On Thursday 4^th March 2010 a group of Year11 students made their way to W5 to spend the morning thinking about the lesser known topic of Near -Earth Objects (NEOs)

What’s that you might ask?  Well, as a number of Lagan students will now be able to tell you; it is an area of Physics concerned with studying the objects that move through space (comets and asteroids) and could potentially strike the Earth. 

By taking part in a number of fun activities students learnt that NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) invest a lot of time and money monitoring these objects – and for important reasons.  These objects vary in size: from small meteorites which hit the Earth regularly (such as the one reported by our local news in Jan 2010); to very large objects which have the potential to wipe out our civilisation (this was illustrated to us by the KT event which scientists believe to have wiped out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago). 

So how do our governments plan to protect us from this latter treat?  Well, Lagan students are now aware of a number of potential ways to deflect an oncoming object and in keeping with this theme the session went on to introduce everyone to some basic rocket building techniques.  Given the resulting test demonstrations, let’s hope Ben’s team will be around to help us with rocket building in 2036 when a large object called Apophis could be on a direct collision course with Earth!

Keep up the good work NASA and ESA.  For more information go to:  http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/

National Science week starts on Friday March 12th.  To celebrate this year, we are doing lots of wonderful activities.

Friday March 12th - Pharmacists in Schools will be visiting and students will get the chance to become a Pharmacist for the day.

Monday March 15th - Miss Ritchie will be taking Yr 9 students to Minnowburn to work with the National Trust.

Tuesday March 16th - Miss Wightman will be taking a group of Yr 9 students to Divis Mountain to work with the National Trust.

Thursday March 18th - the Think Differently Roadshow will be visiting the college and we hope that 300 students will have the chance to see some amazing science.

Also, there is a competition running for Yr 8 - Yr 10 students throughout the week - students will have the opportunity to become a news reporter for Lagan College Science TV and produce a news report.   These will be posted on this web page and there are fantastic prizes for the winners in each category - ask your science teacher for more details.

Yr 10 students recently attended an event run by NI Water as part of National Engineers Week.  At the event the students where entertained by a brief history of the loo, had the opportunity to learn about Belfast’s old Victorian Sewage system and where given a interesting presentation by Mr. Brian Henderson, one of NI Water’s Engineers, about the massive project to upgrade the sewage system.

The Yr10’s also had a tour of the site to see the massive storm tanks and witnessed first hand the cities waste arriving at the treatment plant.  And a lesson for everyone …. what goes down the loo?  Only the 3Ps (poo, pee & paper).

On Thursday 28th January, Professor Chris Hardacre, Head of Chemistry at Queens’ University attended the college to speak to Year 13 and 14 students.   Professor Hardacre demonstrated some experiments involving catalysts and told the students about the career possibilities that studying Chemistry and Chemical Engineering could lead to.

One of the experiments that he showed us was the homogeneous catalysis reaction of the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, which was impressive.

qub-chemistry-visitor-013

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Check out the image above which shows an amazing affect when a mobile phone was used to take a picture of a bright light (LED from student’s mobile) through Mr Ewart’s magic glasses.  The lenses of the glasses are diffraction gratings which split the white light into its familiar spectrum of colours (as seen naturally in a rainbow). Thanks to Teana 10na2 for the idea.

Physics students in Year 13 and 14 recently attended the annual Tyndall Lecture at QUB. This year’s lecture was entitled “Physics in Action” and was presented by Dr Cathal Flynn from the Dublin Institute of Technology.

Dr Flynn devised a wonderful visual lecture that illustrates many areas of Physics through exciting and eye-opening demonstrations. Force, heat, sound, optics and electricity were all explained using on-stage experiments and as promised at the start of his lecture NO MATHEMATICS.

The students were very impressed by the demos and no doubt will try some at home to impress family and friends – Mr Ewart certainly will.

This week Science Club moved to Miss Fairley’s room to carry out a chemical reaction that could be eaten.  We mixed sugar and syrup together and watched as the gas produced during the reaction made delicious honeycomb.

The honeycomb is easy to make - but be careful with the hot sugar, please ask an adult to help you.

Recipe: 

You’ll need:

• 100 g sugar
• 2 tablespoons of syrup
• Large, heavy based saucepan
• 1 heaped teaspoon of Bicarbonate of soda
• Tin lined with aluminium foil (to save on washing up!)

N.B. There are LOTS of different recipes for making honeycomb toffee but this is one of the simplest.

What to do:

• Mix the sugar and syrup together with a wooden spoon in the saucepan. Place on the stove on low heat until the sugar is melted i.e. if you drag a wooden spoon over the saucepan base it no longer feels ‘gritty’ - this may take 10-15 minutes.
• Swirl the bubbling contents of the pan around from time to time but constant stirring isn’t necessary. Once the sugar is all melted, take the pan off the heat, add the bicarbonate of soda, stir to mix and watch the mixture froth up.
• Pour the mixture into a tin lined with foil and then put the saucepan IMMEDIATELY into soak (take care, saucepan is hot). Leave toffee to cool then break into chunks and enjoy!

What happens:

The bicarbonate of soda breaks down with heat to release carbon dioxide gas. The gas causes the toffee mixture to froth and the gas becomes trapped in the sugar/syrup mixture.

this recipe comes from:

 http://www.yummyscience.co.uk/ys_pages/ys_toffee.html

In these videos, Michael and Aaron demonstrate the energy in food by blowing milk powder through a bunsen flame.

food-1

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food-2

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