Life (part 1)

Life has a funny way of working itself out - and I don't mean your weekend plans, they won't always happen the way that you want, and not for any individual, but life as a collective, as a population - life is tough. A lot of that toughness comes from diversity; what kills one animal won't kill another for some reason, sometimes a totally random one. 

There's a genetic mutation that gives a person immunity from the HIV virus and AIDS - but not by actively fighting the virus. In fact, it's a mistake: people with the delta 32 mutation have a messed-up CCR5 protein that can't be bonded with. Normally, proteins bond with each other for all kinds of reasons, and the HIV virus bonds to this particular protein, but because of the messed up CCR5 proteins, HIV cannot attach to the proteins of certain people (less than 1% of the population, ALL of them Northern Europeans). Because HIV can't bind to this mutant protein, carriers are immune, and the protein itself is not important enough for the people to feel any negative effects.

 Won't fit! Full (adorable) video here

Every adaptation started off this way: as either a mistake or new combination of genes that causes a change in the survivability of that species. That little change, like the slightly longer neck of one baby of the giraffe's ancestor, increases the chance of that baby's survival - its slightly longer neck can reach leaves that nobody else is eating. So if it survives to reproduce, its babies will have the same slightly longer neck; their increased chance of survival means more of them reach reproductive age than a normal litter.

Sup?

Eventually - and I do mean eventually, because evolution takes a long time - the giraffe becomes a separate species from its ancestor; the amount of time this takes cannot really be comprehended by a human mind. Nobody has ever experienced a thousand years - few people make it even a hundred - and a thousand years is still a tiny amount of time on the evolutionary scale. All of recorded history goes back about 6,000 years, but scientists believe that the last major division that makes us Homo Sapiens happened 50,000 years ago - after dividing from other primates 2.3 MILLION years ago.

This picture, which you've probably seen before, is a big misconception:

Not how it happened

We didn't evolve from monkeys - we evolved from the same ancestors as monkeys, a subtle but very important distinction. We wouldn't recognize those ancestors, but when their population was split for some reason and some members started hanging out in forests and others started migrating across plains (an oversimplification, but it's a good start), the species' adaptations started to divide: the creatures that many generations later would become monkeys developed climbing adaptations, and the creatures that many generations later would become humans developed adaptations for running.

From that day on, if I was going somewhere, I was running!

But how did this all start? I'll cover that tomorrow in Life (part 2)

BRAAAIIINNNSSS

The human brain is one of the most unique things on this planet. No two are alike (we're all snowflakes!), but they are all orders of magnitude more powerful than other animals'. But a lot of us aren't using them properly...

Neurons are always firing

Our brains evolved as our greatest tool in the fight for survival - instead of claws or fangs or speed or strength. They also evolved during a CONSTANT STATE OF EXERCISE! Sitting around without a lot of physical activity is a luxury only available to humans in the last 100 years - before that, all the way back to the first mammal 300 million years ago, ours and our ancestors' bodies and brains have been MOVING.

Basically, your brain probably isn't getting the amount of blood that it's genetically used to. Fortunately, even a minimal amount of exercise can do wonders for your abilities. Whenever a frustrated person says "I'm going for a walk," there is a biological reason for that: our brains work better when our bodies are moving - and the affects last for awhile even after you stop.

Be the turtle.

So when you take a break from school work, throw on your headphones and go take a walk! You live in one of the most beautiful places in America (I almost like it more when it's raining), and there's probably an errand you can run at the same time.

Your brain is also exercising anytime you're doing school work! That's part of why you have to go through high school, to force your brain muscles to flex - just like your muscle-muscles, your brain improves whenever you use it. No matter WHAT you want out of life, your brain will be the primary factor in helping you get there - TAKE CARE OF IT!

And if you haven't seen Firefly, I highly recommend it - it's on Netflix

This is also why you shouldn't use marijuana or drink when you're underage - I know that they're both super common and it seems like everyone is doing it, but it really isn't that common at all. Also, the effect that they have on your young brain is significantly different from how they affect adults (check that sentence for the crucial difference between effect and affect). The MOST PROVEN negative side effect of marijuana is what it does to young adult brains; don't get stuck with your teenage brain when it still has maturing to do - your brain doesn't stop growing until you are 23-25 years old.

Really.

In related brain news, scientists are modelling circuit boards on the way the brain works, with fantastic results.

Low-Tech Solution

Some "technology" doesn't look like a new computer gadget or piece of software, it looks like garbage shoved into a roof. A man in Brazil has figured out a way to light his home during the day without spending money on electricity, using discarded water bottles and water (with a little bit of bleach to keep algae out) - check it out.

