We spent a bit of time talking about how the reactants of respiration, glucose and oxygen, get to our cells and how the (waste) products, water and carbon dioxide, are carried away from our cells. The transport system which does all of this is our circulatory system. It is our blood which transports it all inside veins, capillaries and arteries. We finished up introducing the thing which pumps the blood around the body, the heart.

WHY WE SHOULD TAKE FLAT EARTHERS SERIOUSLY

The heart

The heart is actually two pumps in one. One pumps blood to the lungs to get the oxygen (and release carbon dioxide) and the second pumps blood around the rest of the body to deliver the oxygen (and collect the carbon dioxide). This means the second pump would pump more strongly than the first as the blood needs to flow a longer way.

In the diagram on the right we see the heart. As you can see there are halves, one is more blue and the other is more pink. In reality the heart is not blue at all and neither is the blood at any point, but it is a colour code for the diagram. Blue means the blood has very little oxygen in it and pink (or red) means it has a lot of oxygen in it.

The two halves are the two pumps I was talking about earlier on. They are called atriums. Notice that the right atrium is actually on the left and the left is on the right? Why is that? It is because if we were doing an operation on someone’s heart, they would be lying on their back facing us. Their left would be on our right and vice versa. 

Circulatory System

If you use the diagram of the circulatory system on the left with the diagram above we can see where the blood goes a little more easily. The right atrium pumps blood to the lungs via the pulmonary artery. Here is  where it can collect oxygen and drop off carbon dioxide. Once it has done that it flows back into the pulmonary vein in the left atrium. Notice before it gets into the lungs the diagram shows the blood as blue to show a lack of oxygen in the blood and after the blood is red to show it now has a lot of oxygen in the blood. The left atrium now pumps the oxygenated blood around the rest of the body. The blood then flows back, now depleted of oxygen, into the vena cava in the right ventricle ready to repeat the cycle.

The lungs

When the blood gets to the lungs to collect oxygen, how are the lungs suited to help with this process? We know that when we breathe in our lungs fill with air, but what else? What are we doing when we breathe in? How do we pull the air from the outside into our lungs?

Breathing is an interesting action. We mostly do it automatically when we’re concentrating on some other activity and even when we’re sleeping. However we can deliberately breathe as well. Most actions are either one or the other.

How does it work?

Whether we breathe deliberately or automatically, what we are doing is contracting our diaphragm which pulls down and forces our lungs to increase in size. As the lungs expand more air is drawn in to fill the space. Intercostal muscles also work to help expand our rib cage to help. The air flows into our nose or mouth and then down our trachea.

Half goes to the right and half to the left down bronchi (one bronchus, two bronchi). Then the bronchi split up into smaller tubes called bronchioles. The tubes keep splitting up like trunks, branches, sticks and twigs of a tree, until they reach very very tiny little air sacs called alveoli. Because the tubes split up so many times, one breath can reach many many alveoli and at this point the oxygen in the air is able to get into the blood by a process called diffusion. Basically, there is a higher concentration on one side than the other, so oxygen flows into the blood from the breathed in air.

I could talk further about how digestion works to get the glucose into the body and what else the blood does and some of the other adaptations of the breathing system, confusingly called the respiratory system, as it is all of course connected, but I’ll leave it there for this 2 part series. I hope it helped clear up a few things and I shall look forward to writing the next post soon!

5 REASONS WHY GOOD STUDY SKILLS ARE IMPORTANT 

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post Respiration (part 2) – The heart and lungs appeared first on The Tutor Team.

Respiration (part 1) – transporting the goods

Oxygen is a very reactive element. If you blast a flame with oxygen you will get a very dramatic effect! Metal items exposed to oxygen, rust and fall apart. These reactions may seem inconvenient, but there are some reactions we are grateful for. There is one which occurs inside nearly every cell of our bodies, without which, we would not be alive. The name of this reaction is respiration. There are in fact two types of respiration, but I shall be referring to aerobic respiration in this post, which involves oxygen. I may talk about anaerobic respiration in another post.

Many people confuse respiration with breathing. It is not breathing. However, breathing is necessary for respiration to occur, but so is eating. Let’s explore…

The reaction

Respiration is the reaction of oxygen with glucose. These are called the reactants because they are reacting with one another. Oxygen is very reactive and glucose contains a lot of energy. When the two substances react this energy is released. This is good news for us as we can use the energy released to move, produce heat, grow, repair and many other things necessary for life. The substances produced (the products) are carbon dioxide and water. These are often both called waste products because the point of the reaction was to make energy, not either of these two products.

