Happy New Year, Hipsters
Time to locate your schoolbag (it’s probably still under the bed where you kicked it when school closed for summer), shine your shoes, iron your skirt or shorts and buy new pencils, highlighters and books… Yip, it’s back to school time. Whether your New Year’s resolutions are to study harder, exercise more or just be nicer to the parental duo, we hope you included ‘Keep an eye on HIP2B˛ activities’! Because if you don’t, you’ll be missing out…
Hot Topic: The Biology of Falling In Love
You’ve just met your dream girl/boy. What happens next? Chocolate sundaes and holding hands while watching a movie? You wish! Heart palpitations, bouts of anger, nausea, sweating and insomnia…
Learn how to combat these symptoms by exploring what happens in your body when you fall in love (Ok, so it’s not really romantic to talk about love in chemical terms like oxytocin, vasopressin and dopamine, but hey – we’re scientists and want to understand why). After reading this article, you might even have a victorious Valentine’s Day!
Hip Stuff: Time-travelling extravaganza
The HIP2B˛ team is embarking on a time-travelling journey! Join us as we travel through the last 150 years of extraordinary discoveries and then take a sneak peak at what the future holds. Interested? We’ve organised the time-machine to pick you up in the comfort of your school. Take a peek to see when your lift-off is scheduled…
What’s all the Skype about? Probably because you can call your mates via computer for free – even if they are sitting in Hong Kong or New York! Read the HIP2B˛ mag to find out about this techie phenomenon.
We have our own Hubble Space Telescope right here in South Africa. Ok, so it’s not exactly as advanced as the Hubble but the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) is still able to record distant stars, galaxies and quasars a billion times too faint to be seen with the unaided eye. Watch this Monday’s HIP2B˛ show at 16H30, SABC2 to find out more…
Making headlines: The top 10 bizarre experiments
Did you know it’s possible to reverse death? A researcher in the 1930s managed to revive two dead Fox Terriers by seesawing the corpses up and down to circulate the blood while injecting a mixture of adrenalin and anticoagulants. If this sounds bizarre, the scientist who managed to create a two-headed dog will probably freak you out even more. Or maybe the doctor who experimented with vomit-drinking?
Explore these and other crazy researchers ‘advancing’ science one crazy experiment at a time.
Brainrack: The new Soduko
You’ve played Soduko, now try Kakuro puzzles…
Requiring just pure logic and simple add/subtract calculations, these numerical-crossword puzzles will carry you into a fascinating world of number combinations you never imagined could exist. What are you waiting for? Start the brain sizzle!
The (Don’t) Do This At Home Experiments: Treading on eggshells
Carefully break off the small end of four eggs and pour out the insides. Wind a piece of sticky tape around the centre of each eggshell. Cut through the centre of the tape to make four dome-shaped shells (discard the broken end of each shell). Lay the four domes on a table with the cut sides down arranged in the shape of a rectangle. Next, guess how many telephone books you can lay on top of the shells before they break. Try it!
Why? Arches - even those made of eggshells - are strong because they exert horizontal as well as vertical forces to resist the pressure of heavy loads. The crown of an eggshell can support heavy books because the weight is distributed evenly along the structure of the egg.
For more cool experiments visit Science Experiments at Home…
Good luck for the year ahead. We’d love to hear from you – keep us posted on your ideas and inspirations at talk2us@hip2b2.com (Pssst - The HIP2B˛ team is also getting addicted to facebook. Keep an eye on our website for more info…)
Nina
The HIP2B˛ team