Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Got Science?
First off, sorry to those of you who accidentally got the next question box a day earlier (I misjudged in my scheduling).
Okay, the last question box: I went and looked it up, and apparently there is a National Christmas Tree Association. According to their "Tree Facts," it can take 4 to 15 years to grow a Christmas tree, but the average time is 7 years. It's actually a really interesting website. According to them, artificial Christmas trees are much worse than real ones. The most interesting (and slightly disturbing) fact from their website is that the first artificial Christmas trees were made by a company that made... toilet bowl brushes! Yes, with the same materials and machinery as well. Puts a whole new light on Christmas trees, doesn't it? I certainly thought of our (artificial) Christmas tree a little differently after that. Very interesting website.
Poll: (well, not really) Which is better: real Christmas trees or fake Christmas Trees? Tell why if you wish as well.
Okay, the last question box: I went and looked it up, and apparently there is a National Christmas Tree Association. According to their "Tree Facts," it can take 4 to 15 years to grow a Christmas tree, but the average time is 7 years. It's actually a really interesting website. According to them, artificial Christmas trees are much worse than real ones. The most interesting (and slightly disturbing) fact from their website is that the first artificial Christmas trees were made by a company that made... toilet bowl brushes! Yes, with the same materials and machinery as well. Puts a whole new light on Christmas trees, doesn't it? I certainly thought of our (artificial) Christmas tree a little differently after that. Very interesting website.
Poll: (well, not really) Which is better: real Christmas trees or fake Christmas Trees? Tell why if you wish as well.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Basic Genetics
This is a cool homework assignment!
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/
Before I start looking at the rest of the website, here are the two (okay, four) interesting things I learned:
Traits are a quality or characteristic that we have, and our combination of different traits makes us unique. We get our traits from our parents, and we will pass them on in our children. While our DNA has instructions for our traits, we can easily have our traits changed by environmental factors. For instance, the "tour" said that our hair color can be changed by sunlight and hair dyes. I never really thought of using sunlight to change your hair color!
Being able to bend your thumb back is called the hitchhiker's thumb allele (uh-LEEL), an allele being a trait. Sadly, even though that ability seems cool, I cannot do bend back my thumb (or curl up my tongue).
When someone has two alleles, like one for a hitchhiker's thumb and one for a straight thumb, they interact. One, the "dominant" trait, dominates over the other one and is what people see (hence the name dominant). The "recessive" trait jumps out your ear, never to be seen again! No, it's still there, it's just, to use their word, "masked" by the other trait. Having two of the same allele for a trait is called homozygous, and having two different ones is called heterozygous. Apparently, traits can also combine, called "incomplete dominance"- so taking a red carnation and a white carnation could make a pink carnation.
Some big words (FYI animefreak44, these are hard to spell, not hard to understand):
DNA= Deoxyribonucleic Acid
The "alphabet" of DNA= A pairs with T, C pairs with G
A=Adenine
T=Thymine
C=Cytosine
G=Guanine
I must explore the rest of the site, so I'll stop typing now.
EDIT: This assignment still isn't due, so I suppose it's okay to add stuff to it. :)
I haven't looked at everything because I've been spending time practicing piano and generally being lazy, but I did look at some other things.
I think that the extracting DNA experiment is pretty cool. We don't get to do much since the computer does most of it for you, but it made me remember the time when I got to extract DNA in real life (from some type of dried plant, I think) at a museum. The DNA looked like a bunch of white, whispy strands. Considering how small DNA is, I was surprised (well, shocked really) that we could see it at all. Sunnyd, are we going to get to extract DNA?
One of the other activities I tried was Mouse Party, which talked about the effects of drugs on the brain (of mice). The mice were kind of disturbing, but that's what taking bad drugs does to you. Anyway, drugs can really mess up your brain, and the "game" showed how the drugs disrupted certain recepters, causing the effects of the drug.