It isn't perfect, bot'tle do :)

This bottle-lamp works through the refraction property of water, which is an idea you've seen before - probably with a pencil in a cup. Light is a wave, and waves change whenever they change mediums ("medium" in this case means "the material that the wave moves through," not the spiciness of your Mexican food).

Couldn't find a gif of this unfortunately

You've heard a wave change mediums before, when you hear someone speaking from the other side of a wall or door: their voice is distorted and muffled because the vibrations that started in their throat have gone through air, then through the solid surface, before returning to air again on the other side. Each change causes a distortion of the original signal.

You could win a bet with this trick by claiming you can change the direction of an arrow without touching the paper

Notice that the arrow also changes location a bit - that's "refraction," which means the changing of the direction of a wave because it changes mediums (in this case the mediums are air, water, and glass). The changing direction is called reflection - BOTH can happen at the same time, just like when you see your reflection on a still pond and can also see the fish underneath the surface.

Birds that dive for fish under the water have to adapt to this, because when a fish is seen from outside  it's never actually where you see it! The light from the sun has bounced off the fish and changed directions when the light wave moved from water to air. Birds that didn't adapt to this would die of starvation in a hurry, so they have adjusted:

I don't have anything to add here, this is just freaking cool

Refraction also allows you to take pictures like this one:

This picture is upside down so that the image inside is right side up!

Friday Randomness (Animal Edition)

Today might be less educational and more adorable, but that's ok :)

Sometimes animals use humans for meat, but not like you think...

I actually had this happen to me deep sea fishing one time, except it was a shark that chased my caught fish up to the boat.

Or sometimes, animals will just use methods that are shockingly human (success around 1:27):

BAIT!

Dolphins have also been found tearing off sponges and putting them over their noses to protect them when they go rooting through the seafloor for food.

There are numerous examples of crows doing similar things - they are clearly highly intelligent creatures that can remember faces and use tools. Lots of links in that sentence!

And we'll close it out with some more cool animal gifs:

Yep. Flying Snakes. NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE

Speaking of NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE

Happy little hummingbird!

Seals are the dogs of the sea :)

See you next Monday, have a happy weekend!

GIF Frenzy

Today I'm going to explain some awesome science gifs from an article on Buzzfeed:

Egg Underwater:

A cracked egg will keep its shape underwater because of the cohesion in the bubble and pressure from the water. "Cohesion" just means that it sticks to itself - like the word adhere, which means to stick to something else, but with the 'co' prefix which means together, so it literally means "sticks together." The pressure of the water helps keep the whole egg together by pushing on all sides of the egg - anything underwater feels a similar pressure.

Turning of the Cheetah:

Notice the cheetah's tail while it turns - it's using that the rotational inertia of its tail to balance the abrupt change in direction of the front of its body, much like the cat we studied in one of my first blog posts about why cats always land on their feet.

Slinky!!:

(full video here)

This is an odd one! The bottom of the spring doesn't fall until the top part has hit it - this will really happen with any dropped slinky. The video linked above explains it best, but basically the bottom of the spring is experiencing an upward force from the top of the spring, and that upward force doesn't go away until the top has met the bottom. With normal objects, the whole thing drops at once, but springs' elasticity changes things :)


The Sun Never Sets Sometimes:
 

On the top and bottom of our world, the sun is a stranger beast. Some months, the sun never rises at all, but during the summer it never sets! Because of the 23.5 degree tilt of our earth, the sun never leaves the sky near the top of the world - but in the winter, it's the opposite, and the arctic can go months without seeing the sun at all. Depressing! If you're still interested, there's a detailed explanation here

The Pythagorean Theorem:

I'm sneaking some math in on you here: this is a representation of the Pythagorean theorem,
(a² + b² = c²). Because those are squares attached to those lines, the water inside represents the square of that line's value: the 2 squares of the smaller sides add up to the square of the hypotenuse!

And finally, one of my favorite demonstrations:

Floating on air:
 

 Sulphur hexaflouride is a gas at room temperature - but gasses actually act like liquids most of the time, we just don't think of them that way because they usually mix and float about. But this particular substance is different because it is much denser than air itself, so just like when a denser object sinks in water, this "air" is sinking in the room's air, and staying contained inside the tank. 

When the cup scoops some of it up and pours it into the "ship," it increases the density of the inside of the aluminum foil and the ship sinks, just like it would if you filled an aluminum boat with water in a water tank.
Source here - with some extras that I didn't explain :)

Asteroids, comets, and meteors - OH MY!