Transport of goods 

So, now we know what respiration is, why it is important and where it occurs. But how does the oxygen and glucose get there? And what about the so called ‘waste products’? Don’t we need to take them away if they’re not being used. Er… yes. So, we need some sort of transport system. Something to deliver the oxygen and glucose. Blood. That’s right, the red liquid flowing throughout your body as we speak is tirelessly working hard to deliver these goods to different parts of your body and have been doing this since before you were born!

Your blood travels through tubes called blood vessels. There are three types of blood vessels:

1. 1. Arteries: These vessels have thick walls as they carry blood at high pressure and walls need to be able to cope with the high pressure without bursting.

• Veins: These vessels have thinner walls as the blood inside them is of a much lower pressure. The downside of this is that there is a risk of it flowing back in the opposite direction. To stop this, veins have valves which stop the blood flowing in the opposite direction.

• Capillaries: These are the smallest of the blood vessels and the final stop delivering the goods. If you want to get oxygen and glucose to the cells, this is where it happens. The walls are extremely thin (one cell thick) so as the substances can easily pass through them and into the place it is trying to get to.

A VIEW INTO THE FUTURE (PART 1): SPLIT BRAINS, GUT BACTERIA

The pump

So, just to summarise so far… 

• There is a chemical reaction happening inside (nearly) every cell in your body called respiration.
• The point of this reaction is to produce energy.
• The reactants required for this reaction to occur are glucose and oxygen.
• The products of this reaction are carbon dioxide and water.
• The blood carries the glucose and oxygen to these cells in blood vessels.
• The blood also carries the products away from the cells and eventually out of the body.

So, what keeps the blood flowing so as to deliver the goods? You may already know it is the heart. This is our very own pump which continually beats since before we were born to pump the blood to our lungs and then back to the heart to pump it a second time around the rest of the body. When it pumps the blood to the lungs it has to pump quite hard, but not as hard as when it pumps around the rest of the body.

Any blood leaving the heart will be under a high pressure as it has just been pumped by the heart and so guess what type of blood vessel it will be transported in? An artery. Think A for artery and A for away. Blood flowing back to the heart will be under a lower pressure and so will be travelling in… veins! Think into the heart; and vein.

Why does it go to the lungs first? To get the oxygen and drop off the carbon dioxide. When you breathe in, the air you breathe in contains 21% oxygen. That oxygen passes into the blood as it makes its way to the lungs and when you breathe out you will breathe out more carbon dioxide as it leaves the body.

Next post I shall be writing a little more about the heart, lungs and circulatory system and also about how the glucose gets into the body.

5 REASONS WHY GOOD STUDY SKILLS ARE IMPORTANT 

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post Respiration (part 1) – Transporting the Goods appeared first on The Tutor Team.

Welcome back to the second part in this two part series on how to be scared of the future!

In my last post I showed with some examples of split brain patients, gut bacteria affecting your personality and other day to day observations that the hard line we imagine between us and the rest of the world is actually a little bit blurry it would seem! In this post we shall continue along these lines and think about where this could lead with the kind of technology which has been coming out in the past decade or so.

Wearable technology

Nowadays we already have a bit of wearable technology. Google glasses allow to experience augmented reality in which notifications, weather, messages and so forth appear over the top of what you can see through the glasses. smart watches measure your pulse, monitor your sleep and help you track your overall fitness. We even have implants which contain information such as payment apps implanted in your hand, or monitor your blood sugar level and pace-makers have been around for a long time now. We even have bionic limbs which can be controlled by thought!

LEARNING ONLINE – HOW TO ABSORB INFORMATION

Combining brain with technology

Maybe in the future, an implant may be possible in your brain. Crazy! Never! Actually, it is already happening! Click here to see an article about Bain-computer interfaces and brain monitoring implants as well as implants which release proteins in your brain for those in need of such medical treatment. All of this is for medical purposes, but it does not seem too far fetched to imagine the use of this technology becoming more mainstream. Maybe a microchip in your brain could help you access the internet with thought! So, we could ‘think’ what the weather is tomorrow, or what year the battle of Hastings took place. We might also be able to write an email by thought.

Next, maybe many people get this technology. It becomes normal, like mobile phones, or social media. So, you could have virtual chats with a friend anywhere in the world, by just thinking. We must realise that we may often think in words and sentences, but not always. Sometimes we think without words or language. On those occasions, currently we cannot communicate those ideas without translating into language, and so often there are arguments and people do not understand one another.