The last activity I tried had to do with genetic therapy, I believe. It was called Space Doctor, and you had to use gene therapy to treat your patients. I only got to treat one patient before I had to go eat dinner (yes, I'm typing this several days later) but I did get it right on the first try. Apparently, you insert genes into viruses (you have to be careful about the type of virus, though) and the newly-modified virus inserts the gene, or allele (see! I'm using vocabulary! Yay!) into the cell. The pictures of the aliens and their environments aren't that great, but it's certainly a cool activity.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/
Before I start looking at the rest of the website, here are the two (okay, four) interesting things I learned:
Traits are a quality or characteristic that we have, and our combination of different traits makes us unique. We get our traits from our parents, and we will pass them on in our children. While our DNA has instructions for our traits, we can easily have our traits changed by environmental factors. For instance, the "tour" said that our hair color can be changed by sunlight and hair dyes. I never really thought of using sunlight to change your hair color!
Being able to bend your thumb back is called the hitchhiker's thumb allele (uh-LEEL), an allele being a trait. Sadly, even though that ability seems cool, I cannot do bend back my thumb (or curl up my tongue).
When someone has two alleles, like one for a hitchhiker's thumb and one for a straight thumb, they interact. One, the "dominant" trait, dominates over the other one and is what people see (hence the name dominant). The "recessive" trait jumps out your ear, never to be seen again! No, it's still there, it's just, to use their word, "masked" by the other trait. Having two of the same allele for a trait is called homozygous, and having two different ones is called heterozygous. Apparently, traits can also combine, called "incomplete dominance"- so taking a red carnation and a white carnation could make a pink carnation.
When an egg cell and a sperm cell join, they form one cell called a zygote, which has all 46 chromosomes that cells usually have.
I don't quite understand this statement: "Traits influenced by just one gene are rare. These are called 'single gene traits' " Perhaps reading (and watching) some more will provide some enlightenment.Some big words (FYI animefreak44, these are hard to spell, not hard to understand):
DNA= Deoxyribonucleic Acid
The "alphabet" of DNA= A pairs with T, C pairs with G
A=Adenine
T=Thymine
C=Cytosine
G=Guanine
I must explore the rest of the site, so I'll stop typing now.
EDIT: This assignment still isn't due, so I suppose it's okay to add stuff to it. :)
I haven't looked at everything because I've been spending time practicing piano and generally being lazy, but I did look at some other things.
I think that the extracting DNA experiment is pretty cool. We don't get to do much since the computer does most of it for you, but it made me remember the time when I got to extract DNA in real life (from some type of dried plant, I think) at a museum. The DNA looked like a bunch of white, whispy strands. Considering how small DNA is, I was surprised (well, shocked really) that we could see it at all. Sunnyd, are we going to get to extract DNA?
One of the other activities I tried was Mouse Party, which talked about the effects of drugs on the brain (of mice). The mice were kind of disturbing, but that's what taking bad drugs does to you. Anyway, drugs can really mess up your brain, and the "game" showed how the drugs disrupted certain recepters, causing the effects of the drug.
The last activity I tried had to do with genetic therapy, I believe. It was called Space Doctor, and you had to use gene therapy to treat your patients. I only got to treat one patient before I had to go eat dinner (yes, I'm typing this several days later) but I did get it right on the first try. Apparently, you insert genes into viruses (you have to be careful about the type of virus, though) and the newly-modified virus inserts the gene, or allele (see! I'm using vocabulary! Yay!) into the cell. The pictures of the aliens and their environments aren't that great, but it's certainly a cool activity.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Got Science?
Anyone curious for ways to time travel? Some ways that I've heard about are:
1. Make an infinitely long spinning cylinder. This cylinder will warp space-time with it, so (I believe) every trip around this cylinder will make you go backwards in time. I don't quite get it, but I read it in a book.
2. From the same book, if you wanted to make a time machine, you could: using negative matter and stuff like that, make two... er... capsules (hard to explain and I read this book a long time ago) and string a wormhole between them (good luck doing that). Then, put one of them on a ship and send that ship zooming off at the speed of light. Time will go differently in each one, and so going in one capsule will send you back in time to the time when it was created (I'm not sure what is which).
