Alien in My Pocket #5: Ohm vs. Amp by Nate Ball Page A

said, standing up and yawning. “I don’t want Grandpa to find my bed empty at this hour of the night. Plus, we’re both going fishing in a couple of hours.” She groaned and stretched.
    â€œThere is one great thing about all this,” Amp said. “Zack and I can finish watching The Mummy . C’mon, let’s go!”
    I smiled, reached out, and held up my hand up for a high five. He gave me a high three, which was the best he could manage.
    â€œYou love that movie,” I said.
    â€œWe can worry about getting me home tomorrow.”
    And with that, we headed back to my house.
    His broken spaceship and everything else would have to wait till the morning.
    We had a movie to finish.

Try It Yourself: Atlatl
    H ave you ever heard of the term leverage ? As in, “We need to get a bit more leverage”? Zack cleverly uses a ball-throwing toy, usually used for chucking tennis balls for his dog, to get himself more leverage for throwing Ohm’s ship into the air. You’re probably already much more familiar with the concept of leverage than you think.
    Levers are all around you. As Ohm points out in his note to the Erdian Council, a lever is basically a stick that pivots, or rotates, around a certain point. When we’re thinking about the stick as a lever, rather than just a stick, we call that pivot point the fulcrum.
    The door to your bedroom is a lever. The fulcrum, or the point that the lever pivots around, is the pin going through the hinges of the door. Ateeter-totter on a playground is also a lever. Have you ever wondered what would happen if a really big person jumped onto the seat across from you? If the person were big enough, the teeter-totter might lever you right up into the air!
    The Levers in Your Body
    There are a few levers you use every day , even if you don’t open a door or stop by the playground. Those levers are your arms and legs! Each joint—like your wrist joint or your shoulder joint—act as a fulcrum for those levers. Your hand and lower arm pivot around those joints, acting as levers.
    The way the human body’s levers are arranged make them very good for speedy movements because they’re very long. Can you imagine if your end of the teeter-totter grew to double the length it started from? If a big kid jumped on the other end, you’d really go flying!
    That’s the same concept Zack takes advantage of when he uses his ball thrower to chuck Ohm’s spaceship into the air. The ball thrower makes his arm—the lever that’s throwing the ship—evenlonger than it was to begin with, giving the spaceship an extra boost.
    Ancient Leverage—the Atlatl
    Humans have been using leverage to throw things extra far for a lot longer than tennis ball chuckers have been around. In fact, the first examples of intentionally using leverage for this purpose can be traced back to nearly 30,000 years ago! The most famous example, however, was used by the Aztecs in the sixteenth century, and is called an atlatl . It’s a fantastic example of how a simple tool can augment human capability in a really powerful way.
    You can build your own atlatl using a few simple materials.
    YOU WILL NEED: Some pieces of cardboard a few feet long (ideally with the corrugations running lengthwise), a roll of tape (like duct tape), scissors, a stick about as long as your forearm, a pen to decorate the cardboard ship, a piece of dish sponge to serve as a soft tip, and an adult to help you cut the materials.
    Making the Ship
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  1. Lay the cardboard lengthwise along a countertop or other flat surface with a corner edge. Use the edge to fold the cardboard along its length, with about a 1-inch width.

    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  2. Fold the cardboard a few times until you can wrap the cardboard around on itself, making a long skinny tube. It can be a triangle, a square, or even rolled into a circle. It doesn’t have to be a