All of this would change with this technology. In fact, you and your friend may cease to feel like two separate people. It may be possible that your thoughts and your friends’ thoughts could be difficult to tell apart. This is similar to the two hemispheres inside your brain which constantly communicate with one another and so make it seem as if you are one person. Now you and your friends may seem like one person! That feels a little strange!

The Borg

Eventually, this could spread to larger groups than just two. Maybe the whole world. After all, language is no longer a barrier, because we are communicating via thought. At this point, we would become a superorganism. One ‘person’ made out many humans. In the same way as one human is made out of many living cells. This idea was first postulated in Star Trek with the idea of ‘The Borg’

Are we already one super-organism?

We tend to think of ourselves as separate independent people in control of our lives, but in reality we are hugely dependent on millions of people everyday. At least the majority of things we do are dependent on the actions of other millions of people. When we shop for food, when we use technology, when we turn on our lights or buy some clothes, it is only possible because of the work of people we have never met.

Right now as I type this sentence it is only possible for the people who maintain the National grid, the people who maintain the internet, the people who helped to develop the internet in the first place, the people who made my computer, who mined the materials needed for the computer, the books I read which inspired me to write what I wrote, the people who enabled me to buy the book by making, distributing and advertising it.

Meanwhile, the services we all provide in our jobs and in life are helping countless people to do the things they want to do. We rarely reflect on this fact and maybe we should a little more often. In a way, we are already a super organism without realising.

A VIEW INTO THE FUTURE (PART 1): SPLIT BRAINS AND GUT BACTERIA

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post A view into the future (Part 2): Technology appeared first on The Tutor Team.

In Physics there are many topics which are a little strange and do not seem to match how we experience the world normally.

Inspiration for this post came from:

• Yuval Noah Harari and his trilogy of books about us humans (Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
• The Borg from Star Trek
• A video explaining the experiments on ‘Split Brain’ patients by CGP Grey.

Split Brain patients??

It turns out that our brains are made out of 2 parts, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. The left controls the right part of the body and receives information from the right and vice versa with the right hemisphere. Crucially, the left hemisphere controls pretty much all of verbal communication. The right hemisphere does not contribute to what we say, but it does hear, using the right ear. Normally these two hemispheres are connected and are in constant communication with one another, but…

Treatments for epilepsy were conducted in the past in which the two hemispheres were disconnected which helped to reduce seizures by keeping the disruption within one hemisphere. The experiment worked brilliantly, except that the patients of these treatments experienced some strange side effects. At times it seemed that the left arm seemed to have a mind of its own. It would choose a different item of clothing, or a different type of food from the fridge than what the patient intended. After careful experimentation it seemed that the patient’s personality had been split into two. One ‘person’ existed in the right hemisphere and the other in the left. Scientists conducted experiments with volunteers to conclude this, which can be seen in the video I linked to above.

Are we so different from split brain patients?

It would seem then, that we therefore are already two people in our heads, but in direct and constant communication with each other so much so, that we feel like one person. In groups of people, this phenomenon is also observed. A group of people will seem to have one personality, when viewed in a general way by looking at the behaviour of the group. A similar thought experiment could take place with hives of bees, which have ‘hive intelligence’ or armies of ants. In a similar way, humans working on huge projects, such as building a rocket and landing it on the moon are very very unaware of how their individual jobs connect with the overall aim and as such the overall personality and intelligence of the group is different to that of an individual within the group.

LEARNING SCIENCE – CAN IT MAKE YOU HAPPY?

This is me, that is not me!

We all have an idea of stuff is us and what stuff is not us. My head is me, my glasses are not me. My skin is me, my red blood cells is me, the food is not me… But, it will become me at some point. At what point does the food you eat become you? When it enters your mouth? Or when the nutrients go into your bloodstream? When the nutrients make it to your cells? What about the bacteria living in your digestive system? They have entirely different DNA, so cannot possibly be you, right? Did you know that they affect how your brain works, even down to your very personality? If you had different gut bacteria, your personality would be different, so would that mean that ‘you’ are different?

5 REASONS WHY GOOD STUDY SKILLS ARE IMPORTANT 

Stop! My brain hurts!

