today’s blog is about my final project for the Science 184 class and my last blog for the semester. so this final project purpose is to create a scientific experiment, explain how it works and present it to the class. it is also a group project consisting of four individuals and between them i ma the group leader. my job is to make sure everything is going according to plan , where i have to keep everyone including myself updated and motivated to work on our project.

so when we got together, we shared several ideas, such as using a watermelon with other credentials to create a voltage to power up an iPhone. we also talk about creating a sweater that can provide heat, but due to time constraint, it was not in our favor. so we decided to search the internet for possible experiment and we finally has one that we are interested in and want to proceed with.

so the project that we will be doing is assembling several nickel and coins to create a voltage. the way it work is we would put them on top of each other, one after the other and put a wet paper towel to hold them together and use a multimeter to record the how much voltage it produces whenever we add more elements to it.

so the process occurred due to a chemical reaction between two elements, that is chemical reaction, to create a voltage, that is an electrical process. so we believe that this would be a great experiment to share in class and we also have the approval of the instructor to accomplish it.

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The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline is an oil pipeline system that would run from Alberta, Canada to the center of the US, Nebraska. This project has being a hot topic ever since it was introduced in 2010. It has sparked both praise and critics though the higher power like member of the congress and even the president. The idea of this system is to help to have a homegrown resource at our disposal and also helping reducing the amount of resources imported from other countries like Iraq and Venezuela. However we know that every change or creating a new system also has his complications along with its benefit.

The proposed keystone XL pipeline has being around since 2005, but only were used in Canada. It has created a thousand of jobs and help boost the Canadian economy. So they decided to expend the pipeline to the US in 2010. They reveal different routes for the pipelines to get to Nebraska, which would be the destination. Some member of the US government including the president is not a big fan of the project since his plans is to build more renewable energy and cutting on oil dependency.

So the pros of his project would be:

·         It would open up thousands of jobs

·         It also means that it would decrease consumption from OPEC by 12%.

·         It would boost the economy

However the cons seem to overcome the pros, which I understand why the president is stalling on passing the bill:

·         The pipeline would damage the environment condition.

·         Its leak would affect the fresh water in Nebraska.

·         It would also affect the wildlife animal.

·         It would create and add the air pollution by releasing CO2.

·         Last and most of all it is not a clean energy, which is the future of the president’s plans.

So this system sounds good, but would have being better if it was introduced in the 19^th century. Since in this present day, we believe that clean renewable energy is the way to a better future, I don’t believe the pipeline resolve our solution even half way going forward.

Today’s blog is about the a couple of key Points that I would like to emphasize about from the President’s initiatives and beliefs to push for a greener and safer environment as well as expanding new ways of providing and creating electricity. In the President agenda, the three things that grab my attention were cutting down pollution from power plants, increasing fuel economy standards, and Cutting Energy Waste in Homes, Businesses, and Factories.

For his first initiative, the president has a sense of urgency to cutting down pollution from power plants as fast as possible and layed down his plans of how he is going to achieve that. As we all know that pollution has taken several thousand lives each year and the president administration has being making huge steps to cut down on pollution and promote renewable clean energy. From the president’s first term until now, he had accomplished and currently working on different methods to boost this process. not only has he being promoting renewable clean energy, he also issue a permit for 10 gigawatts of renewables on public lands, he also expending and modernizing our national grid, which provide the electricity that we use. So with all of those factors in appliance, our future at least in having electricity at our disposal, as well as having them affordable and cheap will ease the burden on the population to afford it and also help the government to have enough energy to supply for an infinite period of time.

The second aspect that I also took notes that the president is being working on is increasing fuel economy standards. What it means is according to THE PRESIDENT’S CLIMATE ACTION PLAN agenda, “In 2011, the Obama Administration finalized the first-ever fuel economy standards for Model Year 2014-2018 for heavy-duty trucks, buses, and vans. These standards will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 270 million metric tons and save 530 million barrels of oil…….. The Obama Administration has already established the toughest fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles in U.S. history. These standards require an average performance equivalent of

54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, which will save the average driver more than $8,000 in fuel costs over the lifetime of the vehicle and eliminate six billion metric tons of carbon pollution – more than the United States emits in an entire year.” So not only the population will save money on transportation, but also his plan is to reduce a decent amount of carbon dioxide along with it.  It is a win-win situation for both the public and the government. Last time I checked the government as well using transportation and aren’t immune to pollution as well.