The dangers of space are not limited to those who go there - space debris sometimes comes to us! The nuclear detecting stations that are in place to find out if anyone is detonating nuclear bombs have found something else entirely: we are being hit by way more asteroids/comets/meteors than we thought.

Source here

Fortunately, our atmosphere burns up a lot of the rock before it hits the ground - they are going such incredible speeds that they hit trillions and trillions of air particles every second, each one slowing them down a tiny bit, converting their kinetic (moving) energy into heat and light.

Pretty - and violent

You might have seen some of the footage from Russia last year, when a meteor streaked across the sky going 60 times the speed of sound - the sonic boom blew out windows for miles before the meteor exploded with a force 50 times that of a nuclear bomb. Luckily the explosion (the result of built up heat and friction, not a bomb of course) happened miles above the Earth's surface over a relatively desolated area; nobody was struck by meteorites, but over 1,000 people were injured indirectly by broken glass or panic situations.

Check out some of the best insane footage here:

How much would you be freaking out?

I've been using these words asteroid, comet, meteor, meteorite - but you might not know the difference! Here's a handy picture for that:

Fortunately, the Earth is very big and, percentage-wise, mostly empty space where it's safe for a meteorite to hit. You don't have any real cause to worry - especially since there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. But this is part of the reason it's important to fund space research, so that we can detect and potentially deflect a big, humanity-ending asteroid.

Jupiter is also well-placed and sized to protect us: because of it's huge size, it forms a sort of "gravity well" that captures some of the asteroids that might hit Earth. Hopefully this will never happen:

And there would be no sound

Also check out this awesome video of a skydiver almost getting hit by a small meteor:

Breaking News: Space is Dangerous

Come watch Cosmos with me at the Web Academy tomorrow (Wednesday) at 1PM! Free Pizza for students :)

Spaceflight can be hazardous to your health - and the danger is more than "just" riding a series of explosions miles away from the Earth's surface. Once outside of the protective bubble that is our atmosphere, astronauts are bombarded with all kinds of radiation and UV rays that are normally blocked by the very air we breathe.

Notice how far each bar gets into the atmosphere - most of the non-visible light rays are blocked! More information here

We've talked about these effects before, but they are not alone: the human body reacts very strangely to constant weightlessness, after evolving for millions of years in a place where there is a very distinct downward force acting on us at all times. There's also the stress of spaceflight, an odd diet, and the complete inability to do something as simple as take a walk - astronauts lose a lot of muscle mass during their time in space.

That's why they have to take pictures like this when they land! (source)

NASA knows all of this, so they're conducting a new experiment to study these effects. Crucial to any experiment is a controlled variable: a person or group that is in the same situation as those being tested, with one big difference, so that the effect of that difference can be measured. Astronauts are already extensively studied before and after they come back, but people change during their time on earth too - so NASA needs 2 identical people, one staying on earth and another to go into space.

The only identical people in the world, of course, are twins! Luckily, these twins are both astronauts - one retired, and the other about to spend a year in space while being compared in almost every way to his brother back on earth.

Which brother would you rather be?

Stay tuned - tomorrow I will report on the very real danger of asteroids. Happy Earth Day!

Balloons!

Floating objects are a bit unusual, right? Everything on earth falls toward the ground...except when it doesn't, like helium balloons.

 Mythbusters is amazing

The trick here is that a balloon full of helium is much lighter than the air around it - much like when you take an air-filled ball down under the surface of a pool and it pops to the surface, a helium balloon will "pop to the surface" of the atmosphere itself, which is many miles above us.

Unless a cat is keeping it down :)

Pressure always moves from high-to-low - this is why when you squeeze a balloon it will eventually pop, because the pressure inside the balloon is getting higher and higher until it's so strong that it has to move to the lower pressure outside - right through the side of the balloon if necessary. 

IN THE FACE

This buoyancy comes from the air (or liquid) that is displaced by the volume of the balloon itself - the atmosphere or water is trying to fill that space, causing a force on the outside of the balloon.

Picture from Wikipedia - more info on buoyancy available in that link

Check out how really weird buoyancy can be:

This guy is SO PUMPED about physics, I love it

Crazy, huh?

Friday Randomness (energy-themed!)

Every Friday, I'll give you a few links and videos to get you through the weekend :)

Today, I have a whole lot to say about energy!

Energy from the plasma light is being inducted into the fluorescent bulb

• NASA can not only purify urine so that it's drinkable again, but now they're producing electrical power while they do it.

