Lambeth's Living Waters
"In the pond" for the National Science Week Open Day was really the driest part of the day. This was the gloomiest, windiest, wettest open day for some years - worse even than this year's Xmas Fair. However, those who braved the weather had the experience of entering the microscopic world of Lambeth's Living Waters through the imaginations and experiences of children from Walnut Tree Walk Primary School. The first photo shows part of the exhibition of their work - sculptures and poems made from a microscopic examination of the world of Lambeth's Waters - their school pond, the Roots and Shoots pond and the River Thames. A model of a copepod - roughly to scale and magnified 1,000 times appears to be about to munch through David's waders - which themselves seem to have shrunk whilst wandering through the pond and so become very vulnerable!
On the left are some of year 2's poems - written into drawings of the creatures they are exploring (flatworms and an ostracod). The hanging models are of ciliates, such as paramecium. The second picture is of a fantastic model of an ostracod - these creatures resemble a real life, microscopic version of pacman - the whole body opens whilst shooting through the water engulfing even more microscopic life forms as they go. The children of years 4 and 2 really went to town on using scrap materials for their models. They managed to find materials that show the ephereal transparency as well the seeming ferocity of the microscopic world.
Even more unique for the Open Day was the 'visit' by a Scanning Electron Microscope (on loan from JEOL (UK) Ltd, with the help of Chris and Mohamed). Professor Jane Lewis, one of our partners for the Lambeth's Living Waters Project (in the light blue top) helped David to explain how the SEM works to all our visitors. Jane is Dean of Biosciences at the University of Westminster and visited the school as part of the Royal Society's Scientist Partnership Scheme. She helped in the school and a grant from the Royal Society bought a full class set of microscopes for the school to keep for the future. In the centre she guides a year 4 pupil in using the SEM - he takes over in the third picture.
And here are some images of what we saw. The SEM uses a scanning beam of electrons fired through a vacuum onto the object mounted on a pin. As it is in a vacuum we cannot put "Living Waters" into the SEM so unfortunately cannot use the same kind of samples as the children saw with the Roots and Shoots video microscopy equipment and in their school. What you can do, though, is see objects in perfect clarity at many thousands of times magnification. What's more you can roam around the object and increase magnification really easily. The SEM JEOL lent to us is really very easy to use (once it is set up!) Here you have a honey bee's head (look at the hairs coming out of it's compound eyes), it's front foot and, in the third picture, some Bermudan sand made up of millions of fragments of diatom and radiolarian 'skeletal' structures. Diatoms are plants - we found a lot in the water from damp bricks around the fountain of Lambeth Palace - but they are plants with the most remarkable structures - when they are dead you can see theseunder the SEM. The 'skeleton' is composed of silica - exactly the same substance as makes glass - they have 'glass skeletons' (but they are plants, remember - and they 'swim', too). Here's a close up of a radiolarian:
More next time!