Escape The Science Lab

I like to cook, which usually involves knives. One afternoon I was chopping onions when I unexpectedly removed the tip of my finger. Naturally, I was alarmed at the amount of blood, and I began to wonder if the bleeding would stop but stop it did. Magic? No, your blood has ways of stopping bleeding. Good job, too; it's important stuff. Blood looks like a simple liquid, but it is complicated and carries out several jobs. You may know that red blood cells are carried around in a liquid called plasma. You may also know that these cells contain a chemical called haemoglobin, which gives them their red colour. These little packets move around your circulatory system, transferring oxygen to where it is needed and returning to your lungs to pick up more. Also carried in the plasma are your white blood cells. There are many kinds of these, but they protect you from dangerous invaders. They identify foreign organisms, bacteria, viruses, fungi, or transplanted organs. Once identified, they ...

When I was a child, we had the usual family myths. These included don't drink milk after eating an orange, it will curdle, don’t sit on the cold step or you’ll get king cough (I never found out what that is), and boiled onions in milk stop you from catching a cold (it may just keep people away from you, so you don't catch anything). There was also an obsession with getting enough fibre, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's extreme when you get interrogated about it when visiting your nana. Are any of these ideas true? How can we find out? Part of the science you study in school is how your body works. A vital organ system is your digestive system, not that the rest are unimportant. We don't usually think about what happens after we swallow our tea unless something goes wrong, but an awful lot is happening that we can't see (believe me, that’s a good thing). Most of the chemicals in your food are useless until your digestive system changes them. The prop...

Hang a bar magnet on a piece of thread and wait until it stops moving. One end will eventually point to the north pole of the Earth. This happens because the earth is a giant magnet, and your magnet is lining up with the Earth's magnetic field, which surrounds our planet like a giant bubble and allows us to find our way around. A magnetic field is an invisible force field that surrounds magnets. Other magnets and some metals are influenced if they come into the magnetic field. The magnetic field around a bar magnet is called a butterfly diagram. Perhaps you can see why. The field is why a magnet will stick to a fridge, or two magnets may push each other away. Each magnet’s magnetic field interacts with the other’s, causing attraction or repulsion.  The ends of a magnet are called poles. One end is called the north-seeking pole, and the other is the south-seeking pole. We usually shorten these to north and south. Put two poles that are the same together; they will repel. A north and...

There's nothing quite as stomach-churning as a pile of maggots. I used to work with someone that was into fishing. He would buy a box of them and put it in the lab fridge. Once or twice the lid came off, and we were met with a squirming mess when we opened the door. That's not counting the time he forgot they were in there, and they turned into flies.  We are naturally disgusted by some things because they spread diseases. Flies, vomit, puss, the list goes on. Would you be surprised if you went into a hospital and a doctor prescribed maggots to help heal a wound? That's right, maggots!  People with badly infected wounds can be prescribed maggots to help clean them. These particular maggots have been raised in sterile conditions, so please don't go rooting in the dustbin at home.  How does this work? Warning you shouldn't read this before your tea! Maggots like to eat dead or rotting material. That’s precisely what is in some nasty wounds. These wounds can be infecte...

You may have heard that diamonds are a girl`s best friend or are forever, but have you ever heard of these shiny pieces of bling falling from the sky as rain? Diamonds are also well known for being super hard, so much so that they are attached to the tips of drills to cut through the toughest materials. Where, then, would you find liquid diamonds? That`s right, liquid!  One of my favourite pastimes is to read about and listen to podcasts about the planets. Why is this subject so fascinating to me? Apart from the fantastic photographs that spacecraft have sent back from these objects, some of the ways they work are unlike anything we will ever see on Earth. In the solar system, temperatures and pressures never occur naturally on our planet. This means that substances we are familiar with do strange things elsewhere in the solar system. For example, ice far away from the sun`s influence gets so cold that it behaves like rock. Methane, the gas used for cooking and heating, can be a li...

I'm fond of disaster movies, so I've been watching the updates on NASA's DART mission to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid. NASA and other space organisations regularly monitor the skies for asteroids which could be on a collision course with Earth. Asteroids travel at incredible speeds, so even a relatively small one could cause significant damage if it hits a populated area. There is a great deal of evidence that asteroids have hit Earth in the past.  There are many large craters which provide evidence of collisions. Some of these are difficult to spot because erosion and vegetation hide them. Even the vast crater left by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs remained hidden under the jungle and ocean until it was discovered. More recently, an object struck the forest of Tunguska in Siberia.  This impact was seen by many people, but the thing that caused the devastation is still a mystery. Was it an asteroid that exploded over the Si...

There's nothing better on a warm day than a nice scoop of ice cream. A quick trip to the freezer, and you have a refreshing treat. You may even have a machine at home to make your own. Plug it in, and off it goes. People have been enjoying ice cream long before freezers were invented. They used a simple bit of GCSE science to make their dessert though you still need ice to start the process. Before freezers, ice was collected from frozen lakes in winter and stored underground in ice houses. These could be natural caves or cellars dug into the ground. Beneath the earth, it stays cooler than on the surface, so the ice stays frozen long into the summer.  The other thing you will need for your ice cream is salt. That's it; ice and salt. No electricity or fancy equipment. Just plain old ice and salt. Of course, you will also need your ice cream mixture ready to freeze. You will need a large and small bowl to make the ice cream. The ice goes in the larger bowl, and the ic...