One of my struggles over the past few years was finding a service project that I was interested in. Sure, there are plenty of opportunities in DC, but I could never get motivated because they were things I wasn't interested in. Recently, while reading an article about environmental conservation in my local area, I saw a section about rebuilding oyster reefs. This caught my eye because I have always been interested in marine biology. This project combines my interest in biology with a conservation project which I can get on board with. Over the summer, I hope to get involved with some projects like this in the Chesapeake Bay area. Here is the link to the article which I found this on, which gives some more ways that you can help conserve the environment around you: https://alexrenew.com/LoveWaterways.
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I was lucky enough to be able to go backcountry skiing in Colorado just a few weeks ago. The fresh powder is spectacular, but comes with high risks. Avalanches are frequent in the Colorado back country, so it is important to have at least a basic understanding of how they form before you venture out of resort territory. - Many factors influence the likelihood and severity of an avalanche, temperature, snowpack, wind, and terrain being the main ones. Snowpack is essentially defined as the various layers of snow that build up over the season. You can have icy layers, crystalized layers, or soft layers, which all build up on top of each other. This becomes an issue when say, a heavy layer builds up on a softer powder layer, on top of an icy smooth layer. This can lead to the formation of avalanches when top layers crack and begin to slide on icier bottom layers. - Wind can help to displace snow from one side of the mountain to the other. This leads to wind slabs, where large amounts of snow can build up on this top layer, displaced by the wind, and increase the likelihood of an avalanche. - Of course, another avalanche factor is steepness of the slope. Most avalanches occur on an incline of about 30-45 degrees. - Temperature is the final important factor in forming avalanches. High temperatures cause the snow to melt, allowing water to trickle down lubricating the lower snowpack. It also makes the snow heavier, less fluffy, leading to slabs breaking away and starting avalanches. On the other hand, however, very cold temperatures cause water to evaporate out of the warmer snowpack and freeze on the surface, forming weak crystalline structures called surface hoar. Surface hoar serves as a weak layer of snowpack, so as that snowpack builds up on the surface hoar layer, it tends to break away much easier. So there you go, that is the basics of avalanches. Before you go out and ski the backcountry, it is important to understand the conditions at the time. Check your local avalanche report (most states with backcountry skiing have them) and make sure to stay safe and make good decisions.
Science class teaches us what is already known to give us a foundation of understanding, but sometimes it seems like a bunch of terms, names, dates, worksheets, boring labs, and tests. Kevin B. Jones reminds us in his TED Talk that science is really a curiosity of the unknown. Scientific progress is achieved by those who want to discover and solve the problems which were once thought to be un-discoverable. With this blog, I hope to inspire you, to motivate that curiosity within you.
I still remember when I got my first microscope. During school I would think about all the things I wanted to observe with it. After school, I would run around taking samples of things to look at. When I look back at this blog which I started when I was 13, I am reminded of that excitement. Although these posts may seem like simple little experiments, to an open mind, they are stepping stones to infinite possibilities. Recently, in science class, we learned how to make ice cream very easily! It was really fun. You basically pour milk, sugar, and a flavoring of your choice into a bag. You then fill another bag with ice and salt. You place the bag with milk, sugar, and flavoring into the bag with ice and shake. Soon it will freeze and you get ice cream. The secret is the salt. It basically makes the ice colder. The milk can then transfer more energy to the ice causing the milk to lose more energy and therefore freeze faster.
Over the past week I was visiting Ecuador with my school. It was a great time and the weather was beautiful. We visited Quito and the Galapagos both of which were beautiful places. The highlight of the trip for me was the snorkeling in the Galapagos. It was great. We got to see turtles, sharks, coral, and fish. Here are just a few pictures of what we saw. I decided to post this because I am actually going to Ecuador and the Galapagos soon. In Ecuador, one of the volcanoes is erupting, sending ash into the sky and scattering around in different locations. They actually have a webcam of this happening and I thought it might be cool to show. Click on the picture below to see the webcams.
I was just thinking about my post a while back about the lightbulb. I was wondering how that actually works though. There are so many different types of lightbulbs these days, but how do they all work? None of them work the same way. For example a halogen lightbulb has a tungsten filament. The difference is that they have a halogen based gas around them. This gas captures the tungsten atoms and brings them back making the bulb last longer. Another example is the fluorescent bulb. This has small mercury atoms in it. The electrons flow through the tube and bump into the mercury atoms creating both seeable and fluorescent light. The white filter around the bulb makes most of the light seeable. To see how the rest of the lightbulbs work click the image below.
With all of this snow from Winter Storm Pax I've been wondering how road salt works. Basically salt makes the freezing temperature of water lower. Usually water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but adding a ten percent salt mixture will make it so water freezes at 20 degrees. This will literally make it so that the ice has to melt and will refreeze when the temperature is 20 degrees. Pretty cool.
My mom and I were just looking for some cool facts and we found one that seems almost impossible. Did you know that a day on Venus is longer than a year. A day lasts 243 Earth days and a year only lasts 224. Basically what this means is that Venus spins really really slowly on its axis, but makes one revolution around the sun very fast. How does it go so fast? it actually doesn't have anything to do with speed, but has more to do with how close it is to the sun. It is the second closest planet and therefore has less of a revolution then say, Earth.
I always think that it's unfair that the West Coast gets the snow before the East Coast. Why does this happen though? Well it all has to do with the Jet Stream. The jet stream is a strong wind about 30,000 feet up which carries weather across the world. In the United States the jet stream flows West to East which causes the storms to move West to East. Occasionally the jet stream will go north to south, but that rarely happens and even more rare is when it flows East to West.
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BenI'm an eighth grader and want to share my love of science with others. Archives
December 2016
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