MAGIC 5

Effect:
The magician shows a pan full of water with five toothpicks in the shape of a pentagon.

The magician takes his magic toothpick and dips it in the center of the pentagon. The five toothpicks fly apart, breaking the pentagon!

Someone from the audience says... oh, that's just what happens when you do that, it's not magic. The magician arranges the five toothpicks back into a pentagon and hands the person in the audience the magic toothpick. The person dips it in the center. Nothing happens. It really was magic!

Supplies:
a tinfoil pan (a pie plate or leftover Chinese food plate work well)
water
6 flat wooden toothpicks
the magic ingredient: liquid dishwashing soap
Before the Audience - Preparation:
Dip one of your toothpicks in liquid dishwashing soap. Set it aside for now.

Make sure your pan is clean. Rinse it well with water. Fill it quite full of water (but not so full that you're going to spill it).

In Front of the Audience - Preparation:
Arrange the five SOAPLESS toothpicks in the shape of a pentagon. Make sure the tips of the toothpicks overlap so your pentagon stays together. This can be a bit of a challenge the first time you do it, so practice arranging the toothpicks at home a few times first and consider arranging them while the audience is seating itself.

Now, when the audience is settled, let them look at the pentagon. They may have to stand to do this or you may want to do the trick on the floor with the audience around you in a U-shape.

Tell the audience that you've arranged the toothpicks into a special five sided shape called a pentagon and that you're going to cast a spell on the sixth toothpick to imbue it with some of your magical force so it will be able to break apart the pentagon. (big words always impress an audience *grin*)

Take out the sixth toothpick (the one that was dipped in dish soap) and wave your hand over it while chanting some magical words. Close your eyes and frown a bit so it looks like you're working on putting your magic into the toothpick.

Words you could chant: Alaka penta Abraka magic

Now, dip the magical toothpick into the center of the pentagon (Make sure you dip the soapy end in the water and try to get it as close to the center of the shape as possible -- the soap shouldn't be visible anymore). The five toothpicks will fly apart.

If you have a non-believer in the audience, offer to let them try the trick. Arrange the pentagon in the water again and hand them the magic toothpick. Let them dip it in the center. It won't work!

If the audience asks you to do the trick a second time, just tell them that it takes awhile to recharge your magical force. You have to rest before you can put more of it into a toothpick, otherwise you could lose your magic forever!

Secret:
Throughout history, a lot of 'magic' has really been science disguised with a few silly words. This is one of those tricks.

All things (including water) is made up of tiny things called molecules). Water molecules like each other and stick together (that's why when a bit of water falls on a table or window, it blobs together in a little droplet).

The surface of the water has a layer of clingy molecules on it -- this layer is called the water's surface tension. The toothpicks were nice and flat so they were floating on this layer.



Remember that we dipped the sixth toothpick in dish soap? That's the real trick to this trick. The soap molecules break the surface tension of the water. This effect spreads out in an ever widening ring (like ripples in the water when you throw a rock in a lake). The molecules originally holding the toothpicks break apart. The molecules farther away from where you dipped the toothpick still have their surface tension (for a little longer) so they pull the toothpick toward them. Of course, eventually the "ripples" of soap hit those molecules too.



Once the soap is in the water, the surface tension won't come back. That's why the audience member couldn't recreate the trick. It will only work once and then you have to clean everything up and use new toothpicks to do the trick a second time. That's also why you have to be careful that your pan is well rinsed before you do the trick.

MAGIC 4

Effect:
The magician shows a glass, upside down, and a coin on a sheet of colored paper.

He puts a handkerchief over the glass and moves it over.

He pulls the handkerchief off and Abracadabra! the coin has disappeared.



Supplies:
A sheet of construction paper (1), a clear glass, a handkerchief and a coin.



Preparation:
Trace the glass onto the sheet of paper and cut the circle out. Then tape it to the glass so when you put it onto a piece of paper the same color it blends in.



Secret:
When you do the above put the glass onto a piece of paper and just basically move the paper covered glass over the coin while the whole thing is under the handkerchief so the glass covers the coin. Pull off the handkerchief. The coin will have "disappeared.

