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Features

Science Snaps Winners!

The winners of Science Snaps, the national science photography competition, were announced on Monday 9th November. Science Snaps, run by Tyndall National Institute, UCC, is open to secondary school students nationwide.

The theme for the photo entries was the Science Week 2009 theme, Celebrating Creativity and Innovation. The theme challenged students to think about how innovations in science have shaped our world and to illustrate the creativity of science in our everyday lives. ‘The judges had a hard time choosing the winning photos due to the high standard entries’ says Aoife O’Donoghue, Tyndall’s Outreach Officer. ‘We had over 200 entries and the students came up with some very interesting and creative shots which they believe celebrate creativity and innovation’.
UL Discovery Sunday Science Family Day

The National Centre for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching and Learning (NCE-MSTL) is running Discovery Sunday Science Family Day Events next Sunday Nov. 8th at the University of Limerick. As part of the UL Festival of Science, Engineering and Technology these events include interactive hands on Science and Maths Activities for all the family. Use Chemistry to make your own bouncing ball, use Physics to build your own hovercraft, or ‘operation’ game, with Biology see how flowers feed, grow your own grass head, and using Maths get down and try out for the maths millionaire or try the Monty Hall Problem?
Galway Science and Technology Festival 2009

The 12th Galway Science and Technology Festival will take place from 9th-22nd November 2009. The festival is planned by a committee comprised of the region’s leading players in the world of education and industry, who combine to help create an active interest in science and engineering, and all shows and events in the festival are free to schools and to children!
Discovery 2009

The Discovery event, run in association with Science Week Ireland, aims to encourage young people to take science, technology, engineering and higher level maths to Leaving Cert and beyond, thus ensuring the high-skills pool for industry into the future.

Now in its 5th year, Discovery2009 will run in Cork’s City Hall from the 14-18th November.
Mayo Science and Technology Festival 2009

The Mayo Science and Technology Festival takes place during Science Week 2009 and is organised by John Magee. The inaugural Mayo Science and Technology Festival in 2007 proved to be an outstanding success.

It is organised with the backing of The Mayo County Development Board, and runs from November 9th to 15th.
Science Week School Report

Each year we at Discover Science and Engineering get to talk to lots of people that took part in a Science Week event. We especially love to hear from school students or their teachers about what they did to get involved. Scoil Ghobnatan in Mallow, Cork, is one such school that we talked to in 2008, that really rolled up their sleeves and got involved! They had visits from Colette Creedon from the Energy Agency Office in Mallow, who played ‘renewable energy’ games with the students. Paul O’Flynn from the Adult Education Centre came in to talk to 4th Class students about organic horticulture. Roddy Crehan, a veterinarian surgeon, spoke to Junior Infants and 6th Class about life as a vet, while Andrea Doolan from the Biosciences Institute, UCC, spoke to the children about the immune system.
2008 Science Essay Competition Winners

Congratulations to everyone who took part in our Science Week essay and photo competitions. There were many entries of an exceptionally high standard.
Senior cycle winning essay

"We forget all too easily that our computers, laptops, mobile phones, MP3 players and computer games were either fledglings or not even invented a mere 20 years ago."

Read Seán Burke's winning essay on the Science Week 2008 theme of "Science – Shaping Our World"
Senior cycle runner-up essay

"…Cold and wet, Ken Cohen was about to leave when he noticed the door slightly ajar. Had it always been like that? Curious, he decided to investigate, and at once he began to notice something strange."

Read Bobby Tang's essay, the runner-up in the Senior Cycle category of the Science Week 2008 schools essay competition
Junior cycle winning essay

"My name is Zwinky. I come from Zeck, a country in the planet Squashque. I have been looking down from my spaceship and observing the differences between Squashque and Earth…"

Read Jayne Groarke's winning essay on the Science Week 2008 theme of "Science – Shaping Our World"
Junior cycle runner-up essay

"…If the Wright brothers were to travel through time to the first launch of a rocket into space, how would they be able to understand that aircraft now fly not only between nations but in between planets too?"

Read Nicola Walsh's essay, the runner-up in the Junior Cycle category of the Science Week 2008 schools essay competition
Space is the final frontier for tourism

“Did you have a good weekend?”
“Yes, I went up for a few orbits. Got outside the ship for a while and got some great video for YouTube.”
“Yeah, I’ve done that. It’s fun. But next year is gonna be a biggie for me. I’m saving for the Moon.”
“Lucky you.”

It seems that it is only a matter of time before there are Monday morning conversations like this. A trip into space could be nearly as routine as a weekend in Prague.
Special effects are shaping our world

Whether it's the curve of a flying football in a console game, or the clash of armies in a film about ancient civilisations, you can be guaranteed that plenty of scientific theory, technology and imagination have gone into those effects that you see on your screen.
Shows bring Science to Life

Roadshows are among the highlights of Science Week - an opportunity to learn and have fun at the same time. Here are some of the great shows, demonstrations and presentations lined up for Science Week 2008. For more details, see the Science Week calendar of events.
Murphy’s Law And Order

Thanks to “Murphy’s law”, people tend to notice that buses come in threes, toast lands butter side down, and when a body is immersed in water the doorbell always seems to ring. It happens to all of us. In a nutshell, Murphy’s law says that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. It’s a particular variant of “sod’s law”, where rush hour is worse when you're running late, and email crashes while you're sending important documents.
Kitchen Chemistry

As well as the experiments below, we’ve shot some footage of Sue McGrath carrying out four wonderful experiments with the help of some young assistants.
- The Floating Bubbles
- Putting a Needle through a Balloon
- The Cabbage Juice Indicator
- The Foaming Volcano
The Foaming Volcano

This experiment uses just a few ordinary household chemicals from your kitchen to turn a glass of coloured liquid into a frothing “volcano” that overflows its container.
The Floating Bubbles

Soap bubbles are beautiful and captivating, but because they are so light and fragile it can be very hard to observe them closely or for more than a few seconds. They blow away on the breeze, or if you are making bubbles in still air they soon settle down on a surface and pop.
Putting a Needle through a Balloon

We all know that you can pop a balloon with a needle. But how can you put a needle through it without popping it?

These two kitchen experiments are not just cool party tricks — they show some interesting science too.
The Cabbage Juice Indicator

Some acid can be very harmful and dangerous, but many ordinary things in you kitchen have acids that are relatively safe, such as orange juice or vinegar. Acids and alkalis have the ability to change the colour of certain vegetable materials. So this experiment uses an ordinary red cabbage to find out if a liquid is an acid or an alkali.
Five things you didn't know about… your radio

Like many great inventions, from the bicycle to the computer, there was overlapping work by many scientists, so it’s hard to say that radio was invented by one individual. One of the leading early pioneers was the inventor Guglielmo Marconi from Italy, who was half-Irish. His mother was Annie Jameson, granddaughter of the founder of the Jameson Whiskey distillery, his wife was also Irish.
Five things you didn't know about… your MP3 player

The first mass-produced one is 10 years old this year. The world’s first mass-produced hardware MP3 player was Saehan’s MPMan, sold in Asia starting in the late spring of 1998.
Five things you didn't know about… your bicycle

Dublin had the first bicycle tyres. The Frenchman De Sivrac built the first bicycle-type vehicle in 1690. It was referred to as a hobby horse, but it did not have pedals — or tyres.
Five things you didn't know about… your garden

Worms are hard workers. Earthworms are among Ireland’s greatest gardeners. There can be as many as five million of them under an area the size of the pitch of Croke Park.