By Solar Spark, this activity explores the relationship between light scattering and colour through anodising. This is the electrochemical process used to thicken the protective oxide layer found on several metals. Aluminium is the most common metal treated in this way, but others, including titanium can also be...

This activity sheet builds on students' knowledge of acids and indicator colours to plot a graph of a neutralisation and to describe the trend of the data.  The career context is a pharmaceutical company development of antacid tablets, used to neutralise excess acid in the human stomach.

A podcast from the Planet Earth Online collection and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). Richard Hollingham finds out that the freezing seas around Antarctica are not barren and lifeless. The Census of Marine Life is building up a picture of the richness and diversity of life in the world's oceans and...

This activity, from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), explores how the antenna part of body centric antennas (BCAs) work and encourages students to consider ethical issues surrounding the use of advanced technology to control prosthetics.

This resource from the Nuffield Foundation allows students to investigate relationships between anthropometric variables and write a report on their findings, which may include the use of scatter diagrams, lines of best fit, regression lines, and correlation coefficients. The spreadsheet contains anthropometric...

In this Core Maths task, based on a resource developed by the Nuffield Foundation, students are given a large dataset of children’s and young adults’ anthropometric data to use to investigate whether particular sets of data are related. The students are asked to present their findings in the form of a report/...

This video demonstrates how a 19kg flywheel, attached to a 1 metre shaft can be lifted easily when the flywheel is spinning, yet almost impossible when stationary. It appears that the rotation reduces the weight of the...

This primary level activity linked to evolution and inheritance looks at the adaptations of bacteria and how adaptation causes problems when treating a bacterial infection with antibiotics. The occurrence of antibiotic resistant bacteria is caused by evolutionary adaptation, by understanding how the bacteria are...

This Catalyst article describes how bacterial colonies produce antibiotics and explains how their growth depends on the medium they grow on. Over sixty years ago, a Russian soil scientist called Selman Waksman discovered that soil bacteria belonging to the Streptomyces genus produce some very useful...

This lesson links aspects of states of matter to the use of bubbles to deliver drugs to cancerous tissue, and is appropriate to students aged 12- 14. Most children will be familiar with soapy bubbles consisting of gas surrounded by a film of moisture. This lesson looks at the formation of bubbles that contain...

This resource can be used to demonstrate an understanding of the use of anti-caking agents that allow powdered food products to flow more freely through machinery. The action of an anti-caking agent in cocoa powder is investigated in one activity and a case study using real results from an industrial setting...

Produced by Science & Plants for Schools (SAPS), this resource encourages students to investigate the effects of various antifungal treatments on the growth of yeast.

This poster looks at the nature of antimatter. One side of the poster discusses Dirac’s prediction and the subsequent discovery of antimatter, in the form of the positron. The difficulty of the storage of antimatter is explained and the use of positrons in medical imaging (PET scanners) is described. The other side...

This resource can be used to demonstrate an understanding of the role of antioxidants in food processing to delay oxidation. A data based activity analyses types of fat in foods and an investigation into the browning of apples under varying conditions allows a quantitative measure of the oxidation reaction. 

In this Triple Crossed activity, from the Centre for Science Education and supported by the Astra Zeneca Teaching Trust, students are provided with a number of images of bones and asked to work in groups to draw what they think the animal would have looked like. They are then provided clues to help build up their...