This is starting to get a bit weird, right? We think we know what we are and what is not us, but when we breathe, the oxygen in the air becomes us and bits of us become carbon dioxide which makes up the air. Plants then take that in during photosynthesis and in no time at all it is now part of the plant.

We may eat some plants, and/or animals which ate some plants and they then become part of us. Meanwhile, the bacteria living inside of us are affecting our behaviour and personality. In fact, the mitochondria that live inside of all of our cells in our body used to be classified as an entirely separate organism, but at some point in our evolutionary history it invaded a cell and since then they have existed together. And now it turns out you can even chop a brain in half and you get two people living inside one human!

Ok. This is too much for now! Next post I shall build on this idea and suggest what is in store for us in the distant future as we start to combine with technology!

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post A view into the future (Part 1): Split brains, gut bacteria appeared first on The Tutor Team.

So, before I get into this I should probably make it clear that I strongly believe that the Earth is a sphere and the sun is at the centre of our solar system and basically, all of the science which we generally take for granted.

I do not believe that the Earth is flat, but the title is not just a piece of click bait, (well… maybe a little), I do believe that we should take flat-earthers seriously.

LEARNING SCIENCE – CAN IT MAKE YOU HAPPY?

How do you know anything?

It seems the main sort of argument flat-earthers put forward for their beliefs is that we should only believe what we can collect directly with our own senses and not blindly trust whatever we are being told. Here is a quote from The Flat Earth Society website:

“The world looks flat, the bottoms of the clouds are flat, the movement of the sun; these are examples of your senses telling you that we do not live on a spherical heliocentric world. This is using what’s called an empirical approach, or an approach that relies on information from your senses.”

This sounds like a convincing argument and it is a problem because that convincing argument is like a virus which has spread throughout society in recent years leading to a lot of people succumbing to conspiracy theories. I shall attempt to provide some modest form of remedy in today’s post.

Firstly, we constantly have to trust in things we cannot know directly.

• • • • • • If I run my tap and pour myself a glass of water, how do I know it is not poisoned or full of mind-altering drugs?
          • If I buy some food from the shop, how I do know it is good for me and not going to make me ill?
          • How do I know  matter is really made out of atoms like my teacher tells me?

I have to go by what I have been told and use what we can evidence to decide on which possibility is most likely. Who would be poisoning my food and drink and for what purpose? How likely is it that people might do that? Might things seem different if our food and drink was being poisoned? How might things seem if it wasn’t? Looking at how things do in fact seem to us, which one is more likely?

Can we really trust our senses?

Furthermore, if we decide to only trust our senses, well how do we know we can really trust our senses? Have you seen the Matrix? 

Maybe we are all in the Matrix right now!! Even if everything is as everybody claims it is, we know that we cannot entirely trust our senses anyway.

Our memories are not anywhere near as accurate as we think they are. This is why people have arguments so often about how they recollect things occurring in some past events. Lawyers, criminal investigators and judges have learnt that witness eye accounts are not really all that reliable.  We frequently cannot find something we are looking for which is right in front of us. Let’s look at a brief illusion to remind us we cannot trust our senses.

These eggs are all the same colour. I’m not talking about vertical stripes which continue above and below the eggs. I am talking about the lighter colour which makes up the shape of the eggs. That colour is the same in each case. I know this, I’ve just proved it to myself (take a screenshot and play around on Paint for a bit…). But, my senses still tell me they are different even still. I cannot entirely trust my senses.

WHAT IS SEEING? PART 1: HOW MOST PEOPLE ‘SEE’

Direct evidence vs indirect evidence

The so called indirect evidence we get from books and people is not all that different from the so called direct evidence we get from our senses. When I look at my desk and see my hands and keyboard, I am actually applying concepts to what I see. I do not actually see hands and a keyboard. I see different colours and shapes. My brain uses what I have been told over the course of my life to give meaning to these colours and shapes.

So what do we do about it?

We have to realise nearly everything we ‘know’ is just our best guess, given our experience. We can by all means critique things people tell us, and it can certainly be fun and interesting to do your own experiments find out that the Earth is round, for example; but if we only trusted what we observe directly, we are essentially choosing to ignore and eradicate thousands of years of human understanding and knowledge.

Personally, I would rather build on what has been laid down by others, rather than start again.

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post Why we should take flat earthers seriously appeared first on The Tutor Team.

Let’s try and get our head around heat and temperature. A concept we thought at least this one we understood and then our Physics teacher took that away from us as well didn’t they??

