine ages of trees and  have given a time of extinction for the dinosaurs , a sample of ice, known as an ice core is taken. This is basically a cylindrical cross section of ice, showing various layers of ice that were laid down over hundred of thousands of years. From this we can see what our world was like back before humans even existed.

The ice core in the Atmosphere gallery

How is this possible?

As scientists peer at this ancient shaft of ice they explore the various layers. Each layer corresponds to a year or sometimes a season. Within these layers lay trapped everything that fell that year including dust, pollen and atmospheric gases. Seasonal swings are detected and thus our past weather patterns are indicated, which gives us a clue as to what we should be experiencing now.

This is one of the reasons we know something is wrong. If we were to go by previous climate patterns, our planet should be getting colder not warmer, bu the unexpected turn has been attributed to the increased production if greenhouse gases.  

The Atmosphere gallery houses the first ice core sample in the world to be put on display! Taken from the Antarctic, almost 200ft beneath the top of the ice in 1989.

If you had all the money in the world, what would you do to preserve the environment?

In fact, is it more important to save the environment or learn to adapt to a changing climate?

Where will you live when the sea levels rise?

And if you’re going to be looking at climate change with your students, you can use Cloud Control, a game about geo-engineering the climate, to get them started on the topic. Cloud Control is part of our new online game suite Futurecade, launching next week!

The ice core is in the Atmosphere gallery, on the 2nd floor of the Wellcome wing

-James Carmody

Well, that’s what happens if you are colony of genetically engineered E.coli bacteria!

Scientists have given the bacteria genes that make it convert complex sugars in the seaweed into alcohol, which can then be used as a fuel. Seaweed is plentiful, and grows naturally in our oceans. A very good thing indeed!

Mmm, seaweed! Germ food?

Up til now, biofuels like ethanol have been made by fermeting sugarcane and maize (no E.coli involved), but that means using valuable food crop land (not to mention, food crops!) to produce the alcohol. Very controversial of course… And in the case of maize, it actually takes more energy to grow and process the crop than the energy gained from the ethanol produced!

The next step in this synthetic biology research is working out how to make this seaweedy process scaleable: biofuel production would need billions of tonnes of seaweed. A pilot plant is being built in Chile- we will stay tuned to hear how it works!

In the meantime, try your hand at engineering E.coli in Bacto-Lab, one of Futurecade‘s 4 games about current and future science. Futurecade launches next week (we are incredibly excited!!) with background science notes for each game so you can use it in the classroom to engage your students in a really fun way, and get them talking about how science that shapes their lives.