3. Going at the speed of light will "stop" time for you, and time slows as you approach the speed of light.
4. Certain drugs will change your perception of time. (i.e. make it seem to speed up/slow down)
5. Life-threatening situations will slow down your perception of time (they did an experiment on it, though I don't quite have the patience now to explain it).
Here are some clips you can watch, and reading the books in this post will also give some more ways. The website that I had hinted at earlier was www.livescience.com, which would have given you some good answers (and possibly some extra credit points!)
EDIT: Congrats to Saffire Goldstone for having the best answer to the first ever question box! And providing wonderful links to articles and videos about time travel. Check it out!
1. Make an infinitely long spinning cylinder. This cylinder will warp space-time with it, so (I believe) every trip around this cylinder will make you go backwards in time. I don't quite get it, but I read it in a book.
2. From the same book, if you wanted to make a time machine, you could: using negative matter and stuff like that, make two... er... capsules (hard to explain and I read this book a long time ago) and string a wormhole between them (good luck doing that). Then, put one of them on a ship and send that ship zooming off at the speed of light. Time will go differently in each one, and so going in one capsule will send you back in time to the time when it was created (I'm not sure what is which).
3. Going at the speed of light will "stop" time for you, and time slows as you approach the speed of light.
4. Certain drugs will change your perception of time. (i.e. make it seem to speed up/slow down)
5. Life-threatening situations will slow down your perception of time (they did an experiment on it, though I don't quite have the patience now to explain it).
Here are some clips you can watch, and reading the books in this post will also give some more ways. The website that I had hinted at earlier was www.livescience.com, which would have given you some good answers (and possibly some extra credit points!)
EDIT: Congrats to Saffire Goldstone for having the best answer to the first ever question box! And providing wonderful links to articles and videos about time travel. Check it out!
Friday, December 18, 2009
Pippin's Question Box
Give three ways to either: slow down time, speed up time, go backwards in time, go forwards (as in going to the future) in time, or stop time. (Best)
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Science Flash: Oil and Water Finally Mix! Gingerbread Men Aren't Worth Chasing!
I felt rather idle, so I looked for the most random articles I could find- and here they are!
How to mix oil and water
Whoever said water and oil don't mix? If you take a drop of water coated in oil and bounce it long enough, then they'll mix together. (That's basically the entire article.) Apparently, scientists in Belgium got the idea (from where is what I'd like to ask) to see what would happen if you bounced an oil coated water droplet for longer than it usually does. They took a drop of soapy water and covered it in oil, and the droplet hung on a wire. Then, they took a (shallow) container of oil, if my interpretation of the video is correct, and bounced the droplet up and down. As it bounced, the outer layer broke up into little globs and went into the water droplet, creating an oil-and-water droplet. They call it the "mayonnaise droplet," a very (cough) official sounding name. Anyway, silliness aside, the significance of this is to try to understand the concepts behind the mayonnaise droplet so they can apply it to other areas like pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
My first questions were how and why. Bouncing little droplets of makeup probably won't be cheap, so the practical applications of this isn't very high. However, research is research, and perhaps they will find something revolutionary based on this concept. Who knows? Also, while I understand the basic way that they did it, I still don't quite understand how the drop "bounced" instead of splattered. Would it simply be because of surface tension or other factors as well? The video was amusing to watch, and explained the experiment much more clearly than the article. Overall, this was definitely an interesting little article.
Case of the toxic gingerbread man
This was a pretty long article compared to the oil and water one. To cut to the chase, there are people out there that try to keep levels of toxic chemicals in the air and water, well, nontoxic. However, there was one stubborn chemical that wouldn't go down: the DCA compound. Basically, what they did was they went into a house (in Utah) and tested every room for the concentrations of this chemical. The hotspot was the basement. Of course, that could be anything: the carpet, walls, paint, the stuff in the basement, and things that go in a basement. Therefore, they took all of the stuff from the basement and put it into the garage. The basement's levels of DCA went down dramactically, and the garage's concentration spiked. A lot. The culprit: a plastic gingerbread man ornament along with some other ornaments. They tested the gingerman's paint, but found little. So, they cut off its legs, and bingo! The chemical is in the plastic. Sadly, ornaments aren't the only culprits. The team who were looking into this also found quite a few other decorative objects that had the exact same problem. On the bright side, the Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission is looking into this, so hopefully it won't get too out of hand.
