MyScience.ie

During Science Week Ireland 2011 some extraordinary elements took to the streets of Dublin to let people know about the “Chemistry of Life” – the theme of this year’s Science Week…

The Discover Primary Science and Maths programme has announced they will be working with Abbott Ireland for this year’s Awards. The health care company will sponsor science equipment vouchers for 60 schools, randomly picked from those who have won. Together, Abbott and DPSM will develop a new ‘at home’ section on the website to make new resources available.

For more information visit www.primaryscience.ie.

Any primary school teachers interested in participating in this year’s Awards of Science and Maths Excellence take note that you have until March 25th to submit your intention to apply! You can also keep up-to-date with what is happening in the programme on Facebook.

Want to know where you’ll be in two years time?
The Science Week lecture series continues as Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell answers the question of “Will the world will end in 2012?” by analysing the astronomical evidence.
The lecture is in three parts below:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Check out these videos from the Science Week lecture series. In this lecture Dr Martin Hendry addresses the question ‘Did we really land on the moon?’; looking at the idea whether the moon landing was a hoax from a scientific perspective. Dr Hendry is senior Lecturer in Astronomy in the school of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. The lecture is split into the three videos below.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The final official Science Week event took place on Saturday 21 November as the Galway Science and Technology Exhibition took place in the Bailey Allen Hall NUI Galway. This year was the most successful week ever with a record participation as over 115,000 people attended 505 events across the country. There’s a short clip about Science Week below from Merrion Street.ie. We’ll add more videos over the next couple of weeks.

The lineup for this year’s Science Week lecture series has been announced and tickets for the general public are now available through the Science Gallery (Dr. Martin Hendry, Graeme Jones, and Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh). Tickets for Friday evening’s lecture with Jocelyn Bell are available through the RIA. As usual all the lectures are free, so book now to avoid disappointment. Please find an overview of the lecture series below.

Dr. Martin A. Hendry
Wednesday, 10th November
The Science Gallery
Time: 1 – 2.30pm
Places: 144

Did we really Land on the Moon?

More than 40 years after Apollo 11 there are a surprising number of theories around – in books, documentary programmes and the internet – that Neil Armstrong’s famous “One small step” was an elaborate hoax, filmed in secret here on Earth. Conspiracy theorists point to a range of “evidence” to support their claim – including waving flags, strange shadows, no stars in the sky and deadly solar radiation. In this talk, using real Apollo video footage and a series of simple demonstrations, Martin Hendry takes a closer look at the science behind “moon hoax” claims, and asks whether we really did land on the Moon.

About Dr. Martin Hendry

Dr Martin Hendry is Senior Lecturer in Astronomy and Convenor of Learning and Teaching in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. His principal research interests lie in cosmology and in the exciting new field of gravitational wave astronomy. He is a passionate enthusiast for popular astronomy and science outreach, and regularly lectures to schools, astronomy societies and science festivals across the world. He is a founding member of the Education and Public Outreach group of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration: a worldwide network of more than 800 scientists which is leading the search for gravitational waves. He currently holds a Science in Society Fellowship from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, to lead a UK-wide programme of public outreach events on the theme of “Exploring the Dark Side of the Universe”.

Dr. Graeme Jones
Thursday, 11th November
The Science Gallery
Time: 1 – 2.30pm
Places: 144

Saturday Night Science – The definitive scientific guide to a Saturday night.

Can reaction dynamics explain that boy meets girl moment? Can studying spectroscopy turn you into a John Travolta on the dance floor? Can Chemistry help you pull? Come along to this scientific guide to a Saturday night and find out where you have been going wrong.

Suitable for audiences aged 16 and over

About Graeme Jones

Graeme Jones is chemical ecologist who has a passion for public science. In 2002 he led the team that built the Guinness World Record making model of DNA in Stoke. He now works with massive molecular models the size of houses, displaying and parading them at festivals and carnivals, even the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2005 he was awarded a NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship to develop his talents as a science entertainer alongside being a Senior Lecturer at Keele University.

Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh

Friday, 12th November
The Science Gallery
Time: 1 – 2.30pm
Venue: 144

The Story of Sugru

In her lecture, Jane will tell the story of Sugru – bringing it from an idea to reality – through a long and winding road of creativity, science, collaboration, experimentation and learning.

About Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh

Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh is the creator of a new silicone material product called Sugru that is getting DIYers and makers all over the world absurdly excited. She is an artist, inventor, avid DIYer, hater of waste and believer in creativity. Jane’s ambition was to create something that everyone could use to fix or adapt mass produced products to make them work better for them. After 7 years of R&D, Sugru is now produced and mailed to the world by a small team of product designers and scientists based in East London. Sugru was recently selected for ‘Design of the Year 2010′ by the London Design Museum.

Before inventing Sugru (in a long and interesting process from 2003 – 2009) Jane studied product design at the Royal College of Art in London, and sculpture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin.

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Friday 12 November 2010, 7pm
Burke Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin 2
Bookings via the RIA website http://www.ria.ie/Events/Events-Listing/-Will-the-world-end-in-2012–The-astronomical-evid.aspx

“Will the world end in 2012? The astronomical evidence”
What’s all this about the end of the world in 2012? Just what is meant to happen, and how likely is it to happen? This talk examines the threats from space and explains how much truth there is in the suggestions that killer asteroids, lethal solar flares or the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way (for example) could cause the end of the Earth.
Admission is free but booking is essential. Bookings can be made via the RIA website http://www.ria.ie/Events/Events-Listing/-Will-the-world-end-in-2012–The-astronomical-evid.aspx

About Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell

After three years as Dean of Science at the University of Bath she ‘retired’ in 2004, and moved to a Visiting Professorship at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellowship at Mansfield College, Oxford. For ten years she was Professor of Physics at the Open University, and had a year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Princeton University, USA.