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What is temperature

Some time ago we started to notice that things changed when it got hot or cold. Specifically, we noticed that matter (a sciency word for ‘stuff’) got bigger, or expanded, when it was hot and got smaller, or contracted when it was cold. Some clever scientists used this idea to invent various thermometers and then marked numbers on it so that we could actually measure how hot or cold something is. You know us humans always like measuring…

Now, we may not have understood how these thermometers did what they did, and I’m sure many of you never gave it much thought. If it’s hot or cold, the thermometer says so. But, how does it do that? If I search ‘thermometer’ on the internet and choose ‘images’, I mostly get images like the one you see here. These are not the only thermometers, but we will stick to this design for now. The first thermometer actually used air instead which expanded in heat and contracted in cold, but it was not as accurate as liquid and so thermometers started to use liquids soon after and we stuck to that.

The particle model of matter

When it gets hotter, the liquid expands inside the thin glass tube and so rises up. But why?

The basic reason is that the particles in the liquid move faster and move greater differences because they now have more energy. This causes them to spread out a little bit. This can be a little confusing because we learn pretty early on that liquids cannot be compressed and have a constant volume, but this is only at a constant temperature.

The above paragraph only makes sense if you are happy with the idea that matter is made out of particles. We have all seen the diagram below many times by now I’m sure, but we never actually see these particles our science teachers assure us are around do we? Well, they do exist, I am quite sure. This idea of matter being made out of particles is known as the particle model of matter.

UNCERTAINTIES IN PHYSICS

A new definition of temperature

So now we have an understanding of how our thermometer works, we could say that temperature is a measure of how fast the particles are moving, or even a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles. If you give the particles energy they move more quickly and so take up more space, which is why the liquid in a thermometer rises! Here is a simulation of a thermometer which you can play with and see the particles in it moving around.

So, if temperature is how quickly things are moving, at zero temperature they should… erm… not be moving?? But that can’t be right, I’ve walked around at 0°C and was able to breathe the air and survive. If particles had stopped moving, the air should have not been in a gaseous form, it should have been solid and the particles should not have even been vibrating! And what the heck would negative temperatures be? Well… Not all temperature scales start at the same place.

We chose to put 0°C at the freezing point of water and 100°C at the boiling point of water which is useful for many purposes, but is not exactly correct when we think of our new definition of temperature is it? We need a new scale!

Enter Kelvin!

Here he is. Looking rather sleepy in this photo, but he’s no doubt been hard at work coming up with a new scale for temperature! What do we call this new scale? The Kelvin scale!

What happens at zero kelvin? Nothing! Nothing moves. Particles in a solid do not even vibrate! We call this point absolute zero but… It turns out that it is impossible to actually reach this point.

That shouldn’t stop us from defining it though. It is impossible to get anything to actually sit still for a moment! I know that feeling…

Ok, so is heat the same as temperature??

Erm… Not really. If you think of how the two words are used, heat is something which something has or something which we can give to something. We do say ‘heat up’ as well, but that really means the same thing as to give something more heat so as it now has more heat in it.

Temperature, on the other hand, is a measure of how hot or cold it is. So, when we give something ‘heat’, what are we actually giving? Well… energy, right? So, heat is the energy we give it and temperature is the measure of average kinetic energy of the particles. Now it’s sounding like the same thing again! Not exactly… The keyword here is average. I mean the average kinetic energy of each particle.

However, if we give something energy, it should get hotter. Pretty straight forward right? However, if you plot a graph of heat against temperature something strange happens. I will have to leave that for another blog post though I’m afraid!

PHYSICS PRACTICE QUESTIONS – WHY ARE THEY SO ESSENTIAL?

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post Heat and Temperature: An Introduction appeared first on The Tutor Team.

The atom and its nucleus

In this picture of an atom, we can see we have protons and neutrons in the centre of the atom, which make up the nucleus and we have electrons around the nucleus. If I was teaching Chemistry right now, I might ask you what element it is in, and where it is in the periodic table. But I’m not (carbon, group 4, period 2). In fact, Chemistry is mostly concerned with the electrons in the atom as they are what is responsible for the chemical reactions it undergoes. Nuclear physics is concerned with… the nucleus of course!

The word atom comes from the Greek word atomos, which means indivisible. In other words, it cannot be divided into smaller bits. It has been theorised for a long time that matter is made out of indivisible particles and we called them atoms for that reason. However, once we found them and gave them the name we annoyingly found that they could be divided into further little particles, which can be called ‘subatomic particles’ and so atoms should really be called something else, but the name stuck.

