STEAM Magazine - Autumn 2022 Issue

WELCOME

Designed By Pupils. Made By Pupils.

We are pleased to be continuing The John Lyon School STEAM Magazine – STEAM into the Future – into its second year. Well done to the hard-working team who have contributed to this issue, both by researching and writing articles, and designing the magazine. I have definitely enjoyed reading their articles and learning something new, I hope you will too. It would be good to see some more new contributors in future issues so if you would like to be involved in the next issue of the magazine, please let us know.

Merry Christmas and have a festive new year!

Dr J Abda Teacher of Chemistry & STEAM

DR JULIA ABDA, JOHN LYON SCHOOL LEAD DESIGNER - HEMANG K 10RMC

Asupernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. Once a star burns through its fuel and cools, the outward forces of pressure drop. When the pressure gets low enough in a massive star, gravity suddenly takes over and it collapses within seconds. This collapse happens so quickly that is creates enormous shock waves that cause the outer region of the star to explode. On average, one or two Milky Way stars per century undergo core collapse, according to the most recent estimates. Yet throughout history, only five supernovae have been recorded as being visible with the naked eye. The last supernova seen by the naked eye was the SN 1987A, which is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

HOW RARE IS A SUPERNOVA

WHAT IS A SUPERNOVA AND HOW DOES IT OCCUR?

HOW HOT AND POWERFUL IS A SUPERNOVA?

The temperature at the core during the explosion can soar up to 100 billion degrees Celsius, which is 6000 times the temperature of the Sun’s core. Also, when a supernova explodes, it ejects matter into space at speeds of 9000 to 25000 miles per second.

WILL OUR SUN SUPERNOVA?

No, our Sun isn’t large enough to supernova. For our Sun to supernova, it would need to be 10 times larger in mass. Instead, the Sun will shrink into a white dwarf instead. A white dwarf is a comparatively small, very dense star that is usually around the size of a planet. It is a stellar core remnant made up of predominantly electrondegenerate matter and forms when a low mass star has exhausted all its nuclear fuel at the centre and loses its outer layers.

HOW CAN A SUPERNOVA BE CONSIDERED POSITIVELY?

A supernova adds enriching elements to space clouds of dust and gas. It produces a shock wave that compresses clouds of gas to help form new stars, thus furthering interstellar diversity. So, supernovae bring positive effects to the rest of the Universe.

DID YOU KNOW:

Supernovae are brighter than a galaxy. For a short period of time, a single supernova will easily outshine an entire galaxy of stars, releasing as much energy in a single burst as our Sun will in its entire 10 billionyear lifespan.

HOW HAVE SUPERNOVAE AFFECTED HUMANS?

A supernova produces a lot of the material in the Universe, including the element iron, which makes up our planet and ourselves. Heavy elements, such as uranium, iron and gold also originate from a supernova. This means that we all carry remnants of these explosions that happened long ago in the past within our bodies, as they produce these heavy elements, which then get expelled across interstellar space. Then elements become part of interstellar clouds, which condense into planets such as Earth, and thus are in the life that is on ear

REFERENCES:

https://www.spaceanswers.com/ deep-space/is-the-universe-coolingdown/ https:// www.nationalgeographic.com/ science/article/supernovae

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/ permanent/the-universe/stars/aspectacular-stellar-finale/we-arestardust

On the 30th of September 2022, Tesla held their annual AI Day, where they showcase the developments made in their AI driven software, such as on the self-driving cars. The presentation on the Tesla Bot this year was incredibly exciting. The Tesla Bot is designed to be a humanoid robot, that will do boring, repetitive, and dangerous tasks. One day in the future there could be a Tesla Bot in your home to do washing and cleaning. We saw the amazing progress the Optimus team (who work exclusively on the Tesla Bot) have made in just a year, and we got to see how they did it and the process for building it. The process of building the Tesla Bot was to first make a functional robot with parts which can be found easily (off the shelf parts, not custom made). The first prototype, which was seen walking at the event, was nicknamed Bumble C.

The team used parts found ‘off the shelf’ to construct human joints and make the robot. Three cameras are located in the robot’s head to gather information about its surroundings. This information is sent to the same FSD (full selfdriving) computer which comes in every Tesla car produced, which uses the cameras’ information to understand its environment, move around safely and identify different objects. The presentation included film of the prototype working in factories moving boxes, and watering plants by identifying the watering can and the plants with its onboard computer with no input from humans.

works similarly to the muscles in your thighs as the piston used to move the knee is very similar to how the thigh muscle contracts and relaxes.