The third plan in the president agenda that I found really interesting is Cutting Energy Waste in Homes, Businesses, and Factories.  Under this category, the plan is to reduce bills energy for families and businesses, and also establishing new coal for energy efficiency standards, reducing barriers to investment in energy efficiency, and expanding the president’s better building challenge. So the plan on reducing bills energy for Americans families and businesses is that it will help the population saves hundreds of dollars  at least in the first year and more as the system fully takes in on heating and cooling, it will also help reduce gas emission. The second aspect is establishing new coals for energy efficiency standards, which is set up new minimum standards from refrigerators and dishwashers. It is actually in process and the goal is that by 2030, it will help save millions of dollars and electricity that could power about 85 million homes for 2 years.  Another aspect of this category is reducing barriers investment in energy efficiency, which means that the president would provide up to 250 million dollars to agricultural producers and rural small businesses for energy efficiency and renewable energy systems. Last but not least, the president also would plan on expanding the president’s better building challenge, which means that it placed to help Americans commercial and industrial buildings to be 20% energy efficient or more through 2020.

So the president’s plan in dealing with creating more renewable energy and saving the pollution money as well as reducing to pollution seems to be a great success on paper and hopefully would translate in reality, assuming everyone would have the same mindset and urgency that he does to make sure that our environment is safe and also making life easier financially for the public. His plans emphasized clearly what he wants to do and where he wants to go with the future of our energy and resources and I do believe with enough support and urgency, life might be a lot easier at least in the energy department looking in to the future.

On Friday march 20^th, 2014, I have attended and learn first-hand about four different energy and innovative exhibits at the museum of science located in Boston. As a future engineer, the four exhibits such as catching the wind, conserve at home, energized, and innovative engineers was extremely a great guidance for me to learn and be a part of it one day.

The first exhibit that I went to was the innovative engineers, which describes the life and work of several engineers and inventors to make our daily life easier. The three engineers that impressed me the most and can relate to myself are Dean Kamen, Stephanie Kwolek, and Eric Bailey. Like them, I always wanted to create something to help people and always had curiosity of how electrical devices work as a kid. And I hope as well in the near future I create a few things that will help save lives or make them easier. Dean himself invented auto syringe to deliver the exact dose for medical purposes, and also a generator that could be used in poor countries to help everyone consume clean water. Eric invented a CT (computed tomography) machine to help hospital scan from your neck to head area for any potential damage. These people have helped make the world a better place and I hope one day I could do the same.

The second exhibit that I checked out was catching the wind. The exhibit describes insightful knowledge of hoe the wind is used to provide electricity. It was more like a review to me since I already knew much that the wind was a clean and renewable energy, as well as 1% is only used to provide electricity in the US. But I have also learned that the wind mill process has being here for centuries. I was surprise to learn that the first wind mill was developed in the year of 500 A.D. I also learned that the wind is originated form the difference in temperature from the sunlight that moves the warm air and replaced it with cool air.

The third exhibit was energized, which provide most of the information about the mix of energy sources such as fossil fuels, hydro power, nuclear, solar, and wind that we use to power our city and described all of their advantages and disadvantages. This part to me was just a review of all the blogs that I have done as well as researching all of those materials before. For example I know that fossil fuel is not expensive, that’s what it occupies 80 % of the population electricity, but causes a great deal of pollution and thousands of people every year. Like hydro power is a clean energy, but take a lot of power and expensive material to produce a decent electricity, but in addition I have learned that it destroys and changes the landscape. For solar energy, I also learned that by theory the sun is powerful to provide electricity for infinite amount of time, but only 1% of it is used to provide electricity, why?? Well it is because of the inconsistency of the sun in certain region or area of the world.

The last exhibit that I visited was conserve @ home, which taught me a great deal of how myself and everyone else can help reduce the amount of extra energy wasted every day and also save us money and our natural resources. In this department, they also displayed several useful methods such as experiment with temperature, gravity, and a bed of nails. The experiment with temperature was to learn if Styrofoam cups keep water warmer than paper cup and the experiment showed that it was the same, but I thought that the Styrofoam cup would have kept it warmer. For the gravity experiment, I used a small ball put it in a tube to a certain height and dropped it to record how long it took to get down and tried it again with a different height that was also recorded to be to same. I also tried the bed of nails experiment, where i layed down on this flat surface and hundreds of nails lifted me up without hurting or piercing my skin. The process is explained that laying down on all those nails, which each carried a small amount of my weight and the pressure is relatively small because there are so many of them, which resulted in me not getting hurt.