Keeping an eye on Mother Earth

Students from Fairmont high school in Durbanville, which is on a former farm with roots traceable back to the days of the Dutch East India Company, dropped in on the MTN Sciencentre in the not too distant past.

They were joined by students from Lotus River on the Cape Flats, St George's Grammar in Mowbray, a school which is about to celebrate its 160th birthday in 2008, and Klein Nederburg High (where rugby player and coach Chester Williams studied) dropped in to the MTN Sciencentre to brush up on their science skills in late November.

Why? They were going to join some very high-powered people at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, which was hosting the Ministerial Summit on Earth Observations.

Ministers and officials from over 100 governments and international organizations assembled in Cape Town, South Africa from 28 to 30 November 2007 to agree on a plan for building a Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS, to monitor the health of our one and only planet.

Who knows - with the help of the MTN Sciencentre, maybe some of the students who came to us before heading off to the Ministerial Summit will one day be the science equivalent of Chester Williams!

Homestead Projects for Street Children

Street children for The Homestead Project (above) in Strand Street were among our last official visitors, with Gerald Jacobs. 1982 - The Homestead was the first shelter for street children in Cape Town and indeed in South Africa. It opened in 1982.

At the same time - this was back in November, on the 26th - Eloise Nefdt and Detlef Basel took the mobile sciencentre to the Western Cape Education Department.

The next day, it was a visit from the students from the Al Azhar Institute, a madressa in Lappert Street in Paarl, 60 kilometres away, and the kids from the Nural Huda Nursery School, one of the Montessori schools, with teacher Fatima Rahbeeni.

The kids from Nural Huda didn't have to travel so far, coming from 62 Ernest Road in Rylands Estate in Athlone on the Cape Flats.

Now, of course, it's holiday-mode, with kids coming in from the beach ready to have fun.

Donating blood

The Western Cape is experiencing its worst blood shortage in 10 years.

So the MTN Sciencentre in Canal Walk is doing its part. You could call it practical science.

As reported in the Tygerburger newspaper, blood donations can be made on Thursday the 27th and Friday the 28th of December from 10:00 to 15:45.

There have been inadequate blood stocks since September, due to the public service strike, the school holidays and the Muslim fasting period of Ramadaan, according to Western Province Blood Transfusion Service spokesperson Lynn Erasmus.

The pressure grows worse by two long weekends over Christmas and New Year and the increase in the number of road accidents over the holiday season."It's undeniable that what goes on on the roads creates an even bigger pinch."

And there's been a 30 percent increase in demand from the trauma units at Red Cross, Groote Schuur and Tygerberg hospitals. So go on - be a vampire in reverse!

Explosive stuff

Detlef Basel, our resident science show maestro, has been fondly mentioned by a former high school student from his time as a Pretoria teacher at St Albans. You know a person is impressive when they linger in a student's memory for 37 years. And it seems some things don't change...

This is what Pete ''George'' Bower (Class of 70) writes: ''I remember sitting next to Rob van der Merwe in Science. Detlef Basel was the teacher. One experiment involved putting sugar together with an acid. The sugar had been "diluted" with an inordinate amount of sand so the experiment didn't work as planned.

"Add heat," said Basel, reaching for a Bunsen burner.

The upshot of the thing was it exploded, covering the front of his safari suit in a corrosive mixture. Detlef still makes things explode, generally on purpose. But the safari suits don't seem to be much in evidence these days, thank goodness.

http://www.stalbanscollege.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=303&Itemid=33

YouTube

MTN Sciencentre is now on YouTube!

A dad was so taken with our optical illusion that he filmed his daughter, her head apparently severed from her body, with her face on a platter with a few garnishes. (Hint: it's all done with mirrors.)

You'll find it here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aZ-st2WCsRU

Flickr

MTN Sciencentre in Cape Town, South Africa is showing up in Flickr, the world's largest online photo-sharing outlet. Danie van der Merwe, who took the photo, called it ''Kaylyn at MTN Science Centre'' and told Flickr ''This is apparently the world's biggest working cellphone with fully working software ...

More photos online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dvdmerwe/archives/date-posted/2007/12/11/

Amy Biehl Foundation

Merry Christmas to Ilchen Retief of the Amy Biehl Foundation, set up by the parents of the 26-year-old Stanford University student and Fulbright Scholar, who was murdered in Cape Town the dying days of apartheid.

In their last newsletter of the year, Ilchen mentioned the MTN Sciencentre as one of the places that waived entrance fees so that children from the townships were treated to the following outings.

The foundation, like the MTN Sciencentre, is heavily involved in educating our youth. For more on the Amy Biehl Foundation, they're online at http://www.amybiehl.co.za/