einstein's army
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Research Into Cosmic Rays.............................1
Dreaming Makes Perfect?...............................2
Car of the Future?............................................2
Mysteries of the universe ................................3
Earthquake in Japan.........................................4
Flying Teabags?...............................................4
Bitten by Bugs for Science!.............................4
Mind Reading - Were one Step Closer..........5
Nuclear Disaster for Japan...............................5
An Invisibility Cloak?.....................................6
Lunar Eclipse...................................................6
SEE INSIDE...
Research into Cosmic Rays.What are Cosmic Rays?
Cosmic Rays are charged sub-
atomic particles which are pro-
tons, electrons and neutrons. Cos-
mic Rays create gamma rays when
they hit the Earths atmosphere.
These gamma rays which are pro-duced are a risk to all living or-
ganisms as gamma rays are very
penetrating. These subatomic par-
ticles surround the Earth beyond
its atmosphere. These rays are
usually made out of hydrogen nu-
clei but they can be made out of
helium nuclei and only 1% are
made out of heavier elements.
These rays give off light.
The Formation of Cosmic Rays
Cosmic Rays have been an un-
known to most People, however
NASA has made a new break-
through as they have researched
on a supernova remnant where
they have found X-ray stripes.
These X-ray stripes have never
been seen before and the NASA
team have started their research onthe supernova. NASA believes
that the magnetic field around the
supernova becomes very tangles
and due to the waves of the super-
nova the subatomic particles
around it start to gain a lot of en-
ergy, and they become cosmic
rays. Most of the cosmic rays are
protons. The electrons are also a
major part of the research, as the
electrons get trapped near the su-pernova and they emit the X-rays.
NASA has begun their research on
the remains of the supernova and
how the cosmic rays are produced.
By Sana Bhatia
This is the remains of the Tycho Supernova.
This was the supernova where the X-ray stripes were found from the Chandra X-ray
Observatory. These remains were even seenby astronomers four centuries ago.
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Dreams. What are they? Why do
we dream? The actual truth is that
in fact nobody yet has discovered
why we dream, but some dreams
may be connected to the mentalprocesses that allow us to learn. In
a study in May 2010, scientists
discovered a connection between
nap-time dreams and a stronger
memory in people who were
l e a r n i n g a n e w s k i l l .
In the study, 99 college students
between the ages and 18 and 30
spent one hour on a computer,aiming to get through a virtual
maze, which was intentionally
made difficult. Each time they
tried, they had to start in a differ-
ent place to one they went in be-
fore, making the task even more
difficult and agitating. In addition,
they were told to find a certain
picture of a tree and memorise
where it was within the maze.
The participants were given a five
-hour break and for the first 90
minutes, half the participants
stayed awake whilst the other half
were told to take a short nap. All
the participants then had to de-
scribe their thoughts, and those
who went to sleep were asked to
describe their dreams. The pur-
pose of the study was to discoverwhat people were dreaming when
their eyes were not moving this
is REM sleep (rapid eye move-
ment). The results were that 4 out
of 50 of those who went to sleep
said that their dreams were con-
nected to the maze. Some dreamt
about the music that that been
playing during their time with the
maze and the rest said that they
dreamed about seeing people in
the maze. These four people re-
turned to the computer to battle
the maze once again, and they
were able to find their tree much
faster than before their naps.
Robert Stickgold, a cognitive
neuroscientist and the leader of the
team carrying out the study stated,
I was startled by this finding. Hesuggested that the dream itself
doesnt help a person to learn, but
the reverse. The dream was caused
by the brain processes associated
w i t h l e a r n i n g .
People use to say that practice
makes perfect, but maybe the time
has come to say that dreaming
makes perfect.
By Amna Farid
Practise Makes Perfect or Dreaming Makes Perfect?
Car of the Future?Can you imagine driving this car? This is the
Hyundai blue2 car. Nearly all of the materials
that were used were recycled or eco friendly.