MAGIC 3

Effect:
The magician gives two volunteers each half a deck of cards and leaves the room (or turns his back).

Each volunteer choses a card from the OTHER person's deck, memorizes and shows it to the audience. The volunteers put the cards they chose into their own deck.

The magician takes each of the decks and spreads them out on the table and tells the audience what the cards were.

(or have the magic puppet whisper to the magician what the cards were).

Supplies:
~a deck of cards

Secret:
You need to split the deck into cards with a flat (or sharp) top and cards with a round top

(the 3 is usually made with a flat top, but sometimes is rounded... look at your deck to figure out which pile it should be in for your trick)

FLAT TOP:
3 4 5 7 J K A
ROUND TOP:
2 6 8 9 10 Q
with practice it will get easier to spot these cards quickly.

Put the two halves together, one on top of the other. When doing the trick, turn the cards so they're facing you and split the deck so that one half is the flat top and the other is the round top (I usually make this easier by putting the ACE of SPADES where the two halves divide. That way, when I see the ace, I know where to split the deck in two

Give each volunteer one of the halves (one volunteer gets the flat tops and the other gets the round tops).

When they chose the cards and put them in their own deck it ends up that there's one flat top in the round top pile and one round top in the flat top pile.

With practice you'll quickly be able to spot the oddball when you spread the decks out on the table.

MAGIC 2

Effect:
Magician lays out 11 cards and asks a volunteer to move several cards over from the right side to the left side while the magician's back is to the cards so he/she doesn't see how many.

Then, when the volunteer is done the magician turns back around. He/she waves his hand over the cards and turns over one of the cards. The number on the card is the number of cards the volunteer moved.

(or have the magic puppet wave its hand over the card and then whisper to you to turn it over.)


Supplies:
11 cards from a regular deck of 52. Take 1 joker, an ace and all the numbers up to 10.



Secret:
Lay out the cards face down in this order: 6 5 4 3 2 A J 10 9 8 7 (A is Ace and J is Joker).

Then have someone move the cards one at a time from right to left.

Say they moved three cards (the magician wouldn't know it though) the position of the cards would now be

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 A J 10

Then wave your hand over the cards and silently count 7 cards over from left to right. Turn the 7th card over. It's the three!!!

It doesn't matter how many cards they move over, this will always work.

Always count 7 cards over (starting with the setup above) and it'll be the number of cards they moved.

If they decide not to move any at all the card will be a Joker and this tells you they didn't move any at all.

MAGIC 1

Effect:
The magician has three rows of cards. An audience volunteer picks a card in his/her head and tells the magician what row it's in. The magician does that three times and on the third time tells the volunteer what their card was. (or have the magic puppet whisper to you what the card was and then you tell the audience what the puppet said.)



Supplies:
21 cards, all different

Secret:
First lay out the cards, 3 across and 7 down.

Have someone think of a card and tell you what row its in.

Pick up all the rows, row by row, making sure to pick up the row that the card is in 2nd.

EXAMPLE: Let's assume the volunteer secretly chose PINK-6 and then told us their card was in the second row. We would pick up the rows and we would make sure the pink row was picked up second so that it was in the middle of the deck.


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Then lay out the cards again (the exact same way, 3 across & 7 down).
Put down one card per row.

Ex: First do this *** (let's pretend the stars are cards).
Then this: *** and so on (7 times).
In our example, we'd put down BLUE-1, BLUE-2, BLUE-3 then go down to the next row and place BLUE-4, BLUE-5, BLUE-6 and so on.

Then ask the volunteer where the card is in now.

Pick up the rows again, like before -- still making sure that you pick up the row that the card is in 2nd.

In our example, the volunteer would say their card was in the first row. You would make sure that row was in the middle of the deck


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Lay them out again, the same way.
Then ask the volunteer which row the card is in now.
(You can get dramatic and tell them to think really hard about it... pretend to be reading their mind)

Then count four cards down in that row.
(It appears more magical if you count to yourself... people won't realize you're counting four cards down).

The fourth card is their card!!

In our example, the volunteer would have said their card was in the last row. Four cards down is PINK-6!

MAGIC!

