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Sunday, June 3, 2012

Science WebQuest


Electromagnetic Spectrum
Wavelength
Frequency
Energy
Radio Waves
947981.1 m
15632.2 Hz
1.036e-29 J
Micro Waves
.00359 m
8.349e10 Hz
5.532e-23 J
Infrared Waves
2.21411 m
1.211e12 Hz
8.026e-22 J
Visible Light
7.530e-7 m
3.981e14 Hz
2.638e-19J
UV Rays
2.379e-8m
1.260e16 Hz
8.3410e-18 J
X-Rays
1.900e-11 m
1.578e19 Hz
1.045e-14
Gamma Rays
4.289e-16 m
6.989e23 Hz
4.631e-10 J



Wave/Ray
How it is used:
Radio Waves
AM/FM radio, TV, Communications.
Micro Waves
Heating up food, radar.
Infrared Waves
Radiation.
Visible Light
Lamps, cars, security, electronics.
UV Rays
Tanning beds.
X-Rays
Medical diagnosis.
Gamma Rays
Nuclear power plants.

                                                                               6. Wavelengths:

 What are two space items that are observed by radiation: Satellites & telescopes.

This narrow band of visible light is affectionately known as ROYGBV.



4. What does each letter stand for?

 Each letter stands for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.



5. Explain how Roy G. Bv lost a vowel.

Indigo (the B”I”V) isn’t easily distinguished in the color spectrum. Therefore it was dropped.





7. Explain how rainbows are formed…



Raindrops in the air act as tiny prisms, in rainbows. “Light enters the raindrop, reflects off of the side of the drop and exits. In the process, it is broken into a spectrum just like it is in a triangular glass prism. A prism is a triangular piece of glass or plastic. To get it to produce a mini-rainbow, you allow a narrow strip of white light to fall on one face of the triangle.” The triangle has something called a refractive index, which causes the light to bend, thus you see the rainbow.



8. Explain how a mirage is created…

 To generate a mirage, the air must be 1 part cold and one part hot. Since hot air is usually denser and cold air is commonly thin, the edge in between the two parts of air can bend, or refract the visible light. Mirages happen more often if the light hits the edge at a sharp angle. “The oasis mirage occurs when the air just above the ground gets hot because the ground heats it.”



9. So why is the sky blue?

 Some of the light from the Sun, when high in the sky, travels towards Earth and is sprinkled towards us by the molecules in our atmosphere. A big part of this scattered light is light from the blue end of the spectrum, so we get to gaze at the beautiful BLUE sky.

b. The colors of the sunset…
When you see a sunset, the sun is refracting across the surface of the Earth. If the path is long enough, the violet and blue lights are longer than our eye can see. This leaves the red, orange, and pink colors for us to observe. This is why sunsets are usually pink, orange and red.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

The Small Ice Cube's Journey to Freedom.


A Day In the Life of States of Matter Changes

I started as ice,
Cold and dreary,
Gray and translucent.
 I was a cube.
I had reached my freezing point.
Everything was “certain” they said.
I would always be:
A constant mass,
One shape,
One size.
They said I wouldn’t move much.
They said I would always be a solid.
They were wrong.
I decided to melt.
I had to be something
Other than myself.
I melted in the form of water.
I started to move more.
ALL OF A SUDDEN
I formed to the shape of the crowd.
I thought I was cool.
I was now a liquid.
I moved when my friends did.
I realized I needed to be
Free.
I knew what I was
I was
Made
To
Be
Something that had
Energy.
I was destined to be…
A GAS!
I evaporated and
I flew up in to the sky.
I would have free form
I could evaporate.
I could be myself.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

What I learned: Newt's Laws.