• Scientists would love to harness the power of the oceans - the tide is always moving, and there's a WHOLE lot of salt water available. So the U.S. Navy has figured out how to turn seawater into jet fuel and other scientists have discovered a way to create electricity when salt water runs down graphene - graphene is an important substance because it is a single atom thick, which gives it special properties. Soon we may have cell phone batteries that last for days and can charge in less than a minute because of graphene.

• Speaking of batteries, Toyota has confirmed the first "fuel cell" car for launch in Europe next year. "Fuel cells" are a kind of huge battery, so instead of visiting a gas station, you would stop at a fuel cell station and simply trade empty cells for full ones.

• I've saved the most fun for last: check out this post, they made a "pyro board," with flames that change based on the music playing (there's a great explanation of how, and then the music drops at 3:38 in the video).
  

And a bonus gif of a wind turbine that is just collecting TOO much energy:

The power of the wind!

Potentially habitable planet found!

The Kepler announcement came through today, and it's a doozy: scientists have discovered the first potentially habitable planet!



It is QUITE far from earth, 490 light years - which is a measure of distance, not time. A light year simply means the distance light travels in one year, which is just under 6 TRILLION miles - that's 6,000,000,000,000. The sun is 8 light minutes from the earth, so this is 63,000 times farther away than our own sun.

But it's in the habitable zone! Scientists have calculated that liquid water can only exist on planets within a narrow range of orbit - as far as we know, liquid water is necessary for life. And this planet's star is the right age and brightness to make life possible, in addition to the similar gravity that it has.

Do you have any questions? Please participate in the comments, I'd be happy to clarify anything for you...

Announcements:

Tune in tomorrow at 11am for an announcement from NASA about a discovery made by the Kepler Telescope, which is specifically looking for planets in the habitable zone!

For MEWA students and friends of the program:

Open House is tonight at 6 pm! Come by to visit with teachers, eat some free food, and fill out your passport that can be used to excuse one assignment :)

Remember, if you bring 5 cans of food for the Food Drive, you will get a stamp on your Open House Passport. Make sure you give the can's of food to your counselor.

 

You are probably not as excited as these teachers, who are just too happy about Open House!

Eclipse (not the mints...there's a lot of space-related candy huh?)

Did y'all (I'm from Texas) see the lunar eclipse last night?

It turns red because the only light that reaches it in the shadow has already been through Earth's atmosphere

If you missed it, a few more times this year (agenda of eclipses is at the bottom of that link) the moon will be in the shadow of the Earth. Over the next year and a half, the moon's orbit keeps it close to the Earth's shadow, so there will be many lunar eclipses viewable from the United States. Check out this great and short NASA video about Lunar Eclipses:

Seems like it would happen more, but space is very big.

More excitingly though, a solar eclipse will be happening in Portland on August 21st, 2017. A solar eclipse is when the moon is blocking the sun, so it happens during the daytime, and the moon is so much smaller that only a very narrow range of places gets to see a full solar eclipse:

The narrow black line is all the people in the world who will view a total solar eclipse this time, but everyone in red will see something

Check out the animation tab of this picture here, it shows how the moon's shadow will move over the earth during daytime for this solar eclipse in 2017.

Plants emit light that we can't see...but now we're looking from space

You probably already know about photosynthesis, the process that plants use to convert energy directly from sun light. What you might not know is that plants "remit" fluorescent waves (in addition to waves of the color that they are). Fluorescence is outside of the visual light spectrum - our eyes cannot see these waves, but NASA has started investigating them from space.

The Amazon rainforest is BRIGHT red - where are most of the forests in North America?

Photosynthesis is KIND OF IMPORTANT, right?  Scientists can use this fluorescence to track and further prove the 97% scientific consensus on the realities of climate change.

Speaking of trees and space, there's a bit of a Fantastic Four situation going on in Japan - with cherry trees instead of humans. Seeds that orbited the earth for 8 months, less protected from the Sun's radioactive waves, sprouted blossoms 6 years earlier than normal. It's crucial to study the effects of space travel on seeds because we may one day create a sustainable spaceship with biological components to recycle carbon dioxide into oxygen like we naturally have here on earth.

All the plants put your stems in the aiiiiiir

Friday Randomness!

Every Friday, I'll post a few different links or videos to get you through the weekend. Let's start with the cutest thing ever:

Cats be cats

Here's an album of gifs that display different engine types:

Here are some articles of interest:

Marine creatures that only live on land plants??!!

Releasing mosquitoes to kill...mosquitoes?
Genetically modified (or sterilized by irradiation) male mosquitoes can be released into the wild to kill off the next generation, since mosquito females only mate once in their lives.

