Using your dog as a compass

You may have used a compass to find out which way is North. Did you know you can also use a dog? Some scientists have found out that when dogs are doing a poo they preferred to face north or south rather than east or west!

This experiment was published in the article Dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field by Vlastimil Hart et al. in Frontiers of Zoology, 2013

Whirlygig toy = Centrifuge = Life saver

Have you every played with a whirlygig? Or a button spinner?

This simple toy has two handles connected by two pieces of string and a disc in the middle of the string between the two handles. It is then possible to make the disc spin really fast by pulling of the two handles. There are lots of videos of how you can make your own on Youtube, including this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCutHjdDFvY



Some scientists at Stanford University have taken this simple toy and are using it to save lives. In order to work out if a patient has a particular illness, doctors often need to take a sample of blood. Blood is made up of four main components: red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and plasma. It is necessary to separate the blood into these individual components to identify an illness. To separate these components the blood is spun around really fast. In a lab this is done using a centrifuge, which is very expensive. The scientists at Stanford have shown how this very cheap simple toy can be used to do the same job.



Here is a video showing it in action and the scientists explaining more about what it can do:

Mytery Object 6 Revealed

This is a jumping spring toy. Watch the video and look for its three component parts:

• The base
• The spring
• The casing

 

If you have any ideas for other objects you would like to see scanned, please suggest it in a comment below.

Mystery Object 6

Can you guess what this object is?

Mystery Object 5 Revealed

This is a clockwork penguin. Watch the video again to see:

• The spring that powers the toy
• The gears that translate the spring power into movement
• The holes where the penguins feet stick out

 

If you have any ideas for other objects you would like to see scanned, please suggest it in a comment below.

Mystery Object 5

Here's another mystery object. Can you guess what it is?

Mystery Object 4 Revealed

This is a Kinder Egg. Did you guess it right? Watch the video again and try to see:

• The two parts of the toy
• The plastic case for the toy
• The wrapper around the chocolate



 

If you have any ideas for other objects you would like to see scanned, please suggest it in a comment below.