The first prototype acted as a proof of concept which allowed the team to continue onto the second iteration. The second version of the Tesla Bot that we saw at AI day 2022 was a robot with parts that were custom made at Tesla, and it is much closer to what the finished product is meant to be. It wasn’t able to walk yet as the first prototype can, but this functionality was due to be added soon. The estimated cost for a Tesla Bot for mass market production and use in your home is $20,000.

The battery for the Tesla Bot has a capacity of 2.3 kWh which Tesla says is enough for a full day of work. The battery is also fully integrated which means that the cooling, power distribution and battery management is all built into the battery pack. The battery pack and the FSD computer are both located in the torso to keep the centre of gravity similar to that of a human.

Overall, the Tesla Bot is an interesting project and could revolutionise repetitive work such as factory work and stacking shelves. I think it is very impressive that Tesla have managed to make a fully functional robot in just one year.

If you want to find out more about the Tesla Bot and other things discussed during AI day part 2 visit: Tesla AI Day 2022 - YouTube

For a summary of what happened during this long event visit: Elon Musk Reveals The Tesla Bot At Tesla AI Day! - YouTube

The Optimus team decided to develop the robots’ joints and movements based on human movements. This is because the body is very good at moving the way it is so instead of making a new way to move a human shaped object, they used similar joints to that of a person. For example, the movement mechanism in the knee

DIAGNOSIS SMELL ELECTRONIC

AMEYA B - 9AHJ

Humans have used smell as a tool to diagnose diseases for many centuries. The Ancient Greeks and Chinese used smell to diagnose tuberculosis as early as 2000 B.C. Gas gangrene has been reliably diagnosed by smell in the battlefield. Patients with liver failure are said to emit a very distinctive smell. Diabetes mellitus quite literally translates to “sweet urine”, referring to the distinctive fruity smell associated with diabetic patients. Evidence suggests that yellow fever can make people smell of a butcher’s shop and typhoid patients smell of freshly baked bread.

The ability of specialised sensory cells in the nose to detect volatile organic compounds is vital in a human’s ability to smell important clues in the environment. Diseases alter human metabolism and therefore, the mix of volatile organic compounds being emitted by humans who might otherwise appear healthy but who might not yet have been diagnosed with a particular disease.

Despite the ability of humans to detect ill health on the basis of smells, it is the ability of animals to reliably detect disease which has received far more attention from scientists in recent decades. It has been proven that dogs can detect lung cancer in breath samples with 99 percent accuracy and breast cancer with 89 percent accuracy.

Dogs have also been known to detect malaria in children with 70% accuracy based on smell. Dogs have also been used to accurately detect Parkinson’s disease, often years before a formal diagnosis in the patient. Rats have been documented to detect bacteria associated with tuberculosis in the spit of patients who have tested positive for the disease with similarly impressive levels of accuracy.

For centuries, humans have harnessed this incredibly powerful ability that dogs have to detect the faintest of scents within a complex environment of smells to hunt, to aid search and rescue missions, to detect drugs, to detect explosives and now, there is an increasing focus on using this incredible ability to detect diseases.

However, there was an exciting breakthrough at the end of summer this year. The world’s media was excited when in September 2022, Joy Milne, a retired nurse from Perth, Scotland was instrumental in inspiring scientists to develop a swab test that could be used to

diagnose Parkinson’s Disease. Joy was able to detect a change in the way her husband Les smelled 12 years before he was formally diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. She described it as a rather musty, unpleasant smell. She only linked the distinctive smell to the disease after Les and Joy met others with the disease at a Parkinson's UK support group and Joy realised that they all emitted the same distinctive smell. The night before her husband died, he made her promise to investigate her sense of smell because he believed it would make a life-changing difference to families to get an early diagnosis. Joy spoke to a Parkinson’s researcher in Edinburgh named Tilo Kunath, who mentioned it to his colleague, analytical chemist Perdita Barran. They both decided that wellmeaning Joy may have just noticed the “characteristic smell of old people” and talked themselves out of it. However, another biochemist was intrigued and it was finally pursued and eventually led to the development of a preliminary swab test which has the potential to offer life-changing opportunities for patients with Parkinson’s to spend more time with loved ones before the symptoms become overwhelming.

