I was just searching around for cool science experiments when I came upon this one. Adding a little bit of water to a balloon can actually keep it from popping. Its simple how it works. The thin rubber membrane can only take a small amount of heat before breaking. When water is added though, it soaks up some of the heat so the membrane doesn't have to withstand as much. Eventually though the balloon will pop. By the way, when I did the experiment, I could hold the flame under the balloon for up to 7 seconds, whereas without water it was an instant pop.
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My mom and I were listening to this really interesting podcast from RadioLab about coral and I thought that I would post it. Scientists decided to take random pieces of coral and cut them open. Just like a tree, there were small rings that indicated a year, but in between these larger lines, were smaller ones. There were around 360- 365 rings which each represented a day! So what the scientist decided to do was the exact same thing with coral that was millions of years old. He found that , again there were lines that marked each year and lines that marked each day. When he counted these small lines he counted 400 or so! Basically what that means is that the days were shorter then, then they are now! To be exact each day was 22 hours long. So why does that happen? As per The Daily Beast article about Neil Shubin's book The Universe Within "Like a slowing top, Earth spins slower and slower with each passing moment, making days longer now than in the past. As the planet rotates, the water in the oceans moves about and serves to brake the spin of the planet. That is why today is two milliseconds longer than yesterday. Fossil corals are silent witnesses to the lengthening of days. Clocks and calendars abound in the natural world, sometimes in the most surprising places."
So what is snow? Snow may look fluffy and soft, but its actually not. Snow is very simple. It forms when water condenses on dust and dirt particles high up in the atmosphere. That's right, snow is basically just dirt. That's also why its always cloudy when it snows. Clouds are the water vapor that condenses on the dirt. When its cold enough, these water particles freeze creating that white puffy stuff we see in winter!
My mom showed me this really cool video. As it is Winter, I thought that this was an appropriate video. Eddy Cartaya and his friend decided to explore a few of the many caves in Oregon. Glacier caves are formed when the weather warms up and ice begins to turn into small streams of water. These streams of water form caves throughout the ice! In these caves there are many things. Things that had frozen in the ice above slowly melt towards the bottom throughout the years. Soon they find there way into the caves that lace the glacier. There can be things that are hundreds of years old! This video shows a journey taken by Eddy Cartaya and his friend to explore and map the glacial caves of Oregon. According to a few websites, the most popular Christmas gift isn't a toy helicopter, a video game, or anything like that. It's not a toy, kitchen utensil, or accessory. It's a gift card. Now why would a gift card be the number one selling Christmas item? Well for starters its versatile. It can fit in any envelope. You don't need to spend hours wrapping it up. Secondly it's easy to find. Walk into Target or Best Buy and there they are, right up front. Lastly it saves the hassle of finding that one obscure gift. Just allow the receiver to find it and pay for it with a gift card. As you can see, gift cards are very helpful to get gifts. Thats just one idea though.
School just ended for Christmas break. Christmas is getting closer every day and that means spending money on gifts for loved ones. Christmas shopping can be fun or stressful depending on your personality. But you know all those gifts add up. The average american spends about 700- 900 dollars on Christmas shopping each year. That's a lot. And of course there were those off years where people spent a lot less or a lot more, but this is the normal number for most years. Don't worry though, its worth it.
This week I was tracking the winter storm that was about to hit our area. I really wanted to get a snow day so I kept checking the weather to see if it was going to snow. I used a different website though called GoesEast. It is great. It is the satellite imagery from the Goes Satellite. You can pick from many different settings that show you water vapor, clouds, heat, etc. (Click on the picture to visit the sight).
Last Christmas I got this thing called Arduino. It looks like a tiny computer board. It turns out that it basically is a tiny computer. You can get many attachments that allow it to do different things. It has speaker attachments, gaming, and other things too. To actually make things happen, you need to be able to code though.
Arduino is an open- source electronic prototyping platform. Open source means the design is made freely available and may be redistributed or modified. This basically means that the design is free to the public. There would be more than one person producing the boards. We did a bunch of things with Arduino. My uncle came over from Belize for Thanksgiving so he showed us how it worked. First we learned how we could make words change on a screen. Then we learned how to make things move across the screen. We are currently learning how to fix a game he made. It was really fun. I strongly suggest getting Arduino. There are many sites with Arduino project ideas. You can even find some on youtube. I decided to do an experiment on the topic of lightbulbs. I got this idea from the Steve Spangler youtube, Sick Science. You should definitely check it out. So the basic idea of this experiment is to make light. I taped together 8 D batteries. I had 2 small wires with alligator clips on the ends. I connected one end of the alligator clips together with a 0.05mm pencil lead which would be a makeshift filament. The other ends were connected by the batteries. When put to either end of the batteries, the pencil lead would begin to produce light! It only lasts for a short time before the pencil lead burns out. One thing I found out is that you really have to push the batteries together because sometimes they aren't actually touching each other. So how does a lightbulb work? Light is a form of energy produced by tiny atoms. The energy is called photons. Photons are produced when atoms "get excited" and start moving. Heat will do this. When heat is added to something it causes the atoms to jump around and move. This will produce photons. In the average lightbulb there is a filament. Usually there is about six feet of metal filament in a bulb. This filament is just an electricity conductor. When the electricity is added it makes heat which makes the atoms around the filament move creating light!
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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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