Monday, June 23, 2014

Plastination - Arteries in the Human Hand



This is an image I have on my pinterest board. It originally comes from Gunther von Hagens(acid-corrosion cast of the arteries of the adult human hand). Students love this stuff, must be the gore! Nice to link this with Halloween! Von Hagens is famous for his techniques on plastination of human tissue. He has also appeared on British tv performing the first public autopsies in over 100 years.

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

A foldable for the heart!

This is a foldable I've designed for my upcoming product on the circulatory system. It's a new take on (for me) an old idea. When I was young one of the things we did was make these paper foldables. We put numbers on the outside and peoples names on the inside and voila you knew who you were going to marry! So I decided to make one for the heart (get the nifty transition there?). The outside flaps have general information on the heart. The inside flaps have questions and the answers are written inside the flap. Inside there's a diagram of the heart. Hope you like them!

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Rotating Moon from LRO

Using imagery collected by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA created this gobstopping video of the Moon rotating 360° about its axis.

Pitch tar drop finally falls!

Here's what's probably the longest running experiment in the world, right here in sunny Ireland! In 1944, physicists at Trinity College Dublin set up an experiment to demonstrate that, firm and stable appearances aside, tar pitch is, in fact, a liquid. The pitch-drop experiment was born. Tar pitch is the material used to coat roofs and pave roads. If you hit it with a hammer, it shatters like a solid. But it’s actually a liquid. It even flows like a liquid. It just does it very, very, very slowly. Finally, after 69 years, the tar pitch dropped! According to Nature, the Trinity College team has estimated the viscosity of the pitch “in the region of 2 million times more viscous than honey, or 20-billion times the viscosity of water.”

First Post!

This is as the title suggest my first post on here. So let me introduce myself (short version). I'm a very enthusiastic science teacher. I like to think that comes across in my lessons. I love science and I'm eager to share that with my students and any passers-by. I am continually amazed and in wonder at the beautiful world around us. The more I learn the more grateful I am. I've been a teacher for 20 years now and I love it. Hope you enjoy the blog! All the best