Random Science: Part 1

 Last Saturday was the feast of one of my favorite saints: St. Albert the Great, patron saint of scientists!

He was a marvelous theologian, an excellent bishop, and a holy man.  Additionally he was a scientist whose keen insight into the natural world left us the first recorded use of the scientific method. 

He was interested in every branch of science, and was said to be the last man to know everything that was known in Western culture.

And he was the teacher and defender of some other famous guy. 

We did lots of fun experiments in honor of St. Albert!

Zorg wanted to try using a magnet on an old cathode ray TV we were getting rid of.  Not only could he change the colors on the screen by passing the magnet near it, but when he placed the magnet on the screen, it formed rainbow lines along the magnetic fields!


We used an extra long slinky to look at waves.  You can do this with a regular slinky, too!

First, we stretched out the slinky between two kids and made waves: transverse waves are the kind you make when you wave one end of the slinky back and forth (or up and down, but that's harder to see and complicated by gravity).

These are super fun! Plus they are a fantastic illustration of the fact that waves are energy moving through something, not really the thing moving.

If you make a wave on one end while the other is still, you can see the wave move through the coil, hit the end, and bounce back reflected (moving upside down in the opposite direction).

If both sides make waves at the same speed (frequency) you can make standing waves! 

These are waves where there are parts of the slinky that look like they are standing still (nodes) and parts that are looping up and down (anti nodes).

The kids had fun using different frequencies to make different nodes, and, of course, jumping over the nodes!

We also did some longitudinal waves (waves that move along the length of the slinky, not back and forth), and had fun trying to make opposite waves.

When a wave meets it's exact opposite, it disappears (the principle behind noise cancelling headphones: they are generating tones that are the exact opposite of the sound you don't want to hear).  This is much easier for a computer than a human being!

And what would a science day be with out a dissection?

Choclo and I did the "sheep pluck," and it was very cool!

The "pluck" is the heart and lungs together, all the way out to the trachea.  I had done the heart, but never the lungs, let alone the entire cardiopulmonary system!

We used Just Bob (our anatomical model) alongside the disssection to see how everything worked in people.

Choclo: "I liked how it showed the tube you breathe with and how it turned into lots and lots of tubes in the lungs, and how they got smaller and smaller and smaller.  And I liked to see how the heart went pump, pump, pump.  I liked how when one part opened, the other part closed.  The small side went to the lungs, but the big side went to the whole body."