And finally, railgun technology is getting more realistic. The problem with these "guns" (they don't get their power from explosions, but rather from electricity and the Lorentz Force) is that they usually warp their rails after just a few shots fired. The Navy seems to have that problem under control...

It's "exploding" from sheer power, not a combustion reaction like a typical gun would have

Because railguns can fire projectiles SO very fast, the military hopes to use them to shoot down missiles in flight.

Orbit (not the gum)

 Check out this awesome gravity game, where you can add planets of varying sizes (and other stars) to the orbit - see how many celestial bodies you can get into the orbit without crashing into the outside barrier, and leave your high score in the comments!

You might notice while playing that the closer a planet is to the sun, the faster it goes; that's the fundamental reason that orbit happens: the orbiting object is going fast enough sideways that it never gets any closer to the star or planet that it's orbiting. Check out these gifs:

No sideways motion

Not fast enough for orbit!

The perfect speed!

So the closer an object is to the sun, the faster it has to go to stay in perfect orbit! That's why Mercury is named after the speedy Roman messenger god - a "year" (one full revolution around the sun) on Mercury is only 88 Earth Days! Pluto hasn't even made a single revolution around the sun since it was discovered 77 years ago - Pluto takes 248 earth years to orbit the sun one time.

Only the first 2 minutes of this video are about orbit - the rest is about fusion, which we talked about yesterday :)

Are astronauts in space outside of the effects of gravity? They sure seem "weightless" - but they are closer to the Earth than the moon is, and the moon is kept in orbit by the Earth's gravity...so they are not too far away to be affected by gravity from the Earth. So why are they "weightless?"

Doge has the same misconception that most people do, that there is no gravity in space - there is!

To explore this secret, think about an elevator. When the elevator is going down, if you jump up in the air, you'll fall farther than you jumped right? Because the elevator has lowered while you were in the air. Now imagine if the elevator was faster - you would float in the air even longer, right? What if it were falling at the same rate that you were?

Scary prank! If this happened for real and the elevator fell with you, you would seem weightless compared to the elevator

The astronauts in the space station are constantly falling at the same rate that their spaceship is. The only reason they don't get any closer to the earth is because they are in orbit, so their sideways velocity keeps them going around, instead of falling directly down.

The Fusion Dream is getting closer...

Scientists have taken one step closer to the dream of sustainable nuclear fusion! If they can figure out how to control the instabilities, nuclear fusion power plants would use hydrogen (the most common element in the universe) as fuel, and the "waste product" would be helium, which is actually far more valuable than your funny high-pitched voice might suggest.

Deuterium and Tritium isotopes are just fancy words for Hydrogen atoms with extra neutrons (Source)

Fusion requires so much pressure and heat that it only occurs in the CORE of the sun. When the sun runs out of hydrogen to fuse, it will burn out - that's how a star's age is determined, by the amount of hydrogen left. It's called "nuclear" fusion because it changes the nucleus - and it's one of the only processes that do that, besides the atomic bomb (nuclear fission).

Because separating nuclei is also difficult and creates energy. More here

And yes, nuclear fusion is the main plot point of Spiderman 2:

Sorry about the mustache.

These scenes are actually relatively accurate, except for the "out of control" part - because the heat point for fusion is so hard to maintain, unplugging the machine would end the reaction. The goal is to get enough energy out of the fusion to power the lasers that create the heat so that fusion is possible, with a little extra energy for us to power our laptops with :)

While all of this fusion business is being worked out, clean energy is gaining ground (and shedding costs). At peak hours, Texas (WHOOP!) wind farms have hit 30% of the energy demand for the area; every kilowatt produced by wind replaces burning coal, to everyone's advantage.

Photographer: Eddie Seal/Bloomberg News

A Talking Piano :)

Check out this piano - it talks!

Is this a guy with too much time on his hands? For every possibility, there's someone dedicated enough to make it happen.

And now, a joke:

Did you hear about the pianist that kept banging his head against the keys?

He was playing by ear!

Buh-dum-dum:

Water is amazing!

Water has many odd properties, but here's one of the oddest:

When the plates are hot enough, the water actually rides its own vapor uphill - this doesn't violate the conservation of energy because the energy to move uphill actually comes from the heat, it just doesn't evaporate the water because of the vapor bubble. COOL!

And here's a slow-mo gif of an over-filled water balloon:

If you have any other cool water facts or videos/gifs, put them in the comments :)

Meteorite almost hits a guy!

Check this out, this guy was skydiving when a meteorite zoomed right by him.

This is the first time a meteorite has ever been caught on film while it was "dark," meaning it was no longer on fire from friction with the Earth's atmosphere! Close call!