When my group and I were first coming together to think of what to do for our final presentation we all had different ideas.  Part of my group wanted to do something with friction and heat whereas other group members wanted to do electricity and lightening.  Then we thought of meeting in the middle where friction would cause electricity.  Once we all thought that sounded like a cool idea we realized static electricity would be the best subject to do our presentation on.   Though I only explained this in a few sentences it wasn’t as easy as it sounded.  For a while we almost completely changed routed going with completely unrelated ideas but we all came together and got through it.

After agreeing upon doing an experiment related to static electricity we thought of what may be a good experiment to show the class that was related to this topic.  We decided to use a balloon, water cotton and wool sweaters.  To do this we rubbed 3 balloons (all different sizes) against the cotton sweater for one experiment, then the wool sweater for another experiment.  then after rubbing the balloon against the sweaters we out the balloon very close to the water.  This made the water bend! The reason this happened is because electrons gathered on the balloon from our sweaters. You then bring the negatively charged balloon near the faucet and it is attracted to the positive force of the water. The attraction is strong enough to actually pull the water towards the balloon as it is flowing.

A professor at Suffolk came into my science class recently and did a guest presentation on different ways in which electricity can be produced.  He had multiple devices going on in the class room to show this, two of the more notable ones were the Mendocino motor and the Peletier Junction. These devices both use more unusual ways to create electricity yet exemplified more creative ways to create power without releasing green house gases.

The Mendocino motor consists of a multi-sided rotor block in the middle of a shaft. The rotor block has two sets of wingdings 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.

The Peletier Junction was showed to the class in hopes to teach us that, when a current is made to flow through a junction between two conductors A and B, heat may be generated.  Though, it is important to note that the heat generated at the junction is not determined by the Peltier effect alone, as it may also be influenced by Joule heating and thermal gradient effects.  This produces thermoelectric effect which is the direct conversion of temperature differences to voltage and vice versa. The Peletier Junction device creates voltage when there is a different temperature on each side. Interestingly when a voltage is applied to it, it creates a temperature difference.

The film on Pandora’s promise was very interesting and enlightened me on the some of the effects of nuclear power plant failure.  Though the people in the film seemed to have mixed feelings on the topic some against it and some for it, it was none the less very educational.  Some members of the film that were featured like Lewis were very against nuclear energy in the past but now in support of it.  In the film they visit Japan and see some of the wreckage from the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima.  This was difficult to watch as it was very unsettling to see what damage nuclear power plants can do to the world when they go wrong.  None the less I tend to still be a nuclear power plant supporter. I think the benefits from this technology with how efficient it is has more then helped society.  It may not be the perfect energy source but it is currently the most efficient a 86% efficiency rate.  Below are some interesting facts on nuclear energy  and its benefits.

• Around 6% of the world’s energy and 14% of the world’s electricity is produced by nuclear power.
• The Calder Hall nuclear power station in the UK was the first to deliver commercial quantities of electricity (1956).
• There are over 400 nuclear power reactors in use around the world.
• Nuclear power provides around 20% of the electricity used in the US.
• Nuclear energy generated 769.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2012.
• Nuclear energy produces no green house gas emissions.

Though nuclear power needs  to have a close eye kept on its usage many would agree that it is safe. Many people panic about the things that could go wrong, but history only shows a few incidents with power plants over there 60+ year usage. Nuclear power even powers many of the U.S military’s air craft carriers and submarines and has allow much more efficient power usage by these vessels.  Clearly society has many benefits from this energy source and with better technology over time we the world will find only more efficient ways of preventing nuclear tragedies.

Taken from the white house’s website Obama’s Global Climate Change Initiative (GCCI) states as follows, “The United States will integrate climate change considerations into relevant foreign assistance through the full range of bilateral, multilateral, and private mechanisms to foster low-carbon growth, promote sustainable and resilient societies, and reduce emissions from deforestation and land degradation.”

Under The Obama administration many environmental accomplishments have taken place. Legislation has been passed so that all cars and light duty trucks will get about 55 mpg by 2025. Wind and Solar energy output has doubled and is continuing to grow. The U.S Energy Sector’s carbon pollution level is the lowest its been in 20 years. Many additional measures have been put into place with the goal making of our nation’s environmental efforts more progressive. In 2011 the Obama administration made the fuel economy standards for 2014-2018 model heavy duty trucks and vans. This will reduce green house gas emissions by 270M metric tons and save 30 million barrels of oil.  Also, in 2011 Obama has passed the Better Buildings Initiative to help commercial and industrial buildings become more than 20% more energy efficient by 2020.

