This month we have not one but two competitions for your budding scientists to enter! Up for grabs we have three copies of Robert Winston’s HOME LAB EXPERIMENTS BOOK and five John Adams Trading Co FORENSIC SCIENCE KITS!!!
What are you waiting for kids, open issue 13 of Whizz Pop Bang and get cracking. Enter before 5th September.
September is the ideal time of year for a stargazing party; it’s cheap, easy to host and the kids get to stay up ‘late’ which is always deemed to be fun in itself!
Inside issue 13 is the ultimate guide to the night sky, along with a pull-out stargazing map to help the kids decipher the constellations and find out how to spot Mars, and depending on the conditions, maybe Saturn too!
We’ve put together a party planner for your science party with a difference, including the recipe for planet cake pops to impress all your party guests. And don’t forget to order copies of Whizz Pop Bang science magazine for really cool goodie bags, order single issues here.
For your stargazing party you will need:
The ultimate evening to hold your stargazing party will be on Saturday 10th September as the Moon will be visible in the evening sky and it will be dark by around 8pm.
Errrrr gross! Slime, goo, rotting fish and the unimaginably disgusting are what you think of when you hear Nick Arnold’s name mentioned. Yes, the Horrible Science author is joining the Whizz Pop Bang team so watch out everyone, Nick’s armed and ready to saw off some legs 🙂
We’re head-to-toe excited about having Nick on board – what more does a children’s science magazine need than a brilliant science writer who gets everyone into the weird and wonderful world of science!
The results are in from our minibeast competition (issue 11, June) and we have five winners to announce!
Firstly we want to say thank you to all of you who entered. We had over 75 entries of awesome minibeast photos. We now have spiders, bees, butterflies, caterpillars, beetles, slugs, ladybirds, snails, dragonflies, centipedes and moths all crawling around on the Whizz Pop Bang office wall 🙂
Without further ado here are our lucky winners and their prize-winning photos…
Isla Gibbs, age 10:
James Grant, age 7:
Khadeejah Hussain, age 5:
Megan Whitfield, age 10:
Pippa Pang, age 6:
Congratulations to our five winners, your butterfly garden kits are on the way! If you didn’t win and you’d really like a butterfly garden kit they are available from insectlore.co.uk
Enjoy the sunshine and the minibeasts in your garden or park, and remember to handle all minibeasts very carefully and be aware that some might sting.
Would you like to know what makes the best bubbles?
Make a base mixture of water mixed with washing up liquid. If you don’t already have one, you can make a bubble wand using a pipe cleaner. Experiment with blowing bubbles, and then try adding sugar, baking powder, corn syrup or glycerin to your mixture, one at a time. Test how each ingredient changes the surface tension and affects the bubbles.
Have you ever wondered why bubbles form in soapy water but not in ordinary water? The answer is surface tension. The surface tension of water is too strong for bubbles to last – the water molecules pull each other together and the bubbles quickly burst. When water is mixed with soap, the surface tension becomes weaker and the liquid can be ‘stretched’ more, allowing bubbles to form.
Whizz Pop Bang introduced eating insects (entomophagy) to the Cheltenham Science Festival; inviting kids and their families to try ‘foods of the future’. These are just some of the kids who tried pasta and flapjacks made with crickets, we think the smiles say it all!
In issue 7 of Whizz Pop Bang we introduced our readers to the concept of eating grubs as a sustainable source of protein. Now as a forward-thinking kids science magazine we’re all about looking into the future 🙂 So we got in touch with a company in Thailand, called Bugsolutely, who make pasta using 20% cricket flour mixed with 80% wheat flour, and asked them if they’d send us some boxes to try. Three weeks later a large box arrived full of pasta ready for our trials. We sent out a newsletter inviting Whizz Pop Bang subscribers to take part, and within minutes we were inundated with families wanting to taste cricket pasta! So we set up individual trials, and took the pasta to Cheltenham Science Festival to find out firsthand what the kids thought.
And the results?
In the style of Innocence smoothies, we asked people to vote with their rubbish. So we had a ‘YES! I’d definitely buy this’ bin, and a ‘NO! It’s not my cup of tea’ bin. The results speak for themselves, it’s a resounding YES please to buying foods made with insects in the UK!
The double page spread in February’s issue of our magazine, introducing the idea of eating grubs:
Feed the World – By the year 2050 there will be over 9 billion people living on Planet Earth. With all these extra mouths to feed, there is a real risk of a global food crisis developing. Farm animals are responsible for producing almost a third of the greenhouse gasses that are contributing to global warming. They also need lots of land and drink lots of water, so we need a more sustainable solution.
“The way we farm our food is going to have to change. We can’t keep farming like we do today, or we won’t be able to produce enough food and look after our environment at the same time.” Dr Sarah Beynon, an insect expert and farmer.
Insects – the taste of the future Like it or not, we are all going to have to make changes to the way we eat in the future, and scientists like Dr Beynon think that insects will soon become a normal part of our diet.