It is National Science Week this week and I am bringing my "Science of Sound" workshop around schools in county Galway for the next two weeks as part of the Galway Science and Technology Festival. The fun kicked off today in Gaelscoil Mhic Amhlaigh where we learned about sound, had great fun making, feeling and even seeing sound and its effect on some different materials.
You can expect plenty of "sound" posts on the blog for the next few weeks, as I will be sharing lots of experiments, facts and information... but today I thought I would share five fun facts about Sound!
Did you know...
- ... sound waves travel in water at a speed of nearly one mile a second, which is more than four times faster than sound travels through air?
- ... a bat can detect an object as small as a human hair using echolocation?
- ... thunder is the sound made by lightning? Sound travels in air at a speed of almost one mile in five seconds. If you count the seconds between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder you can work out the distance from the source of the thunder! For example, if you count ten seconds between the lightning and the thunder then you can tell the storm is about two miles away!
- ... the loud noise created by a cracking whip is due to the fact that the tip of the whip is moving so fast that it breaks the speed of sound?
- ... the scientific study of sound is called acoustics?
Labels: bat, facts, galway science and technology festival, lightning, science, science week, thunder, whip