The list of Obama’s environmental efforts goes on. He is clearly a man who takes pride in our planet and cares for our future generations experiences/interactions with nature. I would say that Obama is doing a good job at sticking to his policy of making the outdoors in America more sustainable and enjoyable while making us as a nation more energy efficient.

Today we performed an experiment in class which involved using a pulley and an electric motor (the same electric motor used in the robot car experiment).  We had the motor operating at different speeds and used various quantities of weight, then we would check the speed of the crane and record the differences in timing. The pulley just had a string and metal hook attached, the hook was about 4 inches long.  The basis of this experiment was to gain a better understanding of energy, force and mass against gravity. We then used our recorded data as support for believing the higher the mass of an object requires more force to lift it.

Below is a chart where in trials 1-3 the power was held constant, in trials 3-6 the weight is held constant.  My group’s graphs would not upload to word press which is unfortunately why only the chart is included here.  When the speed was held constant, the slope of the line was negative. However, when the weight was constant there was a positive correlation and the slope was positive. For the first 3 trials, the average acceleration with the power level remaining at 75 was about 42.5 RPM/s  (rounded up). The average acceleration for when the mass remained the same at .18 kg is 44.132 RPM/s.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them.

For those who may be unaware slick water hydraulic fracturing (Hydrofracking), is a newer methodology in natural gas extraction. This process has made mining for natural gas in dense shale underground possible [1]. Before I get into whether or not Hydrofracking is good or bad for the people living near where companies are preforming this process, I want to explain how Hydrofracking is preformed and how it differs from older methods of extracting natural gas from the Earth. 

In a nut shell this is essentially how Hydrofracking works. A drilling company builds a drill site in the location they choose. Right now states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York (among others) are popular [3]. Setting up their drill site involves removing trees, building an access road and rig, and making room for the appropriate equipment, vehicles, and chemicals that they would need to undergo the process [1]. Once the site is set up they drill into the ground downward and eventually horizontally up to about 8,000 feet in each direction [1].  Once the well bore (hole) has been drilled they inject about 6-8 million gallons of freshwater (per fracking), sand and other chemical-based additives like: diesel fuel, biocides, benzene and hydrochloric acid into the ground through the well bore [1]. This props open the fissures caused by the well bore to allow the gas to seep through the pores in the shale, which eventually makes its way to the well bore and then they are able to extract the gas [1]. If this seems a little confusing below is a picture to help.

Hydrofracking has a few differences from conventional natural gas drilling. Hydrofracking uses much more water than conventional drilling, it uses “slick water” which is a mixture that is pumped into the shale to fracture the rock and release the gas [1]. Additionally, there is a potential for toxicity and its long-term impacts.

Although Hydrofracking is a more economically efficient it has downsides which could gravely affect our habitat and water supply. Some of the negative impacts of this are surface and subterranean damage, groundwater and surface water contamination and habitat/species damage [2]. The chemicals used like benzene are very toxic even in the parts per trillion [1]. This is important because if these chemicals were to integrate with the water table, under which is the shale with a layer of bedrock in between, people’s drinking water could be affected. Unfortunately disclosure by the companies preforming Hydrofracking of what chemicals and in what amounts they use them are very vague, they tend to say they only use them in “small amounts” not revealing the actual quantitative measures used in the process

Sources:

[1]- http://www.peacecouncil.net/NOON/hydrofrac/HdryoFrac2.htm 

[2]- http://www.newser.com/story/112950/hydrofrackings-ugly-secret-from-gas-wells-bad-water.html

[3]- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-gallay/fracking-environment_b_1186998.html

My class and I recently completed a lego robot car experiment. In the first part of the experiment we had to build the car by following instructions online and then we put a electronic battery attached to a small computer on the car. This small computer(car) had USB cords attached to itself from a computer. We used the computer to program the robot car with commands so it would be able to move. The purpose of this experiment was to test the velocity, acceleration and distance traveled by the car, while making 1 complete revolution, or circle.  The robot car below is a close resemblance as to the one we used in class.

