Contemporary Science and Innovation

Last Tuesday we went on another adventure. This time to the Museum of Science! I for one was very excited because I haven’t been to the MOS in a loooong time.

Now this place has to be one of my favorite places, but due to time constraints, I was only able to see a little bit of what this place has to offer.  It is such an interesting place where you can learn all types of stuff, from animal life to plant life, to dinosaurs and the human body and planets and pretty much anything else you can imagine. I remember the first time I came here in 6th grade, and being simply amazed by everything. Even going there now I feel like my 11 year old self, a little childish and awestruck.

 

What I have decided to focus on was one exhibit that corresponded to our final project. One area was dedicated to alternative energy sources. The one in particular that caught my eye was solar energy, because  our final experiment has to do with heat and solar power. Below you will find some pictures of the charts they have. There are also dioramas of simply sunlight experiments.  One interesting fact I learned was that heating and cooling account for nearly half of the energy used in U.S households.

Unfortunately I missed out on the brainstorming portion of our experiment with Luana, Livia and Evan. From what I can gather from their posts we are going to use the Nxt robots to determine which surface conducts the most heat, whether it is sand, soil or water. This sounds like an awesome experiment, so good job guys!! I look forward to working with everyone!

Happy Science-ing!

On February 28, 2012 we went on a long and treacherous journey.

(Okay, it wasn’t that bad. )

It was our trip to the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. It was pretty cool! We had learned a lot about it in class previously but to see how passionate the people who were working on the project were about it made it even that much better.

The Plasma Center is recognized as one of the leading university research laboratories in the physics and engineering aspects of magnetic and inertial fusion.

Their machine, Alcator C-Mod, uses magnetic fields to confine hydrogen atoms and get them hot enough to fuse. This particular machine is a tokamak, which prevents the particles following the magnetic field lines from escaping. It looks similar to this:

They run their machines for a couple of seconds, and it takes almost the amount of energy that the entire city of Cambridge uses! The downside to this is that they use so much energy, but they do not make nearly enough of it back. MIT is working on it though, the hope for the future is to someday be able to produce much more energy and create an alternative energy source that is more economically and earthly sound.

 

On a sad note, this particular research center has got their funding cut, so more funding can go to ITER, another fusion machine, bigger and stronger. More info here: ITER. It is really sad because all of the members of the MIT Plasma Center have worked so hard and put so much time into it, and now they can’t continue. There is one thing we can do to help them though, a petition. An online petition is up and running to help MIT keep their funding. You can find out more information about the program here: http://www.fusionfuture.org/why-fusion-energy/intro-to-fusion/ and you can sign the petition here: Petition

Fact or Fiction?

We have all heard about global warming and its effects on the Earth. Basically global warming is the climate change that is happening on the Earth at an increasing rate. Some  fun facts about global warming found at National Geographic are shown here:

• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century’s last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

• Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana’s Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

• Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

• An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts.

 

So based on these facts about our planet we are left to decide whether we acknowledge it is happening, choose to ignore it, or just call it a hoax. It may seem silly to call it a hoax, based on fact and reason, but we are not here to judge. We are here to simply share the views of people who consider themselves “deniers”. My opinion in this should not be taken into account, I am merely sharing the views of others.

One interesting website that I had found was : Global Warming Hoax. A website devoted entirely to debunking the global warming idea. I enjoyed their tag line for the website: “Where only the Truth heats up”, I thought it was humorous. Many global warming deniers believe that the science hasn’t been tested completely and that the science is mixed. Here is a comic that some deniers, or skeptics, believe explains where they are coming from:

There is actually a petition going around that scientists can sign stating that global warming is not man-made and it could actually be good for us. Here is what the petition looks like from Global Warming Petition Project:

So what do you think? Can global warming actually be good for us? And are we not actually the main cause?

Today we didn’t do an experiment like the previous classes, but we did see some experiments and had Tom Vales there to show us how they worked.

It was awesome!

The first was the Peltier Device, which is still used today. It was first used in 1834. It involves putting one leg in cold water and one in hot. The only draw back is that it is below 20% efficiency. It works as  “a solid-state active heat pump which transfers heat from one side of the device to the other side against the temperature gradient (from cold to hot), with consumption of electrical energy.”

This is basically what it is like:

Except in our class it was almost like a fork and one leg was in a cup of cold water and another in the cup of warm water. Towards the end of class it stopped working because the hot water cooled down and the cold became room temperature.

The next device he showed was the Mendocino Motor Calibrator.

“The motor consists of a four-sided (square cross-section) rotor block in the middle of a shaft. The rotor block has two sets of windings and a solar cell attached to each side. The shaft is positioned horizontally and has a magnet at each end. The magnets on the shaft provide levitation by repelling magnets in a base under the motor. There is an additional magnet that sits under the rotor block and provides a magnetic field for the rotor.”

“When light strikes one of the solar cells, it generates an electric current thus energizing one of the rotor windings. This produces a magnetic field which interacts with the field of the magnet under the rotor. This interaction causes the rotor to turn. As the rotor rotates, the next solar cell moves into the light and energizes the second winding, creating a current in an opposite direction to the first thus maintaining the rotation. This process repeats as the motor spins.”

It looked very similar to this: This one was my favorite!

The last thing we were shown was the Tesla Coil. “A Tesla coil is a type of resonant transformer circuit invented by Nikola Tesla around 1891. It is used to produce high voltage, low current, high frequency alternating current electricity. Tesla coils produce higher current than the other source of high voltage discharges, electrostatic machines.” A Tesla coil looks like this:

 

Source: Wikipedia