With a blue 2 sports 90kW fuelled engine with
34.9km/L of hydrogen. The tires and wheels and
aerodynamics, everything has been based around
the theme of being eco friendly. The environ-
mentally friendly car has low resistant tires, an d
increase in efficiency. This car will not only
help the driver but the environment as well, put-
ting less by products in to the atmosphere. Thiscould be the car of the future.
By Saher Bhatti
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The Black Hole! Did you get it
right? Scientists think that blackholes can be smaller than an atom,
or a billion times more massive
than our Sun. A black hole is a
place in space where the gravita-
tional pull is so strong that not
even light can get out, ( nd you
know how fast light can travel,
300,000,00 m/s) . Their huge
gravitational pull can rip starsapart! What is happening over
there? No one knows. That's for
the next generation of physicists -
you - to work out.
By Shifa Mugloo
Mysteries of the UniverseDo you know whats at the centre of our Galaxy?
Can You Solve Einsteins Riddle?ARE YOU IN THE TOP 2% OF INTELLIGENT PEOPLE IN THE WORLD? SOLVE THE RIDDLE AND FIND OUT!There are no tricks, just pure logic, so good luck and don't give up.
1. In a street there are five houses, painted five different colours.
2. In each house lives a person of different nationality
3. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, has a
different job and keep a different pet.
4.Who owns the fish?
HINTS
1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the
White house.
5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who is a policeman rears birds.7. The owner of the Yellow house is a teacher.
8. The man living in the centre house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who is a doctor lives next to the one who
keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man
who is a teacher.
12. The man who is a lawyer drinks juice.
13. The German is a scientist.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who is a doctor has a neighbour whodrinks water.
Suggested by Zahrah Massood
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On March 11 2011, a series of earth-quakes shook the East coast of Japan,about 400km North-East of the capital
city, Tokyo. The worst quake struck at14:46 local time and measured 8.9 on the
Richter scale, a scale used to measure thesize of earthquakes It was apparently theworst earthquake to hit Japan in morethan 100 years, and the fifth largest earth-
quake in the world since 1900. Over 350 people have been found dead, but thereare fears that the death toll may be muchhigher. Alongside that, 500 people havebeen reported missing.Earthquakes are caused by continental plates. The Earths crust is made out of
several pieces, called continental plates.These plates float around on the mantle, a
thick layer of molten rock, called magmathat is below the surface. This enables theplates to move slightly. When the plates
bash into and slide past each other, earth-quakes occur.
Japan is on a faultline, a line where two
plates meet. This is why they are vulner-
able to earthquakes and other natural
disasters. Other places that are situated
on a faultline include the West coast of
North and South America, New Zealand,
Iceland, The Philippines, Indonesia and
some parts of Asia.
By Lizzie Pengelly
Magnitude 9 Earthquake Hits Japan
You already know how to make a
rocket out of a film canister. Now,
you can make a tea bag fly!
Lighting the top of the teabag cyl-
inder heats the air inside the cylin-
der. The air molecules start to
move more quickly and spread out
to take up more space. As the air
molecules spread out, the air in-
side the cylinder becomes less
dense. Warm, less dense air rises
above cool, dense air. The ash of
the teabag is light and doesn't re-
quire much force to lift it. As the
warm, less dense air rises, it has
enough force to lift the ash of the
teabag.
Did you know this is the same
principle for hot air balloons?
Well now you do.
By Shifa Mugloo
Teabags can fly?You will never look at teabags in the same way again.
Would you get bitten by a mosquito
for science? What if you had to feed
500 of the biting bugs?Feeding 500 hungry mozzies is what
Leslie Vosshall does. A neuroscien-
tist at Rockerfeller University, Leslie
is studying mosquitoes to help fight
mosquito born diseases.
Leslie aims to discover why some
people smell better to mosquitoes
than others. Wild mozzies can carry
parasites that cause malaria. Malaria
parasites manipulate the host's biol-
ogy, send a signal to mosquitoes say-
ing "Bite this person!". This helps theparasite to be transmitted from person
to person.