She started her academic career by failing the Northern Ireland equivalent of the 11+, but went on to read a Physics degree at Glasgow University, Scotland. This was followed by a PhD in Cambridge (UK) in Radio Astronomy. During her time there she was involved in the discovery of pulsars, opening up a new branch of astrophysics – work which was recognized by the award of a Nobel Prize to her supervisor.

She worked subsequently at the University of Southampton (in gamma ray astronomy) and at University College London (in X-ray astronomy) before returning to Scotland in the early 80′s to a job in infrared astronomy at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. Latterly she held a management job there, running the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii as a facility for astronomers in British, Canadian and Dutch universities. She has been President of the Royal Astronomical Society and in 2008 became the first female President of the Institute of Physics.

She has used telescopes flown on high-altitude balloons, launched on rockets and carried on satellites, and built a radio telescope which was firmly grounded in Cambridgeshire. The Oppenheimer prize, the Michelson medal, the Tinsley prize and the Magellanic Premium have been awarded to her by learned bodies in the US and the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society has presented her with the Herschel Medal. UK and US universities have conferred honorary doctorates on her, and she holds several Honorary Fellowships. She was made a CBE in 1999 and that year also won the Edinburgh Medal for services to science and society.

She became an FRS in 2003, and FRSE in 2004 and was elected a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2005. In 2007 she was made a DBE. The Royal Society awarded her its 2010 Faraday Medal for science communication. Her appointment to the Open University doubled the number of female professors of physics in the UK. She hopes that her presence as a senior woman in science will encourage more women to consider a career in science.

511 primary schools received an Award of Science Excellence this year as part of the Discover Primary Science programme. The awards programme, which is organised by Discover Science and Engineering, the Government’s national science promotion programme, acknowledges the efforts of primary school children and teachers who have demonstrated an increaded knowledge of science. Pictured at the announcement at Kildare National School, Dublin 6, were Charlie Thomson and Celine Simunyu.

SciFest is taking place across the country, with 2,000 students exhibiting their projects over the next fortnight at 14 Institutes of Technology nationwide. The programme aims to encourage the pursuit of science through an investigative approach to learning and to provide an opportunity for students to display their scientific discoveries.

Leah Kelly and Zainab Raouf, Loreto College Foxrock, are pictured demonstrating their project which investigates whether mobile phones can be charged using solar energy at DIT Kevin Street as part of SciFest last Thursday.  203 local students took part in the event at DIT with 97 projects on display in total.
 
Athlone, Blanchardstown, Dublin, Dundalk, Carlow, Cork, Galway/Mayo, Letterkenny, Limerick, Sligo, Tallaght, Tipperary, Waterford, and Tralee Institutes of Technology are all participating in this year’s SciFest with nearly 900 projects entered in total in 2009, compared to 680 projects in 2008.
  
Now in its third year, SciFest is jointly funded by Intel and Discover Scinece and Engineering and is supported by a number of other partners. The project thus creates a valuable link between the second and third level education sectors as well as between education and industry. Students compete for a number of awards including; Intel Best Project Award, Abbott Runner-up Best Project Award, BT Best Communicator Award, Discover Sensors Award.
  
Following a successful pilot in 2008, an online element was added to this year’s exhibition, with Project Blogger. This allowed students to create individual blogs to keep a record of their SciFest entries and share their experiments with participating students from around the country. Such blogs then formed part of students’ exhibitions at the SciFest events, tracking the project’s path from conception to completion by uploading images, ideas, graphs and video files to the web.

Discover Science & Engineering (DSE) are asking teachers to signal their intent to enter the Awards of Science Excellence by applying online on the Discover Primary Science website. The awards acknowledge the efforts of primary school children and teachers across Ireland who have shown an increased knowledge of science and its many applications as a result of participation in the Discover Primary Science (DPS) programme.

Students from St Pious X National School who are participating in the Discover Primary Science programme.

There has been monumental growth in primary schools interest in the Discover Primary Science programme. Since the programme’s inception in 2004 when approximately 500 schools were registered for the project, Discover Primary Science now has in excess of 3000 schools involved. Last year over 650 primary schools received Awards of Science Excellence, representing an increase of almost half of the 2007 figures.

Registered schools applying for an Award of Science Excellence must keep a Discover Log recording their science related work which must be submitted by 1st May 2009. Credit is given for providing evidence of involvement in:

> Completing a certain number of activities from the DPS classroom activity pack
> Visiting one of the Discover Primary Science accredited Discover Science Centres or inviting speakers to school to talk about science related topics
> Holding a science display day or event
> Taking part in many other explorative, fun and hands-on activities

Each award winning school will be entered into a draw and one school per county will win a fantastic prize – a science entertainer will make a special visit to their school and put on an incredible show especially for them! All log books received in by 1st May 2009 will be entered into this draw, so make sure your logs are in on time!

The assessment of the Awards of Science Excellence process begins following the closing date for submissions on 1st May 2009. Registered schools, who have applied on the website by the end of March, will receive an application form in the mail, close to the submission date.

Last year we took our first steps into the blogoshere with this website and Project Blogger. Project Blogger aims to provide second level students with a web space to create their own science blogs and share their experiences with classmates and other schools around Ireland. This year we have teamed up with Scifest to provide students with a web space to store all their project results, pictures, graphs, videos and discussions.