Animation fun!

The animation to the left is a simulation of what scientists say will happen to our continents. They say our continents will shift and "morph" into each other 250 million years from now into a Pangaea Ultima. Of course, no one can really predict exactly what our continents will look like and what will happen to them, but it's a good guess as to what will happen because of the continually shifting plates. What we've been talking about in class is that the reason plates move is because what we think are convection zones of magma under the plates. These convection currents don't necessarily rotate in the same direction, so it makes sense that the continents would move in different directions.

This is how scientists think the continents shifted to their current locations from Pangaea. This is because of, once again, the shifting plates. Evidence for this is the fossils found on the different continents. There are fossils found in the USA that have the same composition and are the same type that can also be found in Europe. The only explanation was that the continents were once together.




http://library.thinkquest.org/17701/high/pangaea/
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2000/ast06oct_1/

Biography of a Planet

In Ms. Gardner's class we've been talking about the Nebular Hypothesis and accretion. There is evidence of this on the planet Saturn, but there is also problems involving the idea. The evidence of the Nebular Hypothesis on Saturn is the rings around the planet. It is thought that the rings were a satellite that crashed into Saturn, proving that rocks did crash into other planets. Also, it is a Jovian planet (a gas giant) so it's size and diameter work perfectly for this hypothesis. It's said in the theory that the gas giants formed something like the terrestrial planets, but with gases, and since there were so much gas, the planets (Jupiter and Saturn) became huge in size. Once the gas becomes all used up, the planets could grow no longer. Some problems involving this idea on Saturn are the fact that the rings orbit around Saturn in half the time it takes Saturn to rotate. This is a problem because of the planet Mars' satellites. One of them (Phobos) was found to orbit Mars 3 times around as Mars rotates once. It was thought that Saturn would have an explanation for this, but the rings orbited slower. Then a satellite was found orbiting Saturn and it was orbiting the opposite way of the planet's rotation!

http://www.plantanimalmineral.com/universe/the-nebular-hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebular_hypothesis

Alien's From...

The kind of enviroment required for life is a stable atmosphere, there would need to be water, breathable air, and heat that could hold a body temperature. There would also be medium mass for a normal amount of gravity for a body. Low mass planets have low gravity and high mass planets have high gravity. That is why scientists are searching for possible life on Mars. It's the closest thing to Earth's enviroment. It's close to the Sun, about Earth's mass, and it has a stable atmosphere. It's rumored that there has been water found on Mars, making it possibly able to sustain life.

Science fair!

What I'm doing for my science fair project is trying to find out if brass instrument players or woodwind players have a larger lung capacity. I'm investigating how much air a person can breathe into a balloon and then measuring the diameter across the balloon. I expect the woodwinds to have a larger lung capacity because it seems to take more air to play a woodwind instrument than a brass instrument. I picked this because it's kinda fun to find out considering I'm in band and most of my friends are too. It's already started up a competition with the band kids! :P

Paper.li

So you guys remember Ötzi the Iceman? In case you don't know who that is, I'll tell you in a nutshell. A few years ago, 2 hikers stumbled upon a dead body in the Alps in Ötzi inbetween Astria and Italy and they called in about it. Turns out, this body was mummified and had been there for about 5,300 years and was probably killed because of an arrow wound in the back of his shoulder.
Apparently, scientists have found his genome which will let them find out what color his skin and eyes were, how healthy he was, what race he was, and stuff like that. After using his genome, they discovered that he had brown hair, was lactose intolerant, had type O blood, and that he probably had cardiovascular disease and Lyme disease. His genetic make-up was from Sardina in the Mediterranean Islands. Scientists believe that his parents immigrated from Sardina to Italy for trade. I'm not the only one that thinks this is interesting right? It gets me wondering, what was is life like? Was he married? Did he have kids? Who shot him? And what was his real name? It's really interesting! Questions? Go to:
http://paper.li/238DouglasJ4/1326323626#!science

WIPP

WIPP is a cavern underground in Carlsbad, New Mexico that is used for the storage of nuclear waste. 10, 284 on average are made each year and 12,363,183 miles are travelled. A type of waste being transported is transuranic waste. Transuranic waste is waste that is usually contaminated with plutonium and uranium, which makes it VERY dangerous because plutonium and uranium are nuclear. It needs to be stored because of the radiation it gives off. WIPP is the site of choice because it's certified by the EPA (Enviromental Protection Agency) for storing the waste safely and for a long period of time. Personally, I think it's a bad idea to be storing the waste by burying it because the ground is always moving and if it moves just the right way, the maste will move and break. Also, our future generations will have to deal with what we should have dealt with, which is what we should figure out how to do so we don't just dump it on them. Any questions? Go to: http://sheff.caeds.eng.uml.edu/hazwaste/sciadone/transura.htm
http://www.epa.gov/radiation/docs/radwaste/402-k-94-001-tru.html

You Learn New Things Everyday

What I learned by reading everyone's blogs in Mrs. Engelbrecht's class is that if the world suddenly stopped, the water in the ocean, air, and man-made objects would probably keep going the same rate the Earth was going at before, (1,000 miles per hour) basically destroying our whole planet as we know it. I'd never really thought about that before because I guess it's just not something you think about. Also, that the metric system is more accurate than the imperial system and it'd be MUCH easier for everyone to use the same system rather than different ones.
I also learned that I'm not the only one that thought I knew everything about the Big Bang before this class. I thought I had the basic idea and that's all there is to it, but I really had no idea! There's so much more to it!

Big Bang

The evidence discussed in class supports the cosmological model because of the radiation and the fact that the galaxies are moving farther away and the ones farthest away are going faster than those that are closer. This is because the universe is expanding. The radiation is the aftermath of the Big Bang. Some questions the video brings up is why didn't the beginning of the universe mess up in any way? Sometimes things get messed up like a tree will grow funny, or a person is born with a disorder, but why didn't the universe mess up at all? Scientists should definitely be asking this question. I think new pursuits ARE possible because there is still so much that we don't know about our universe.

Scientific Method

The difference betweent the scientific method and an essay is an essay is more of the ways you got to your results and the conclusion of your experiment than steps of the scientific method. It's more of the plot and the main idea of what you're trying to prove than the scientific method. For example: In the article Astriods and dinosaurs: Unexpected twists and an unfinished story, It was more backround knowledge on how they came to the question and how they got to their conclusion. Also it was mostly the plot of their experiment. Even one of the subtitles was called "The plot thickens..." The scientific method is the steps of how to get to a result or conclusion, these steps being Question, Hypothesis, Research, Experiment, Data, and Results and/or Conclusion. This is more getting even the littlest details about how they came to that result. For example, in the paper airplane project we did in class, we had to write down basically everything that happened in our experiment. In my opinion, the scientific method is used more to help a person know how you did an experiment and to help them do that experiment to if they wanted to, while an essay is just giving you the big idea of the question and results of the experiment.