By Shifa Mugloo
Bitten by Bugs for Science!
http://www.planet-science.com/categories/over-11s/technology/2010/12/three,-two,-oneblast-off!.aspxhttp://www.planet-science.com/categories/over-11s/technology/2010/12/three,-two,-oneblast-off!.aspx -
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Mind Reading - Scientists One Step Closer
Brainwaves - the patterns of elec-
trical activity created in the brain -
can easily be measured. It's much
harder to work out the informationencoded in the brainwaves. What
do they mean? How and where are
they produced?
Scientists at the University of
Glasgow showed volunteers lots
of images of people's faces. The
faces displayed different emotions
such as happiness, fear and sur-
prise. Some of the faces were cov-
ered up so that, for example, onlythe eyes or mouth were visible.
Volunteers were asked to identify
the emotion being displayed and
their brainwaves were measured
whilst they were viewing the im-
ages.
What emotion do you think this
woman is showing?
Scientists showed that the type of
brainwave varies greatly accord-
ing to which part of the face was
being looked at. When you looked
at the picture of the mouth above,
you made a 'theta' - slow fre-
quency - brainwave. The brain
produces different brainwaves pat-
terns to encode different visual
features. Information is encoded
by the frequency and timing of
brainwaves.
Professor Philippe Schynes, who
led the study, said: "It's a bit like
unlocking a scrambled televisionchannel. Before, we could detect
the signal, but couldn't watch the
content; now we can.
"How the brain encodes the visual
information that enables us to rec-
ognise faces and scenes has long
been a mystery. While we are able
to detect activity in certain areas
of the brain when particular tasks
are performed, we've not knownwhat information is being carried
in those brainwaves.
"What we have done is to find a
way of decoding brainwaves to
identify the messages within."
By Shifa Mugloo
On March 11, a 9.0 magnitudeearthquake occurred off theeast coast of Japan. A subse-quent tsunami struck thecoast, killing thousands ofpeople and causing serious,widespread damage to the Fu-kushima nuclear power plantand to buildings, roads, andpower lines, particularly alongthe east coast of the Tohokuregion. Damage to the Fuku-shima nuclear power plant fol-lowing the earthquake andtsunami has resulted in an on-going leak of radiation fromthis facility. The Japanesegovernment has evacuatedhundreds of thousands of resi-
dents of Fukushima Prefectureliving within 20 km (12 miles)of the nuclear power plant.The US Nuclear Regulatory
Commission recommends thatall Americans remain a mini-mum of 80 km (50 miles) awayfrom the plant. At this time,the risk of exposure to radia-tion and the risk of contamina-tion from radioactive materi-als are believed to be low, es-pecially for anyone outside a50-mile radius of the nuclearpower plant. Some countrieshave started blocking importsof produce from Japan, fearfulof radiation contamination.The plant, battered by a 9.0magnitude earthquake andtsunami that has left 23,000people dead or missing, hasstill not been brought under
control, and workers wereforced away from the complexwhen black smoke began risingfrom one of its six reactors.As
concern grew over the risk tofood safety of radiation fromthe nuclear plant, the UnitedStates became the first nationto block some food importsfrom the disaster zone.It is stopping imports of milk,vegetable and fruit from fourprefectures in the vicinity ofthe plant. Hong Kong, a majorimporter of Japanese food,also banned produce and milkimports from the disasterzone. It has been said thatHong Kong authorities hadfound radioactivity levels inspinach and turnip samples upto 10 times above the safetylimit.
By Angelica Sharma
Nuclear Disaster for Japan
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This cloaking device may notwork as great as Harry Pottersfamous invisibility cloak, butscientists at Birmingham Uni-
versity have developed an in-visibility cloaking device tomake objects appear as if theyarent there. The whole con-cept it truly pure physics withthe use of a natural transpar-ent looking crystal called cal-cite. This cloak uses two cal-cite prisms joined together tomake a pyramid with a littlerecess in the base. The under-
neath of the pyramid is coatedwith gold to make it reflective. This clever crystal has doublerefraction (birefringent) prop-erties meaning when light raysenter this crystal, the rayssplit into two rays of differentpolarizations that travel in dif-ferent directions in which the
light waves oscillate. It exploitsthe refraction of light.