For the second part of the lab experiment we were supposed to make the robot do 1 complete revolution.  To accurately do this we had to measure the distance that the wheels traveled, speed at which the car traveled, measure the diameter of the wheel and compute the circumference, record the number of degrees that the wheel rotated in comparison to the number of turns the wheel committed, record the time it took for the wheels to turn, and in order to make the car do a perfect circle inside the circumference of 2 feet we did multiple attempts with the motors at different power levels.

The results are as follows for our final attempt:

Degrees of rotation for wheel one: 471

Degrees of rotation for wheel two: 472

Number of wheel turns: 1.30833

Distance traveled: .24649 meters

Velocity: .08216 M/S

Time it took: 3 seconds

Power level of both motors: 25

Circumference: .1884

The results to the

Many variables go into the creation of a huge storm, the size of hurricane Sandy or any other storm cannot directly be related to climate change. This does not mean however, that climate change contributes nothing at all to variances in weather patterns. Would large storms be taking place even without global warming? Yes, of course they would as storms have taken place under every set of temperatures and ocean levels since this Earth was formed. Global warming, which is known to cause an increase in ocean temperatures would not so much make a vast increase in the number of storms we experience every year, but supporting evidence does show that global warming contributes to stronger hurricanes. I found a good explanation for hurricane Sandy which I honestly cannot put into better words myself, so I’m going to quote this person from the website, the source is located below, “Hurricane Sandy got large because it wandered north along the U.S. coast, where ocean water is still warm this time of year, pumping energy into the swirling system. But it got even larger when a cold Jet Stream made a sharp dip southward from Canada down into the eastern U.S. The cold air, positioned against warm Atlantic air, added energy to the atmosphere and therefore to Sandy, just as it moved into that region, expanding the storm even further.” [1] There you have it folks, that is how Sandy became as powerful as she did.  My first question after reading this quote was what is a jet stream?  A Jet stream is narrow air currents found in the atmosphere, these air currents can be very powerful wind streams and but also can be mellower air streams, it depends on what altitude you are at. Strong jet streams are found in our atmosphere around 23,000 – 39,000 feet above sea level and very frequently cause planes to be delayed. With all of this being said, essentially hurricane Sandy got it’s strength from  the ocean water temperature and a cold Jet Stream.  I’m not totally sure how the cold jet stream dipped down so low form Canada, but global warming does contribute to rise in ocean temperatures, which when mixed with cold air currents causes an increase in a storm’s strength. This proves that Global warming can in fact contribute to the strength of a storm.

For those who may have forgotten, this is what hurricane Sandy looked like over America when it struck in late October of 2012.

Sources:

1.) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/10/30/did-climate-change-cause-hurricane-sandy/

2.)  http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/sciencetech/5-deadliest-effects-of-global-warming/276?image=2#jMVhe3Vrp9uboELc.99

3.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream

GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) are a big debate today among countries because of the health effects they can have on humans and other animals.  As many people know, GMO’s are implemented commonly in plant crops where companies are using molecular biology techniques to more efficiently produce and enhance food for human and other animal consumption. Essentially what happens is these plants are modified in a laboratory to enhance desired traits.  They do this so the plants will be more pest, disease, weed and cold resistant, among other advantages. Additionally, many crops are infused with genes that make them more nutritious for us and has helped many people in developing nations. Overall, these scientific techniques do help the world greatly by sustaining and feeding our growing human population which topples over 7 billion people now.

Though these GMO’s do help us in many ways they also can cause harm. Some independent farmers have been victim to the corporation Monsanto, where plant gene transfer happened to unintentional targets. Monsanto’s farm fields are next to other farmers’ fields, and the wind blows Monsanto’s GMO pollen into other people’s fields of crops. Monsanto would then sue those farmers for not paying them compensation for using their product, putting many out of business. Additionally, GMO’s have been known to cause allergies among  some humans and unintended harm has been done to other animals.  For example the pollen from corn contains a GMO called B.t and when also blown into other farmer’s fields,  many times it has been digested by monarch caterpillars and kills them.

Below are some interesting graphs giving you a good insight of how today’s world is producing and consuming GMO grown crops.

Amount of Earth’s Land Used To Grow GMO Crops

Countries Producing GMO Crops

Overall I am on the fence about this issue of whether GMO’s should be abandoned all together or their usage only minimized.  But I hope this information can help people figure out their stance on this issue. The information above can be checked at these sources…….   http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/gmfood/overview.php       http://www.itmonline.org/arts/gmo.htm