A quick and colourful demonstration to inject a little science into otherwise grey and rainy spring days.

Materials needed:

• a large, clear jar
• a smaller glass container (doesn’t have to be clear)
• food colouring
• hot and cold tap water

Method:

Fill the large jar with the coldest water you can get from your tap. Don’t fill it all the way to the top – leave room to accommodate the volume of the smaller container. For really cold water, put the water in your fridge or freezer for a few minutes.

Put ten drops of food colouring into the small container and fill it to the top with hot water.  For the most dramatic effect, boiling hot water is best, so that there is a greater difference in temperature between the hot and cold water. However, if you are working with small children, you can still get satisfactory results with the hot water from your tap.

Ready to drop!! Carefully drop the small (hot) container into the larger (cold) one as gently as you can.  Try not to add any extra disturbance or motion with your hand.

Watch the convection current develop, as the coloured hot water mixes with the cold water.

What’s going on here?!?!

Convection.

The molecules of the warmer, coloured water are less dense than the cool clear water molecules and “float” to the top of the container. As they rise to the top heat is exchanged and the coloured fluid cools, and is replaced by hotter water still rising from the heat reservoir.

Simple, intuitive, sturdy, and inexpensive, the Celestron Handheld Digital Microscope is the beginner’s digital microscope I’ve been searching for.

Set up was a breeze. I plugged it into my laptop and images instantly appeared on my screen – the software was simple to install. I immediately snapped some accidental (and blurry) shots of my tablecloth but I quickly figured out the focus. Soon, other flat items found their way under the microscope: a five dollar bill, some snake skin, and a penny.

The penny proved to be a challenge. You see, I suffer from the affliction known as “beginner microscopist” and it manifests itself by making it difficult to move a specimen in the correct direction on the first attempt. I academically understood that movements are mirrored (moving the penny away from me made the image on the screen drop) but it took a few tries to coordinate my intentions with the results to frame the right image for the money shot.

"the money shot"

Satisfied that this tool would be great to use for investigating all manner of two dimensional objects I turned my attention to the third dimension. It is a challenge in optics manufacturing to achieve high magnifications and a reasonable depth of field. Individually these factors can be achieved rather easily but in combination can prove difficult. However, the Celestron Handheld Digital Microscope met that challenge. There are some limits on the depth of field (things that are above or below the focal plane are out of focus) – as you can see in this shot of an old ficus leaf – but it certainly exceeded my expectations for an inexpensive, entry-level microscope.

The microscope can be used both on and off its stand. If you have a smartphone or tablet with a host USB port (rare now, but most manufacturers have announced it as standard by the end of 2012) or don’t mind hauling your laptop around, it’s easy to take this microscope out into the field (or your garden, yard, or park) and (with a steady hand) get some great shots while exploring the outdoors. Or, for a more thorough investigation, attach the microscope to its stand to work hands-free. The ruggedly solid metal stand has two ball joints for articulation which provide a wide range of possible angles. I did find the adjustment mechanism to be a bit delicate – there is a very slim margin between “just tight enough to hold a position securely” and “flailing loosely like a wet noodle”, which made fine adjustments a somewhat tricky affair at first. These frustrations may be more acute if you also suffer from “beginner microscopist”, but will ease over time.

All in all this is a great microscope at a great price. It is a perfect tool for exploring the world by both children and adults, has an acceptable learning curve, and is rugged enough to put in the (supervised) hands of those younger than the suggested age.

Here at Quarky Science there are several things we are especially passionate about, including: the outstanding products we sell, fantastic customer experiences, and creating a company based on sustainable living and environmental stewardship. As we are getting very close to launching our business, we have been looking at our many shipping options. Obviously, shipping and shipping well is going to be a big part of offering an exceptional customer experience.

One of the many things to take into consideration when running an e-store is that as a company you may be shipping  product’s across town, across the country, or even across the continent. As a result, shipping products has the distinct potential to eat up valuable resources as well as costing you – the customer – more money. We have decided to make a deliberate choice to minimize these extra costs to you while being considerate to the environment – which we feel is essential.  From the beginning – when the idea of starting up a science and natures store was still just a gleam in our eyes – the four of us drew up a partnership agreement and our number one statement was “Do no evil”. Now we all know that Google was in there first with that goal (and look where it’s gotten them!) but we intend to follow through. We want to make our mark, but we want to do it by doing good.

So, the details! After seemingly endless research, we have decided to go with Canada Post and the US Postal Service. Sounds a bit staid and predictable, I know, but there are a lot of reasons:

1. Canada Post and USPS ship to every postal station everywhere. This is not a little thing. The private package services (who will remain unnamed, because we do not wish to receive angrymail) only deliver to larger centers. The Internet tells us a story of a man in Red Deer, Alta, who waited for his parcel to arrive via one of them. Thanks to parcel tracking, he was able to watch his package go from Calgary to Edmonton to Calgary to Edmonton over and over and over, all because the delivery driver (apparently!) couldn’t find the exit to Red Deer on Highway 2. Imagine if he lived in Drumheller!