Newt’s Laws
            This year in physical science, we learned about Newton’s 3 laws of motion. The laws…  they are honestly are kind of boring if you are merely reading them. HOWEVER, there is hope! I’m going to clear up a few things about Mr. Newt’s laws and show that he isn’t so BORING after all!
            The first law is: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.  So let’s put some fun into this. One day there was a boy named Angus. Angus was a pretty cool kid. The other kids got jealous while they saw Angus running. They went up to him and tripped him. YAY! That scenario shows the first law. “How?” you might ask? Well, Angus was running and he was in a regular motion. His legs were constantly putting each foot in front of each other. Then the kids came up and stopped him; ladies and gentlemen, Newt’s first law.
            Now for the second law: The relationship between an object's mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors (as indicated by their symbols being displayed in slant bold font); in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector. Phew, now that’s a mouthful! Some people summarize this by saying F=MA. Let me show you how this actually makes sense. The let’s just say that Angus has a mass of 55 kg. His mass and his acceleration, (acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with time) are directly related to his force (strength or power exerted upon an object). Make sense?

For the grand finale; THE THIRD LAW!  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Isn’t that nice… and little? Well it may be pretty clear and simple, so I’m not going to make a story up; maybe this analogy from the Study Physics will help:


  • If you push on a wall you feel a force against your hand… the wall is pushing back on you with as much force as you apply to it.
  • If this wasn't happening, your hand would accelerate through the wall!
 Get it? Got it? Good.
            So now for the personal stuff…
When learning about the laws, I noticed that they way it was being taught was easier to understand than when I was being taught it in 7nth grade. I studied by memorization and also thinking of ridiculous stories (like Angus’s…). I honestly enjoyed studying Newton’s laws because it was easyto learn and I have to thank my teacher for that. J
            ANYWAYS, enough of the mushy gushy stuff, study hall is almost over and I’m ready to go home! Maybe I should use Newt’s first law to get out of this seat…
-Caitlin
           

Monday, May 28, 2012

What I learned: How Light Works.


Light, light, light, and more light! We see it all the time. However we can’t taste it, we cannot touch it, we can’t smell it, we can’t really hear it! So WHAT is it? I’m sure that you are on the edge of your seat, JUST WAITING, for me to tell you.  Light is a noun and it is something that makes things visible or affords illumination: ex. All colors depend on light. As you can see, light is easily defined in a dictionary, but humans have been boggled by the concept of light for a while, well, since forever started. However, in science class I realized that order to understand light, we must know what we actually see of light (visible light), is filtered through our Earth’s atmosphere and reflected off of various objects and surfaces.  This, my friend is how we see light and how it works.


Light is so important that it has a place in a big thing called the “electromagnetic spectrum. ” The picture below is basically what I learned in science class. I learned that visible light is a very small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is spilt up into something called RoyGBiv, which stands for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.  Red has the lowest wave frequency and violet has the highest wave frequency.




What I found difficult about studying light is remembering how we see light. It’s a hard concept to remember (that light is filtered through our atmosphere; it’s kind of mind blowing actually).  When I was studying my problem solving skills kicked in once again!  I studied by just memorizing the electromagnetic spectrum and remembering it for the quiz. My problem when studying was doing it creatively. My studying is usually just “cold turkey.”


            When thinking about how light related to my life, I couldn’t really think of much, but then this popped up in my head… (still thinking actually). I saw that my “visible light” (outward appearance) is only a small part of me (the electromagnetic spectrum). Our “visible light” is our clothes, our skin, our face… etc. , but our true personality can’t really be seen. You have to get to know a person before you know their personality.


            Anyways, I enjoyed studying light, how we see it and how it works. I hope that someday we will know even more about the wonderful, mysterious, elusive, world of light.


-Caitlin


Sources:          


http://www.howstuffworks.com/light.htm

What I learned about: The Moon.



            The Moon; it's what little kids dream about, it's in history books, and it's what I learned about in science class. Even though the Moon is a rather repeated subject that we hear much about. I think that it is fascinating because it's roughly 250,000 miles from Earth and we can still learn about it. Though it may about the width of America, is an intriguing area of science that I have always loved more than cake physics.

            The Moon is surprisingly both the same and different from the earth in many ways. Over fifty years of research has shown multiple areas of resemblances and differences to Earth. The Moon and our world are both terrestrial planets (rocky planets). Both objects are not smooth on the surface. They both have soil, deep valleys, rivers (the moon’s “rivers” do not have water in them) and they both have basins.