COMETS

Comets are small rock, dust and ice objects that orbit the Sun. In 1950, Fred Whipple proposed the "dirty snowball" picture of comet structure. The nucleus of the comet - typically about 10 kilometers across - is composed mostly of dust and ices of carbon dioxide, water, ammonia and methane.

As the comet approaches the Sun, the ices in the nucleus sublime to form the coma, a dense cloud of gas and dust particles around the nucleus. The coma contains water, carbon dioxide and other neutral gases.

VILLI IN SMALL INTESTINE

The small intestine is the foremost site of nutrient absorption in the body. In fact 90% of nutrients are absorbed here. Therefore models that accurately depict what goes on in the intestine would provide numerous applications to the food and drug industry. The complicated structure and mechanisms of the small intestine is the main obstacle to its modelling, with mechanisms such as peristalsis and segmentation mixing and transporting the intestinal contents. The structure of the small intestine, in place to aid absorption of nutrients, consists of three levels: on the macro scale, folds or plicae intrude into the lumen; on the mesoscale villi, small, finger like projections, cover the surface, as shown in the image below; and on the micro scale microvilli cover the villi on a cellular level.


The small intestine is too complicated to model in full, so the researchers concentrated on modelling the effects of the villi on the flow and absorption in the small intestine, a factor which has been ignored in most previous absorption models. On the level of the villi most of the motility patterns can be ignored, with the flow being represented as a simple shear flow over the villi. They created a model of a two-dimensional wavy-walled channel, where the waves are small in comparison with the channel width and represent the villi. The aims of this project were to investigate the effects of the villi on the transport of nutrients as well as to determine effective boundary conditions for the concentration that could be applied on a flat wall, to incorporate the effects of the villi. These could be then used in future models which include more of the complicated intestinal mechanisms or larger-scale geometry.


Technical Summary

To determine the effects of the villi on the transport we used asymptotic methods to split the channel into a large core region and a thin region near the wavy wall. We could then investigate the flow and uptake in the wall region, using a variety of numerical and analytical methods to find solutions and using matching methods to determine far-field boundary conditions and to relate the wall region solutions to effective boundary conditions that could be applied on the core region.

At the wall, the flow circulates in the troughs between the villi, causing a string of eddies to form. These affect the uptake, causing nutrients to circulate between the villi for certain parameter values. Looking at the solutions of the concentration, the effect of villi is very dependent on the uptake parameter (or effective permeability) of the nutrient being absorbed. For nutrients or molecules with a low uptake parameter, such as ibuprofen, which are not readily absorbed, the villi increase the uptake proportional to the surface area, hence ensuring that the molecule is absorbed over a shorter length scale. This is the expected result, and is thought to be the purpose of the villi.

For molecules with a large uptake parameter however, such as glucose, which are easily absorbed, the villi decrease the uptake, relative to that of a flat wall. Therefore high uptake molecules would be more readily absorbed over a flat wall than one with villi. This is due to these nutrients being pulled in strongly at the peaks of the villi, leaving few nutrients to permeate through to the troughs. This effectively decreases the surface area available for absorption, hence decreasing the uptake. These results can be seen in the figures below, where molecules with a low uptake parameter are absorbed slowly across the villi, while those with a high uptake parameter have a high flux at the peaks, dropping to a nearly zero flux in the troughs. As advection starts to dominate over diffusion (i.e. the Peclet number is large) the effects of the flow can be seen more easily, with the nutrients being circulated by the eddies and pulled further into the troughs.

These effects may seem detrimental in the context of the small intestine, however, the villi increase absorption for low uptake molecules whilst the high uptake molecules will always be totally absorbed over the length of the intestine, so a small increase in the absorption length scales will make little difference. Previous experimental work has shown that certain molecules, such as sugars and amino acids which have high uptake parameters, are absorbed mainly on the top third of the villi, and the small intestine has adapted to this factor with, for example, sites of glucose absorption only situated on the upper third of the villi.

This model has shown unexpected effects of villi on the uptake of nutrients, as well as providing boundary conditions for future models that incorporate more detail, hence producing a more accurate portrait of the small intestine. This work could also be applied to other industrial situations such as heat transport in a rough-walled pipe, or other types of transport over surfaces covered with small projections.