Alter Wreck Boast

In Episode One of Alter Wreck Boast, Kate discovers some amazing things about creating sound by hitting things: ‘THWACK!’

What’s Going on?

What you use to hit something can create different sounds, whether it is the palm of your hand, a stick or a brush.

The material of what you hit will also affect the sound that is produced, as well as the shape of the thing you are hitting.

Try this:

If you have a drum, an old cooking pot, even a cardboard box, sprinkle sand over the surface and lightly tap the surface repeatedly in the same spot. The vibrations will move the grains of sand and if you are careful you should be able to ‘see’ the vibration patterns of the surface.

Now try tapping the surface in another spot. See if you can create a different pattern of vibrations.

The skin of a drum vibrates to create the sound you hear. This vibration is a bit like the vibration of a rubber band or a guitar string. But, rather then a ‘string’ wobbling, the drum skin is a large surface that wobbles.

If you hit the drum skin right in the centre you may get a circular ‘ripple’ moving through the skin. If you hit the skin off to one side away from the centre you will create different ‘shaped’ vibrations.

Different ‘shaped’ vibrations will sound different.

Alter Wreck Boast

In Episode One of Alter Wreck Boast, Andy makes his guitar electric. He uses a piezo crystal or piezoelectric crystal. The word piezo comes from the Greek word piezein which means to squeeze or press.

What's going on?

Piezoelectricity is the ability of certain crystals to generate electricity when they are squeezed or bent.

These crystals will also work in reverse! When electricity is applied to them they will bend.

Andy got his crystal from the back of a digital watch. In a digital watch, as well as in many other electrical devices, a piezoelectric crystal is used to make that high pitched ‘Beep Beep’ and other annoying alarm sounds. An electric signal is used to vibrate the crystal at certain frequencies to make the beeping sounds you hear.

When Andy put a piezoelectric crystal on his guitar, the vibrations of the sound of the guitar wobbled the crystal, which generated an electric signal (working like a microphone). Andy attached wires from the crystal to a ‘jack’ plug and plugged it into his amp. What a sound!

The gossip, the dirt, their favourite band… The stars of Cosmix!

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Broken Dawn

In episode one of Broken Dawn Alex takes a closer look at the muddy foot prints she finds at Billy’s house. She wants to analyse the soil to see what it is made up of.

Alex uses detergent containing surfactants. She mixes the soil with surfactants and water. The particles of soil become suspended, floating in the water. The particles gradually sink and settle with heaver particles sinking more quickly. Sand at the bottom, silt next and clay on top. This gives Alex a ‘fingerprint’ of the soil, which helps her work out where Billy might be.

What’s going on?

They say ‘oil and water don’t mix’, but you can help them mix by using a type of chemical called a ‘surfactant’.

The work surfactant is made-up from the words: Surface Active Agent.

A surfactant is a chemical that has special molecules. These are molecules with one end that is ‘water-loving’, water soluble (hydrophilic) and the other end being ‘water-hating’, insoluble (hydrophobic).

With a surfactant added to it, water is less likely to ‘stick to itself’ and more likely to interact with oil, grease and dirt.

How does it work?

You probably use surfactants every day.

Surfactants in shampoo break-up oil droplets in hair allowing them to be washed away by water.

Surfactants can increase the spreading and penetrating ability of water. Which means with the surfactant of laundry detergent, the water can get right into the fabric of your clothes, cleaning them more thoroughly.

New Zealand Frogs

There are seven species of frogs in New Zealand, three of which were introduced from Australia. All native New Zealand frogs are protected and two of the introduced species are currently endangered in their native country, Australia.

Native Frogs

New Zealand native frogs are an ancient group of frogs that have changed very little in 70 million years. New Zealand originally had seven species of native frogs. Three species have become extinct since the arrival of humans and animal predators, such as rats.

New Zealand native frogs are classified with the genus Leiopelma. They are unique in the frog world for the following reasons:

Frogs are declining everywhere in the world. They are more sensitive than most creatures to disease, pollution, chemical poisons and environmental changes, as they absorb many things through their sensitive skins.

Some New Zealand native frogs are the world’s most endangered. If you see a native frog in the wild please report its location to the Department of Conservation. Avoid touching frogs, because you may damage their sensitive skin.

Life Can Be Found Almost Everywhere

Life can be found almost everywhere on this planet. Life has adapted to thrive in many extreme environments such as volcanic vents deep under the ocean and inside rocks and ice.

Living things can even be found living within us!

In fact there are over 10 times as many non-human microbes in us than human cells! The average person is home to 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a thousand million, million) microbes.

There are over 115 different species living happily on our skin alone.

There are probably more microbes on your hand than there are people on the whole planet.

In just one teaspoon of soil there are over 1,000,000,000 microbes.

So just think about the numbers of microbes on the whole planet!

Cosmix Static

In Alter Wreck Boast, episode three, Stuart creates new sounds by mixing static from the radio into the music. But what is static? Static is the sound you hear on the radio when it is not tuned in to a particular station. You are hearing jumbled radio waves from electrical activity such as lightning in the atmosphere, electrical equipment and power-lines.

Radio waves are also created by solar activity and the activity of stars and galaxies. Karl Jansky discovered this in 1932 while working for Bell Laboratories. He was trying to find the source of static interference heard over the telephone. He built a giant antenna that could be pointed in different directions. Karl discovered that radio waves are coming from all directions, but that the strongest source is the centre of our own galaxy - the Milky Way. This began the science of Radio Astronomy – using radio telescopes to pick up signals from things in space.

If you tune a television set between channels, about 1% of the static you see on the screen is from the cosmic background radiation, the radio wave echoes from the Big Bang that started the universe!

Marine Science

In episode three of Risky Forecast Marama discovers that she is in a marine reserve. There are a number of marine reserves around New Zealand, most of which are around offshore islands. Marine reserves have been set up to protect biodiversity in the marine environment for present and future generations. Marine environments can be threatened by pollution, sedimentation, pests, over-fishing and fishing methods such as bottom trawling and dredging.

New Zealand’s marine environment is more than 15 times larger than its land area, and is home to up to 80% of all creatures native to New Zealand. But just 0.3% of New Zealand’s marine environment is protected in reserves compared to about 30% of New Zealand’s land area.

Scientists estimate there are as many as 65,000 species living in New Zealand marine environments. Many are not found anywhere else in the world. Currently, we have identified only 15,000 species. Although, on average, seven new marine species are discovered in New Zealand every fortnight!