2. Canada Post and USPS don’t add outrageous extra fees if a parcel crosses the border. They don’t hold your purchase hostage until you either cough up the cash or spend hours on the phone sorting out their cruel scam. Google “ebay brokerage fee lawsuit” if you want to know more about this nasty con.

3. Canada Post offers us a shipping charge module that allows our store to automatically calculate the exact cost to ship your items. No more high default shipping costs where you end up paying more for shipping an item than it cost in the first place!

There are other things we plan to do to save you money and reduce our impact on the environment:

• Reduce the amount of packaging with your shipment. No more giant boxes with a ton of packing materials around a small object. Instead, we’ll use appropriately sized boxes and brown paper wrapping to cut down on the size and weight of your package.

•  Re-use packing materials where ever appropriate. We collect clean boxes and packing material in good condition and use it to package your purchase. We have agreements with several local companies to re-direct their used packaging from the waste stream and keep it in circulation for longer. That means 1ess packing material at the local landfill and lower impact on the environment for all of us. Best of all, this lowers our costs and we pass our savings on to you!

• Offer bicycle shipping for local deliveries. Live in Victoria?  Want to cut down on your carbon footprint? Ask for our free cycle shipping option!

We’re always looking for more ideas on how to reduce costs in a sustainable, ethical way. While we do look for best practices from other on-line retailers, we’d love to hear your thoughts about what else we can do – or what we can do better. Comment here or send us a message to share your ideas!

Many seemingly complex features of the world and universe are built from repeating units that combine regularly to assemble astoundingly beautiful structures. From sea shells and spiral galaxies to cauliflower florets and the leaves on a tree, repeating patterns shape our universe.

This month’s project is a model of a truncated icosahedron, a planar combination of hexagons and pentagons. You might recognize this pattern as the shape from a soccer ball. This model was developed by George W. Hart.

While it looks complicated, this is a relatively simple model to construct and is a good place to start for beginners. This example is made from 20 3″ triangles cut from scrap cardboard. You can also use other types of paper, such as construction paper or poster board.

Materials needed:

• Ruler
• Scissors
• Pencil
• Compass
• White glue
• 9″ by 12″ of scrap cardboard

Cut out the triangles:

1. Use the pencil, ruler, and compass to draw a 3” equilateral triangle.
2. Cut it out.
3. Trace 20 copies of the triangle and cut them out.
4. On each triangle, cut a slit on each side, 1″ from the corner. Each slit should reach to the triangle’s midline. These slits will help each piece lock together when you assemble the model.

Tip: To make this process faster, cut a template using the 21st triangle you cut out earlier.

Once slits are cut on all three sides of all twenty triangles, you are ready for assembly.

Assemble the icosahedron:

1. Slide two triangles together, by their slits.
   
2. Add three more triangles to make a ring of five triangles.
   
3. Add another triangle to each of the free points on the ring.
   
   
4. Then, to create an alternating row, connect a new triangle to two of the triangles on the ring. This should form a pentagon-shaped space between the triangles.
   
   
5. Repeat step 4 with four more triangles, until the ring is complete. 
   
6. Fit the last five triangles across the ends to complete the polyhedra.
   

Tip: If you are having difficulty with pieces popping out while you are working dab a little white glue on the seams as you go.

Other ideas:

Try making paper sculptures in different sizes. The larger you go the more rigid your source material needs to be. Or go smaller to  make some lovely,  delicate models using decorative papers of all kinds.

If this type of project appeals to you, try the versatile and far more durable Space Chips available in many sizes and styles.

Revelation! It IS possible to make an interesting, affordable set of prepared slides for the beginner microscopist. I have seen countless boring, over-priced prepared slide sets in my life but now I can rest easy, I have found a set from Celestron that truly exceeded my expectations.

These slides are less expensive than others I have encountered. I expected to encounter some cost cutting measures to make up for this but nothing immediately jumped out at me. These slides are optically sound, well produced, and effectively packaged in a sturdy wooden box.

The biggest selling feature of Celestron’s prepared slide collection is the cross-section of samples. There are, predictably, plant root, stem, and leaf sections. Protists (single celled organisms) are similarly well represented. The slides that catch my interest are the ones that people always seem to ask for the most: physiology slides. There are six in this collection: cardiac muscle, skeletal muscle, motor neuron, spinal cord, intestine, and a good old-fashioned blood smear.

Well, here we are! The website is live, we’ve got a deal with merchant services for credit card and Interact services, and we are adding product to the e-store just as fast as we can. As some of you may have seen, both our Facebook page and Twitter account are live, so we’re starting to post fun, interesting, and thought-provoking stuff.

Last night, we checked out some of the stock that just came in. Bruce cooed over a cute little baby Dobsonian telescope – a children’s My First Telescope type. Mostly because it is just so teeny next to his personal telescope (an 8″er from Celestron), but also because it was ready to go right out of the box. Brynne was ecstatic over the Celestron Deluxe Handheld Digital Microscope. It was very simple and intuitive to use and plugged right into her laptop. She slid some snake skin under the scope and came up with some excellent pictures. Stay tuned to hear more about this microscope – Brynne plans to post a review of it.

Unfortunately we don’t have either the telescope or microscope loaded into the store yet, but we expect to soon.