From the category archives:

General science

They’re out there

February 13, 2012 Earth and Beyond

Image courtesy of Luciano Mendez, a hypothetical view of moons around a giant planet in the habitable zone. Exoplanets. And if we’ve already found over 700 with just a few years of looking then how many billions really exist? It’s a crowded universe. Exoplanets are planets that orbit other stars. Most we have found so [...]

Pendulum Waves

February 6, 2012 Energy and Change

First watch this video: How cool is that? And did you like the setup in the beginning when they showed you there were no tricks, it’s just a line of pendulums of different lengths. This, my friends, is all about maths. And physics, but at this level physics is pretty much applied maths. Pendulums Pendulums [...]

Bird Answers

February 3, 2012 General science

How did you do? I had good fun working out the answers. 1. Lungs in birds are very different to ours, they are more efficient. In mammals we breathe into large dead end sacks of alveoli, use some oxygen then have to get rid of the low oxygen air taking up the space. [...]

Curiosity Found the Cat?

November 28, 2011 Earth and Beyond

NASA has successfully launched another mission to Mars with their biggest ever rover, Curiosity. Curiosity is the size of a car and the mission is the Mars Science Laboratory. Technically Curiosity is not searching for life, but it is assessing whether or not the Martian environment has been (or is?) suitable for life. The main [...]

60 Second Science

November 14, 2011 Energy and Change

Logo belongs to 60 Second Science, definitely not to me. The Victorian Education Department sponsors a fabulous competition called 60 Second Science. It’s very simple and open – make a video of 60 seconds or less and explain some science. That’s it. Forgetting the competitive aspects, this is a great idea for any teacher or [...]

Lunar Answers

October 25, 2011 Earth and Beyond

Are you a lunatic? If you want the questions, click back. Sorry this took so long to go up, I ended up flat out and was too optimistic on what I’d get done! 1 and 2. Firstly, the moon’s orbit is not a circle. It is a relatively stable ellipse and when you consider [...]

Blood Falls

October 3, 2011 Earth and Beyond

In one of the driest parts of Antarctica, known appropriately if unimaginatively as the Dry Valleys, there appears to be a bright red waterfall. The colour is as out of place as the water – the Dry Valleys are brown rock with white ice and blue sky. So where are the water and the colour [...]

My Little Mermaid

September 27, 2011 General science

That time of year has rolled around again, we are approaching big girl’s birthday. This year the request was for a Mermaid party and cake, which worked pretty well. We ended up with several mermaids, a rainbow jellyfish and a couple of sharks running around on the deck having a wonderful time. There could have [...]

Explosions Make the Wheels Go Round

September 20, 2011 Energy and Change

That’s the really short version of how internal combustion engines work. And if you find this through a search engine and are wondering how to fix or run one, sorry. I reliably keep the shiny side up and the rubber side down. I put the right fuel in. If absolutely necessary I can change the [...]

Like a Diamond in the Sky

August 30, 2011 Earth and Beyond

There have been two big stories in Astronomy this week, a visible supernova and a planet made of diamond. Supernova The supernova shown in the top picture is in M101 or the Pinwheel Galaxy, which is 21 million light years away. That means this star died 21 million years ago and the light has only [...]