What is it?: The Keystone XL Pipeline is a system that is designed to carry hundreds of thousands barrels of petroleum that will travel daily from Canada to the Gulf Coast. TransCanada is the company that came up with the idea for the nationwide pipeline. However, there are many debates between whether or not we should finish the building process of these pipelines (UPDATE: the Senate voted against completing the pipelines)

Pros: Pipelines are the least expensive way in the industry to transport oil. Also, it is estimated that the pipelines will create about 42,000 jobs for construction. However, after the completion of construction, only about half of those jobs will be permanent.

Cons: There are environmental concerns due to the crude oil having to be heated and separating the crude from the sand. This concerns environmentalists because they would prefer the oil to be left in the ground, rather than taken from where it lies naturally.

References:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/us/politics/what-does-the-proposed-keystone-xl-pipeline-entail.html?_r=0

http://keystone-xl.com/facts/myths-facts/

http://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364727163/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-keystone-xl-oil-pipeline

For our final project in this class, Rebecca, Bryan and myself thought of a few different ideas. At first, we were wondering which topics we could cover in our project and how to relate that topic to the class. It did not take long to come up with the idea of our project dealing with heat and insulation. It was one of the first ideas we had, and we instantly knew we would probably end up using this idea for our project.

Overall, the project is about temperature and heating. We want to figure out which material (cotton, wool, plastic, or aluminum) would keep liquids the warmest after ten minutes. We will use coffee cups to hold the hot liquids in, since we figured that would work the best rather than glass or plastic. This project will relate to the outside world because it will teach us which material works best for insulation. This is also important because the winter is near, and I want to make sure I keep my hot chocolate as hot as I can when I’m outside.

I really enjoyed the field trip to the Museum of Science because we were allowed to freely look at the exhibits. This allowed me to spend as much time as I needed at each exhibit to ensure that I understood what the exhibit was about.

The wind power exhibit was the first one that I visited. It had an interactive screen that I could play with, which let me change the wind speed to see how much power it gave off. This display also had a bunch of gears with a crank that I could turn. The gears turning represented the wind, and the faster I spun the crank, the more electricity that was generated.

The second exhibit I visited was the solar energy one. One of the parts of this exhibit included a display that showed the energy the sun gave off during different hours of the day. I learned that in between noon and afternoon is when the sun gives off the most energy to Earth. It also had a display that showed the three different types of solar collector shapes. This included the tower, the trough, and the parabolic dish. There was also a map to show which locations around the world have the most potential for solar energy. The areas near the equator had much more potential solar energy than areas extremely close to the polar regions.

The third exhibit I visited was the nanotechnology one. I was very curious about this one because I was not as familiar with nanotechnology as I was with wind power and solar energy. Nanotechnology is the building of small items out of individual atoms. One thing about this exhibit that intrigued me was the light-up butterfly. The butterfly clearly had a beautiful blue color to it, but once the light hit the wings, it revealed that the butterfly was actually brown in color, making it look like a moth. I thought it was very strange that nature could do that, and I would’ve just assumed that because the butterfly appeared to be blue meant that its atomic makeup was blue. Another little fun part of this exhibit was that I could see how tall I was in nanometers…I am about 1.65 billion nanometers tall!

The final exhibit we had to visit was conserving energy. This exhibit looked cool because it looked like you were entering a house. My favorite part of this exhibit was the display that showed a live-video screen of the moving heat. Anytime a person walked past the camera, I could see the body heat they gave off and I thought it was pretty neat because it was happening right next to me.