The above atom is carbon because of its protons, nothing else. If we were to change the amount of neutrons or electrons it would not change the fact that it was carbon. Carbon is, by definition, an atom (or ion) with 6 protons.

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Isotopes

As I said, we could change the number of electrons or neutrons, but it would still be carbon. Changing the number of electrons makes it a positive or negative ion, but changing the number of neutrons would change it into a different type of carbon, or a different isotope of carbon. Not all carbon atoms have 6 neutrons. Some have 7 and some have 8. But by far the most common isotope of carbon is the one with 6 neutrons. The one with 8 neutrons does something quite strange…

UNCERTAINTIES IN PHYSICS

Nuclear decay

This can also be called radioactive decay. If left alone for a long time, (5730 years), there is a 50% chance that it would have changed, as if by magic, into an entirely different atom. It is important to understand here that nothing was done to encourage this. It did not react with anything. Heating up, cooling it down, shaking it or shouting at it will not speed up this process, slow it down or stop it. It can not be predicted when it will happen, only a probability like above can be stated.

Below is something called a nuclear equation of the process.

As you can see, before the decay there is the carbon-14 nucleus and after a nitrogen-14 nucleus. Looking more closely at the carbon 14 nucleus we can see that they have labelled one of the blue circles as a neutron and that same circle on the right is now red and labelled a proton.

A quick look at the periodic table tells us that nitrogen does in fact have 7 protons and this isotope of nitrogen has a mass of 14 and so it must have 7 neutrons. So, during the decay the number of protons went up by 1 and the neutrons went down by 1, leaving the mass number unchanged. Nothing was added to the nucleus and so clearly…

… a neutron changed into a proton??

Yup. That is what happened. Weird right? This type of decay is called beta decay and it is not the only one. There are also alpha decay and gamma decay. If you are studying A-level Physics, this is beta negative decay; there is also beta positive decay.

ISN’T IT AMAZING THAT WE’RE ALIVE? (A BRIEF GUIDE TO ORGAN SYSTEMS)

Ok, so what about these keywords?

So, let’s use this example decay to define the words:

• Nuclear/radioactive decay – This is the process which we have just been describing. An atom starts off as one type of atom and changes into another type of atom. It is spontaneous and random.
• Nuclear radiation – This is what is given off in the process. In this case an electron is given off, and we call this the beta particle. There are also alpha particles and gamma rays. These are examples of nuclear radiation as it is given off in nuclear decay. The antineutrino  is also given off in this example, but we only talk about that at A-level.
• Radioactivity – This is simply the topic of all of this. It can also be a word to describe how much radiation something emits. We can measure the activity of a radioactive isotope which means how often one of the atoms decay and emit some radiation.

Ok. I hope that is clear enough now. Thanks for reading and I shall see you in the next post!

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post Radioactivity, nuclear decay, radiation… What’s the difference? appeared first on The Tutor Team.

Every now and then something will catch your attention and have a strong physiological effect on you. Your eyes will open a little wider, your pupils will dilate, your mouth will drop open and you may gasp or say “wow!”. The word for this emotional response is awe.

The thing which caused the effect is, by definition, awesome and you are awestruck. We have probably all experienced this before and it is quite pleasant. One thing is for sure, in that moment you are nowhere but right there, present in what is happening.

WHAT IS ELECTRICITY?

Being Awestruck

You are not distracted by your many worries or desires; you are not thinking of things that have happened or things which might yet happen. You are present. A slightly less extreme emotional response is delight. It is much the same thing, but just less so.

There has been plenty of research on the effect of experiencing these emotions on our well-being, but I think most of us already know, when we think about it, that it would undoubtedly make us feel quite good. In any case, feel free to read about one study here.

Space is awesome!

So, how do we bring more awe and delight into our life? Of course, if we have the money and opportunity we can go on exciting and adventurous holidays, but you could also just go on more walks outside and you could … learn a little science! 

Without much of a scientific understanding of the world, you may be walking down a street on nice day and notice the blue sky and the trees swaying in the breeze, and it is nice, but hardly awesome, right? However, throw in a little science and you are suddenly awestruck by much of this.

Look up at the night sky and you see little pinpricks of white light in a blanket of black. But it is in fact awesome to think that each one of those pinprick of lights are in fact stars many times larger than our entire planet which is already larger than we realise. Consequently, this is something you come to realise when you do a bit of travelling locally and abroad. So, with that in mind, Here is a video giving you some idea of the size of things out there in space.