We can see an object because
light rays hit it and some raysenter our eyes from that pointonwards. Calcite also works bybending light so that the raysdont bounce of the object andenter our eyes therefore givingthe illusion of invisibility.
There has been an attempt be-fore to produce the effect ofinvisibility using artificially
made meta-materials however;it was not that useful as itcould only hide really smallobjects made on a really tinyscale, as large as the waves
length and only work for cer-
tain kinds of electromagnetic
waves, such as microwaves or in-
fra-red light. "By using naturalcrystals for the first time,rather than artificial meta-materials, we have been ableto scale up the size of thecloak and can hide larger ob-
jects, thousands of times big-ger than the wavelength of thelight," stated Shuang Zhang
who led the research at Bir-mingham University. Eventhough this is a vast improve-ment, the crystal needs somestrict criteria to work. Firstly,it only works when light is po-
larized in a particular plane. This means that object can
only seem invisible whenviewed through a filter. Alsofor the effect to work the ob-
jects and the crystal have to beplaced on a flat surface andthe size of the objects is lim-ited by the size of the crystal(which is actually visible).However it may be possible tomake the crystal less visible asunder water, the crystal is al-most completely invisible. Sothe crystal can be put to moreuse under water where lighttends to be polarized already.
Nonetheless it is definitely anexciting and new way forwardin the world of science. Its areally exciting demonstrationof how we can take theoreticalideas and actually make themphysical.
By Zahrah Massood
An Invisibility Cloak?
Calcite with its birefringent
properties
A lunar eclipse occurs when themoon passes behind the earth sothat the earth blocks the sun'srays from striking the moon. Thiscan occur only when the Sun,Earth, and Moon are aligned ex-actly, or very closely so, with the
Earth in the middle. Hence, a lu-nar eclipse can only occur thenight of a full moon.
This year the lunar eclipse tookplace On 15th June, but unfortu-nately Britain was not able to seethe eclipse as it was only seen inparts of the world near Australia.Form more details about the Lu-nar eclipse watch this video:
h t t p : / / w w w . n a s a . g o v /mission_pages/LRO/news/eclipse-video.html By Aleesha Luthra
Lunar Eclipse
Magic? Nope, just one of the
fascinating the tricks of physics!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_moonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_moonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun -
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And...A man was to be sentenced, and
the judge told him, "You may
make a statement. If it is true, I'll
sentence you to four years in
prison. If it is false, I'll sentence
you to six years in prison." Afterthe man made his statement, the
judge decided to let him go free.
What did the man say?
What English word retains the
same pronunciation, even after
you take away four of its five let-ters?
If I say "Everything I tell you is alie," am I telling you the truth or a
lie?
What is broken every time it's
spoken?
Dont forget, if you have any suggestions
for the articles that we should write next
time, or if you want to write one for us,
contact Mrs. Egan or speak to Lizzie in
9JWa (V12) .