Parkinson Disease is the fastest growing neurological condition in the world. Approximately 145,000 people in the UK live with the condition. There is no cure and no definitive diagnostic test, with clinicians diagnosing patients by observing symptoms. With no definitive test, people have to wait months or years to be diagnosed. The swab test inspired by Joy could be revolutionary. This is just one neurological disease where smell has been proven to be an effective diagnostic tool and research is well under way to develop a low cost efficient and easy test to provide an accurate early diagnosis for patients who develop the disease. This could pave the way for other similarly devastating diseases to develop low cost, non invasive diagnostic technologies to assist the medical community to make early diagnosis.

Scientists are working on mimicking the biological olfactory systems. This has led to the development of electronic noses, also called e-noses. The electronic nose works like a mammalian nose. An array of chemical sensors mimic the range of receptors in the mammalian nose. Each of these sensors is made to respond differently to different scents. The signals from these sensors are transferred to a computer using sensitive electronics. The signals sent to the computer are then interpreted using a special pattern recognition software. Like a human nose, when a scent is first detected, it is tagged and stored in a bank of signature scents. These devices can then identify disease-specific odour profiles of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) within a complex environment of smells.

Studies using different types of electronic noses for detecting pulmonary diseases and cancers have shown promising results in the arena of noninvasive medical diagnostics. Prior to the invention of sophisticated medical equipment, smell was a common diagnostic tool. Smell is still used as a secondary diagnostic tool in some illnesses but is often disregarded by the medical community. The lack of objective scientific research and investment in this field has prevented its widespread usage in modern medicine. A dependable electronic nose may allow for a revival in the use of smell as a non -invasive diagnostic tool for diseases.

The research is extremely promising although the medical community is still largely sceptical of its widespread use as a reliable tool for diagnosis. This is an exciting field of research to observe in the years ahead as the technology continues to evolve. The practical uses of electronic noses may come to include the possibility of it being used in nasal implants which could warn people who have lost their sense of smell to detect the presence of natural gas in their environment.

In conclusion, scent detection by humans, animals and electronic noses are promising avenues for future research attention and funding in order to develop low-cost technologies that can transform the future for millions of people, particularly in the developing world where resources and access to high quality and extensive diagnostic labs are limited and prohibitively expensive.

ALY A - 8GMM

In this article, I will be talking about sleep. Well, what is sleep? Sleep is the terminology used for a state where all your body muscles relax, your heart beats and your lungs breathe less frequently. But why exactly do we need to sleep? What are its uses? Let’s find out…

- Sleep is controlled by 3 major factors, the first being the circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm is basically a sort of 24 -hour clock that runs inside your body. It tells you approximately when to sleep and when to wake up. It’s like a loop that goes on and on in your brain.

- The second factor is melatonin. When the circadian rhythm decides it is dusk, it sends a signal to your brain to release melatonin into your bloodstream from the pineal gland. It acts like a megaphone, shouting “It’s bedtime!”. Its counteractive hormone, cortisol, is used to wake you up and give you a sense of alertness.

- The last factor of sleep is known as adenosine, or sleep pressure. Think of this as a meter that keeps going up, from the minute you wake up, to the minute you fall asleep. It keeps on growing and growing until you can’t resist the urge to sleep.

Caffeine works by blocking the receptors to your adenosine, meaning your brain keeps building and building up the sleep pressure and you don’t feel it. That’s why you feel refreshed when you have a cup of coffee, it takes away the feeling of dreariness and sleep pressure. And that’s also why when the effect wears off, you suddenly feel very tired, and then drink another cup, and another, and another. Eventually you’ll fall into the viscous cycle of caffeine, and you’ll become sleep deprived.

WHAT ABOUT TIME?

The creation of the jet engine was a revolutionary change allowing people to travel around the whole world. But it had an unforeseen problem. Planes went faster than our internal clocks could keep up with. This caused something we know as jet lag. As a result, we might be feeling sleepy through the day and awake at night, because our circadian rhythm hasn’t yet adjusted to the time of the new country or place you are in. And for every day you spend in the new time zone, your circadian rhythm can only adjust by about one hour.

So, let’s say that you were travelling to Japan for work, for one week. Japan is 8 hours ahead of the UK. By the end of the trip, you wouldn’t have even fully adjusted to the time, because you can only adjust by about 1 hour each day. And after you’ve nearly adjusted, you have to go back to England, and will have to go through the same sleep difficulties.