RAISE THEIR GRADE: 5 STUDY HABITS THAT WILL RAISE YOUR CHILD’S GRADE

Seeing is awesome!

You can even focus on the process by which we see in the first place. Firstly, light, as it turns out is just one very small part of what we call the electromagnetic spectrum. The part that we can see with our eyes is called visible light because we can see it. You may have heard of some other electromagnetic waves such as x-rays, ultra-violet, infra-red, micro-waves and radio-waves.

A pretty cool experiment

I often show students uses the camera function on your mobile phone and a TV remote control. Remote controls usually use infra-red radiation which is invisible to us to communicate with the devices you are controlling. For example, if you look at the remote control through your phone camera and press a button on the remote control, you should see a flash of light being emitted from the end of the remote which you point at the device, however, if you look at the remote with your eyes you don’t see anything!

The light that we can see, how do we see it? What actually happens in our eyes and brains to enable us to have an image of the world projected onto the canvas of our minds? The more you question your experiences, the more fascinating and awesome life becomes! Here are a few videos and simulations to help answer some of the questions I have just posed.

So, I find that the more I learn about the world and how it all works, the more often I can bring about a sense of delight and awe simply by calling to mind what I have previously learnt and reflect on how amazing it is. In this way, I find I experience awe and delight on a regular basis, and it makes me pretty happy!

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post Learning Science – Can It Make You Happy? appeared first on The Tutor Team.

At the time of writing this blog post I am 42 years old. For 42 years, my heart has kept me alive, pumping blood around my body carrying oxygen, glucose and other nutrients to every cell in my body via a complex network of arteries, veins and capillaries, as well as back to itself to ensure it also has the required resources to continue to pump.

The arteries have thick walls to combat the higher pressures as they are the vessels which are coming from the heart and so need to deal with a higher pressure. The veins flow back to the heart and so do not need to deal with such high pressures, but do need to cope with the possibility of blood potentially slowing down too much and possibly going the wrong direction, so they have clever valves to stop this from happening.

The heart itself is separated into two halves. The right hand side receives low oxygen (deoxygenated) blood via the vena cava into the right ventricle. This blood is low in oxygen as it has delivered oxygen to every cell in the body. The blood then moves to the right atrium and gets pushed out of the right pulmonary artery towards the lungs to get more oxygen. After this the blood flows back to the heart, now replenished with oxygen (oxygenated) and into the left side. More specifically, through the pulmonary vein and into the left atrium. It then moves into the left ventricle before being pumped out of the aorta to deliver oxygen to every cell in the body.

That monstrous paragraph very briefly describes the circulatory system. This is one of the many systems in our body that work tirelessly to keep us alive! I, for one, am very grateful for mine and I do what I can to keep it working well. Other systems include:

WHAT IS SEEING? PART 1: HOW MOST PEOPLE ‘SEE’

Organ Systems: Nervous 

This is responsible for delivering messages around the body via electrical impulses through very long and thin cells called neurons. These neurons bundle together into things called nerves. Some neurons receive information from the outside world via receptors which are sensitive to sound, light, touch, temperature, pressure and so on and send that information towards our central nervous system. These neurons are called sensory neurons. They then relay this information towards a muscle via other neurons called motor neurons.

If this is a reflex action, such as moving your hand away from something hot, it will bypass any conscious part of your brain and your hand will flinch away before you are even aware you have touched anything hot. The nervous system is the only reason we know anything about what is going on, where we are, what we want to do with our lives and it is responsible for sending signals which allow us to tell our body what to do.

SERIES AND PARALLEL CIRCUITS

Organ Systems: Digestive

When we get hungry and stuff a burger in our mouth, doesn’t it feel good? The signal to eat is not part of the digestive system, but what our body does to the food is the digestive system. The digestive system processes the food we eat and sorts out what we need from it and sends it off to the necessary parts of our body.

Organ Systems: Reproductive

The reproductive system is what is responsible for enabling us to make more of ourselves! Within each of us we contain millions of instructions of how to make another human! Well, actually only half another human. We need someone of the opposite sex to get the second half of the instructions and then we can make another one of us!

There are other systems too as well and each one is mind-bogglingly insanely complex and incredible! For 42 years none of these have failed me yet!