Chemistry Word Search (by Lizzie Pengelly)(If youre reading this on a computer just print screen it and paste it into Photoshop or Paint)
Chemistry
Science
Atom
Electron
Proton
Neutron
NucleusShell
Covalent
Particle
Periodic Table
Element
Compound
Reaction
Halogen
Alkali Metal
IonIsotope
Noble Gas
Radioactivity
H N C C L A E A I N L L T P O N I T M O B I A D A
T I P N T R T D L A C R R S S T E E I R N R E O A
A E R O O M C R R K E C E D M A C V R A L S N L E
N E E G A I U N I S A N O O N C A T P K L O E O E
S U E O S A T E R P S L N A L U I I R N B L U H A
O A C N E D E C R L A O I P L S O E N L M D E T C
S T C L T A O A A E C L A M C E S P E N A T N N EH R N N E O L D M E H P K I E R O G M U C L E T R
A A I E N U P O T N R R E A H T A C E O E L N A P
D I L E M M S R I E E N S T I S A E N P C O D E E
R H E O O E G Y A D C U P N L R N L E T I I N L C
I E G A G K L B E E I L T E L O O I I N O I E E N
A O T E R E C E E D N N A R T O E R A A T C L T H
R A T I O H N L U T O I L O O T O G C C T B E I E
M E C M L A C E N E O A R E L N L T I R A A S N B
S O E E T I N T S C O P D T Y C I A O T R O S N P
A A G O T K P L T C K Y O R L V T N C N T U C O R
M E M R A R L N A A M L T T I H V I R O T O E N C
A O A O O I E T S R C S P T N C D A P P N T N L H
T P T E G L O E H T I T Y N O O C E A A L G K E I
T B L N A L O N I M I N T C I R E L U O S L A G E
I T A V T N E C E E T N T R M L L S I N E D E D U
C O O T E E A H E M I L E L L A O N I C O A T H T
E C N E A R C E N R I P C S A T A N A P T T N T S
I E N L C O A L E C L S E E T L L E O E E A A N P
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What you need:
A willing volunteer Two toothpicks
How to:
1. Get your volunteer to close
their eyes.
2. Press two toothpicks, point
downwards, lightly on the volun-
teer's arm - make sure they're
around 5 cm apart. Don't press
hard - that would hurt! Ask the
volunteer how many toothpicks
they can feel.3. Move the toothpicks closer
together and keep asking the vol-
unteer how many toothpicks they
can feel.
4. At a certain distance apart, the
volunteer will only be able to feel
one toothpick - even though there
are two!
5. When this happens, measure
the distance between the two
toothpicks. Record your results ina table like this:
Repeat the experiment on different
parts of the body - you could try
the back of the hand, index finger
and feet - if they're not too tick-
lish!
What did you find?
On some parts of the body, suchas the index finger, the distance
between the two toothpicks should
be much smaller. This means that
the volunteer has more sensory
receptors in that part of their
body. Sensory receptors are spe-
cialised cells. They detect changes
in the environment, called stimuli,
and turn them into electrical im-
pulses. In this case, the sensory
receptors are detecting pressure.Sensory neurones - nerve cells -
carry these electrical impulses to
the spinal cord and brain.
To be really sensitive, each sen-
sory receptor must connect to a
different nerve cell.
By Shifa Mugloo
Area of the bodyDistance between
toothpicks
Arm
Hand
Index finger
Feet
Knee
Leftover chocolate from Easter? Try this!
What you need:
Small chocolate pieces - all around
the same size
Paper plates
Thermometer (optional)
Pen and paper to record your resultsHow to:
1. Put the each piece of chocolate on apaper plate.
2. Put the paper plates in differentplaces - outside in the shade, outside in
the sun, on a sunny windowsill.
3. If you're using a thermometer, youcan record the temperature at each of theplaces where you put the chocolate.
4. Record how long it takes for thechocolate to melt.
Where does the chocolate meltquickest?
Experiment with putting chocolate
in other places - how long does it
take to melt in your mouth? What
does this tell you about the tem-
perature of your body?
Try melting the chocolate and then
letting it go solid again. What hap-
pens if you melt this again? How
long does it take?What happens if you use different
types of chocolate - white, milk
and dark? Does one type take
longer to melt than others?
What's happening?
At a certain temperature, choco-
late begins to turn from a solid to
a liquid - it melts. If it's a hot day,
sunlight can melt chocolate -
something you don't normallywant to happen!
The taste and melting point of
chocolate depend on how the
chocolate is made. If you let
chocolate melt and re-harden, it
forms a different structure. This
gives it a different taste, texture
and melting point.
By Shifa Mugloo
How long does it take your choco-late to look like this?
Chocolate, lots of Chocolate!
How Sensitive are You?