Personally, I don't really find any reason to panic or throw out all of our Christmas ornaments from reading this. We can't really tell what it is made of, so there's not much really we can do that is practical. Plus, I don't think polyresin is the only material that is emitting toxic fumes into our environment, and trying to rid ourselves of all of those toxins would be nearly impossible. Rather, probably a more rational approach would be to buy new ornaments with care, and perhaps avoid the ones made in China stuffed away in the corner of a dollar store. This material is a cheap plastic, so I'm guessing that cheaper ornaments and decorative stuff would be more likely to be dangerous than the more expensive ones. Overall though, it was an interesting article and nicely written.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Got Science?
I'm a little tired of science articles (there's so many!) so I'm going to take a break from that stuff this week and talk about science and things like that in general. First off, if you do need an article, just click the little label called "Article of the Week" and you'll find enough to satisfy your two-current events minimum. Second, Happy December everyone! Already I can see that this will be a very busy and happy month. I hope that every has had a good Thanksgiving and is doing well.
Now, to the best part: Science! I apologize in advance if I'm a little random, but I'm just saying what comes to mind. I found a great, um, simile to magma bubbling away underneath the earth's crust: freshly baked and bubbling apple pie! What's your favorite biome? I did my project on temperate rain forest, but my personal favorite is marine. There's so much life in the ocean, especially coral reefs. If I had to choose a biome to live in, though, it would probably be in the temperate rain forest (Oregon/Northern California/Washington State) region. I visited the general (not the forest) area once on vacation, and it's really nice and cool. I know some would prefer a hotter climate like Southern California, but I prefer a mild cool that doesn't get too cold. The reason why that area doesn't experience extremes in temperature is because the mountains shelter the region from extremes in temperatures. The mountains also trap moist air masses from the ocean, thus the temperate rain forest. Okay, so I just read an article about anger. Apparently, certain people experience anger more than others. Here's a link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130131326.htm. Here's another about loneliness (I knew I spelled it wrong, but it's fixed now): http://www.livescience.com/culture/091201-loneliness-spreads-friends.html How many people here like science? Just out of curiosity. And why? We're studying genetics soon, and I'm really excited. I have to wonder, though, when we are studying physics. Hmm.... Anyway, here's a random fact, courtesy of http://www.funology.com/ : Your brain is 80% water. Isn't that comforting to know? Oh well. And that's about it for today!
Now, to the best part: Science! I apologize in advance if I'm a little random, but I'm just saying what comes to mind. I found a great, um, simile to magma bubbling away underneath the earth's crust: freshly baked and bubbling apple pie! What's your favorite biome? I did my project on temperate rain forest, but my personal favorite is marine. There's so much life in the ocean, especially coral reefs. If I had to choose a biome to live in, though, it would probably be in the temperate rain forest (Oregon/Northern California/Washington State) region. I visited the general (not the forest) area once on vacation, and it's really nice and cool. I know some would prefer a hotter climate like Southern California, but I prefer a mild cool that doesn't get too cold. The reason why that area doesn't experience extremes in temperature is because the mountains shelter the region from extremes in temperatures. The mountains also trap moist air masses from the ocean, thus the temperate rain forest. Okay, so I just read an article about anger. Apparently, certain people experience anger more than others. Here's a link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091130131326.htm. Here's another about loneliness (I knew I spelled it wrong, but it's fixed now): http://www.livescience.com/culture/091201-loneliness-spreads-friends.html How many people here like science? Just out of curiosity. And why? We're studying genetics soon, and I'm really excited. I have to wonder, though, when we are studying physics. Hmm.... Anyway, here's a random fact, courtesy of http://www.funology.com/ : Your brain is 80% water. Isn't that comforting to know? Oh well. And that's about it for today!
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