Interconnectivity

Now, these various organ systems are made out of organs and the organs are made out of tissues of cells. Each organ and each cell is again just incredibly complex. It seems no matter how much we zoom in or out at life it remains an incredible mystery. We could zoom out again from a human and realise that we are dependent on many other humans as well the environment we live in. As I sit and type this post I can reflect on the fact that this is only possible because of millions of other humans who mined the computer parts, assembled the computer, maintained the internet, supplied my house with electricity, and manufactured my desk, chair, house… The trees that supply the oxygen I breathe…

You could imagine a red blood cell just going about its day moving around my body and being totally unaware it is part of something much greater: me! Likewise, as I go about my day typing up blog posts, talking with friends, teaching students; I too am part of something much greater and I think it is important to be a valuable part of whatever that is.

YOU WILL BE A DIFFERENT PERSON AFTER READING THIS POST

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post Isn’t it amazing that we’re alive? (A brief guide to organ systems) appeared first on The Tutor Team.

The Dress

You might also have heard of the picture of the black and blue (or was that white and gold?) dress that went viral a few years ago. If you don’t know what I mean, have a look at the picture on the right and ask a few friends to do the same. Do you all agree on the colour?

See a video here by ASAP Science which discusses the science behind the confusion. And, most of us love illusions like the one below of the young/old woman below.

So, we can be fairly certain that we indeed do not all see the same thing all of the time.

What is Something?

A lot of science is about categorising things. That is a person, that’s a cup, this is my hand and so on. We have rules for how to categorise things. These can be official rules, scientific rules or just rules we have subconsciously decided upon. We might think “That person is a ‘keener’.” because they always do their homework on time and listen well in class, for example. Clearly this is not helpful or linked that close to reality. It would be more accurate to say that they are a person who maybe finds the subject interesting and/or wants to do well in that subject and has the self-confidence to not be shy about it.

But, what about the more odd question: What is a thing? Look at your hand. Look at your wrist. Where does your hand end and your wrist begin? And, in any case, is your hand not made out of other ‘things’? In which case, does that mean your hand is more accurately a collection of things like muscles, bones, blood, cells, nerves etc? Or maybe we can go the other way: Your hand is part of another larger ‘thing’, yourself. But you could go further and say you are part of a larger thing also, such as a culture, or a family, or a town, or a planet. And then of course, our planet is part of the solar system, which is part of our galaxy and so on. Here’s a video by Kurzgesagt which also discusses the same question.

Nutrients?

If we look at all of the things inside our skin and ask ourselves how much of it is us, it starts to get a little weird. For example, at what point in digestion does food become part of you? Maybe once the nutrients have been extracted and are now floating in the blood stream? Is that still in transport? In which case, is it you once they reach their destination and take part in a chemical reaction somewhere. This new molecule is part of you then? How long does that molecule stay around for?

Bacteria?

And then there’s the bacteria that lives in and on us… Did you know the bacteria cells outnumber the cells that generally consider are your cells by 10 to 1? And a lot of these bacteria cells are very important for us.Research even suggests they contribute quite a lot to our personality! This would mean the person you take yourself to be is partly down to what bacteria is living in your gut! See this video about your bacteria to learn more.

Cells?

Did you know that the mitochondria in your cells used to be separate independent organisms? They were absorbed by the ancestors to our cells millions of years ago before multicellular life, but instead of being dissolved by the cells they lived on inside the cells. They helped the cell to live and were given a safe place to live and reproduce themselves. This is called symbiosis and there are some very interesting examples of this in nature. Learn more about mitochondria here.

Wait wait wait… What’s all this got to do with seeing?

Well, the way how we see ourselves as this independent being separate from our environment drastically affects our decisions about very important matters such as global warming. We see ourselves as having been put on this planet, but in reality we grew out of it. The materials that make up the planet have been used to make up us. What is you and what is not you is constant fluctuation as you eat, breathe and go to the toilet. We are not a constant unchanging permanent separate thing. We are part of this world. How might this change our behaviour towards our planet and towards the people around us?

A bit about the author, Paul H:

Paul is a qualified and experienced Physics, Maths, and Science teacher, now working as a full-time tutor, providing online tuition using a variety of hi-tech resources to provide engaging and interesting lessons.  He covers Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Science from Prep and Key Stage 3 through to GCSE and IGCSE. He also teaches Physics, Maths, and Chemistry to A-Level across all the major Exam Boards.

You can enquire about tutoring with Paul here

The post What is seeing? Part 3: Do you see what I see? appeared first on The Tutor Team.