However, you may have noticed that its easier when you fly westward than eastward, whether on the way there or back. There are two reasons for this. The first being that flying eastward, you have to sleep earlier, but for westward, you’d have to stay up later, which in some cases is easier than sleeping earlier. The second reason is that if you pay close attention, the circadian rhythm is actually 24 hours and 15 minutes. As small as this might be, it makes it feel better because when you travel westward, the day you are in is a little longer, whereas eastward makes the day shorter. And having the extra few minutes makes it feel easier to artificially stretch your circadian rhythm, rather than squashing and shortening it.

4 THEORIES WHY WE SLEEP:

1) To conserve energy. Our brains consume around 20% of all our energy, so it makes a lot of sense to preserve this whenever you can. In addition, if you are hiding in a safe spot, it is harder for predators to spot you.

2) Sleep plays a role in growth and development. This theory is supported by the fact that the growth hormone is only secreted during sleep.

3) Sleep is a time for physical and mental recovery, as well as clearing metabolic waste. This theory sees sleep as a chance to repair muscles, replace essential chemicals, and rest the brain from the emotional and intellectual demands of the day.

4) Sleep is for consolidating memories and retrieving the emotional moral of your daily activities. This retrieval is known as emotional distillation. You store all the important information that could be useful for your survival in the future and forget the rest which you don’t need to remember, for example, what you ate a few days ago, except if you got harmed or poisoned by the food.

The earliest scientific theory was made by Sigmund Freud. He believed that dreams were unconscious wishes and thoughts that could be threatening if considered while awake. He also believed there was two parts to dreaming. 1) Manifest content is the story line of the dream, images, thoughts, and feelings. 2) Latent content refers to hidden aggressive and instincts that we subdue from our conscious awareness. There is little support for this theory except for a study in 2004, which proved that one part of Freud’s theory was correct, which is that we are more likely to dream about things that we are trying our best to ignore, this is now known as the dream rebound effect.

The next 2 theories are newer but have contrasting ideas.

The first is that dreams are a by-product of random stimulation of the brain during sleep, which the brain takes in and creates clear patterns known as dreams. In other words, the brain tries to make up a story from the random electrical charges during sleep. This theory is supported by the fact that all parts of the brain will stay on to an extent during sleep, except the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain for logical thinking. This could explain why our dreams can be very illogical and make no sense.

The contrasting theory is that dreaming is a time for cognition and understanding. According to this theory, dreams help us organise and understand our everyday life experiences and enhance memory of what is important. In another explanation, dreaming is like a tool which works in the background while you sleep, which prepares us for better survival chances for the next day. That’s why you should always have a good night’s sleep before a test! The sleeping will help you remember more of what you have revised.

Over the course of the whole night, we move from light sleep, stage 1 and 2, to stage 3 deep sleep. Then the cycle goes a little back to stage 2 before entering REM sleep. This cycle repeats itself around every 90-120 minutes, meaning we have about 4 to 5 cycles of sleep during the night.

REFERENCES

Williams, C. (ed.) (2021) How your brain works: Inside the most complicated object in the known universe. London: New Scientist.

Butler, G. and McManus, F. (2014) Psychology: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cash, A. (2020) Psychology for dummies. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Peter, F. (ed.) (2020) How the brain works: The facts visually explained. New York, NY: DK Publishing.

Walker, M.P. (2018) Why we sleep: The new science of sleep and dream. Miejsce nieznane: Penguin Books.

1. The brain processes 1,375,000 bytes of data every second which is 1375 kilobytes or 1.375 megabytes.

2. There is evidence that people were riding horses 6,500 years ago

3. A single cough can contain up to 200 million virus particles.

4. 500 tones is the weight of an average cumulus cloud

5. One lighting strike can toast 100,000 pieces of toast

6. A wren can sing 36 notes in one second

7. Opiorphin is a powerful painkiller which can be found in our saliva

8. The human skin replaces itself around 900 times in the average human’s life

9. Oxygen is pale blue as a liquid or solid

10. 8,000 cars were owned by Americans in 1900

10 FUN FACTS

STEAM

PROJECTS ACROSS JOHN LYON

Robotics Team Qualify to Nationals with 3 awards Year 7s making spaghetti bridges

Year 7 building tall paper towers

Year 7 making cardboard boats