           

            The soil on the moon (regolith) is also similar to the Earth! The pebbles in the soil are made of basalts (from minerals and eruptions). Such examples are as plagioclase feldspar and olivine. Those kinds of rocks are ones that we can scout out here, on Earth. However the moon has no life on it. This means that its soil isn’t organic, like Earth’s. In order for the moon’s soil to be like Earth’s, it would need to be originating from a form of life (like a plant, animal, or human).



  Just like the earth has The Grand Canyon, the moon has its version of it. They are called pits.  The pits on the moon are aged scars from asteroids and meteors that impacted into the Moon and exploded. Because it faces an open space, the farther hemisphere of our moon has more craters. Also, the side that faces Earth has fewer craters because we shield the moon from debris (our atmosphere burns it up).


 The Moon’s rilles are like Earth’s rivers. They are basically stretched out valleys. However, they are barren of water. Some scientists think that there may be small pockets of ice in the Moon’s poles. This happens by a comet or meteoroid hitting the surface and leaving ice behind on the Moon’s surface. However, since the Moon has major temperature changes in one day, the state of water (solid, gas, liquid) would be constantly changing.


Like the earth has seas’, the Moon has maria which is a fancy awesome word that means "sea," however maria on the Moon are flat areas on the moon. Maria are more common on the side of the moon that faces the Earth; the far side has very few of these plains. Scientist have no explanation for this.

“Earth and the Moon have been in a wrestler-hold of gravity for as long as time,” says Globio. Just like the Earth pulls the Moon into orbit around us, the Moon has a gravitational pull!! Woo Hoo! I know, you’re so excited. Anyways, when the Moon orbits around us it also is multitasking because it pulls on the oceans. This results in the water shifting toward the Moon. It ALSO means that when you go to the beach you can tell your parents that there is a high/low tide because of the Moons gravitational pull, and THEN they’ll think that you’re REALLY smart.

 Now that we know the similarities, let’s go into the differences between the Moon and Earth. They include, the atmosphere, temperature, and phases.

The Moon also has no protection barrier, or atmosphere, covering it from harmful space stuff celestial objects, solar wind, molecules (like neon, helium, hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen). The molecules and solar wind emitted from the sun's force impact the moon's exterior directly and are entrenched into mineral grains. It is estimated, by really smart scientists, that about half of the moon's surface make-up “is oxygen, bound up in silicate minerals,” says Extreme Science.

The Earth’s temperature is relatively mild to the moons! “The temperature on the Moon ranges from daytime highs of about 130°C = 265°F to nighttime lows of about -110°C = -170°F,” says Enchanted Learning. Talk about a BIG humongous difference.

The last difference is phases. The moon itself doesn’t disappear, but it is an act of a light illusion. The luminosity of the moon is actually the light of the sun reflecting off the surface of the moon.  The moon’s phases include first quarter, full moon, last quarter, and new moon.

Now that the differences are covered, let's go over my reflections on what I learned.

When learning about the moon I did have difficulty remembering eclipses for the quiz. I think it was because we just didn't cover it enough in class. I think watching a video over it might has helped me.

My problem solving skills helped my studying! I knew that I needed to study more on eclipses and that I was good at remembering certain terms. However, I made the mistake of studying the terms too much and not focusing on the weaknesses.

Like I said in the begininng, the moon is almost always mentioned in our history books. We see it when we (America) first laneded on the moon. And today, we see that our trip to the moon was certainly one small step on the moon for one man, but for mankind it meant a new age in time.


The moon may have many differences to the earth, but, it isn't that ddifferent when compared to me (believe it or not...). Like the moon I have phases. I may feel sad one day and another day I may be happy over everything! Like the moon, I have my own "gravitational pull" on people (otherwise known as and influence on people). They also influence me! The moon and I also reflect light! The moon reflects light off of the sun (in space) and I reflect light off of the Son. The son of God of course! Only through Him do we have this amazing, never ending playground called space. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light, and there was light.'" Genesis 1:1-3

 -Caitlin
(By the way, I’ve typed the word MOON so many times that it looks misspelled… J )


Source:

http://www.globio.org/glossopedia/article.aspx?art_id=38

http://www.extremescience.com/moon.htm

http://www.globio.org/glossopedia/article.aspx?art_id=38

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/moon/
http://planetfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/The-Moon.jpg