News Snippets

As most of you know, science happens all the time, and usually I was really good at reporting all the fun science news. Then I got busy, then I got lazy (Twitter makes sharing stories to darn easy), then busy again... but who cares??? I have a blog to write! Who says all the post have to be long and amazing?!?!

Here are some stories that I have found to be interesting these past few days:

• Sixty Second Science did a podcast about sugar being able to flush out microbes. Sugar actually helps antibiotics work more effectively in chronic infections.
• There was a great video showing chimpanzees exhibiting what humans would consider "mourning behaviors" and, of course, was posted to National Geographic. What do you think? Are they just unusually quiet and curious or does it seem like mourning?
• Elevated levels of radiation were found in seaweed near the "injured" nuclear plant in Japan.
• Locally, one guys stupid laziness caused an island wide (two islands actually) power outage. Fantastic.
• Whales in the West Indies have West Indian accents. It's true. Studies have shown that whales have regional accents and dialects!

So go and read... You might learn something!

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e=mc2?

Many times myself and a lot of you have seen this famous equation used in Einstein's theory of relativity. Most of us have seen it, a lot of us can "say" what the variables stand for (energy is equivalent to mass times the speed of light squared) but what does it really mean? Math was never my strong suit in high school or college and you will be surprised that this famous equation can be quite simple when explained properly.
Quite simply the equation states that any amount of energy can be converted into matter and more importantly to us humans, any amount of matter can be converted to energy. Lets break this down a bit.....

This bottle contains one liter of water. If we plug this into e=mc2, this one bottle of water can produce 90,000,000,000,000,000 (quadrillion) joules of energy. Whoa! Todd! You lost me!..... Basically all I did was take one liter of water which, with the ease of the metric system, is approximately one kilogram times the square of the speed of light in meters which is 300,000,000 meters/second. There! Do that easy but long number multiplication and you get the energy in joules!

But Todd, what the heck is a joule? Good question. We as normal people rarely use joules in our daily lives, well, especially in North America. Basically a joule of energy is how much energy it takes to toss this bottle of water 4 inches into the air. So something more practical would be 1 joule measured over the span of one second is a "watt".......100 joules in one second would light your typical 100 watt light bulb for...you guessed it ..one second! So, back to that bottle of water, literally that one liter or one kilogram of water could power a 100 watt light bulb for 250,000,000,000 (billion) hours or 28,500,000 (million) years! Imagine that while you drink this cool refreshing bottle of water. In your hand is enough potential energy to solve the energy crisis! Of course, to create fusion energy is a lot harder than it looks and very dangerous if not controlled.
What blog of mine would be complete without some tie to astronomy?
The Sun, which is small as stars go, produces energy equivalent to 4 trillion trillion 100 watt light bulbs every SECOND......that is a "4" followed by 26 zeros! The sun has been doing this every second for 5 billion years and will continue to do so for another 5 billion years. So the Sun converts 5,000,000 tons of matter every second.......that's roughly 5.5 Golden Gate Bridges every second! I'm tired of doing the math........5 of those bridges is 804,000,000 bottles of water to the 5th power.....somebody else calculate that....
Boy! I'm thirsty! :-)


Sincerely,
Todd Gonzales

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Introduction

Rainbow Photo credit and copyright: Terje O. Nordvik

Hello everyone! I feel like I should share with you a little about me, so that when reading any posts by me in the future you can have some understanding of the who and the why. I'm currently a 30 year old science student and teacher. For eight years I have taught science (mainly Astronomy) to 5th and 6th grade students all over southern California. I am currently back in school with hopes of obtaining a masters degree in Observational Astronomy. With that degree my goal is to begin a traveling astronomy outreach education program that will hopefully jump start the California science standards. Most 6th graders here in my town of Victorville, CA are moving on to junior high without much preparation in science. Most if not all cannot explain how we have seasons. There are several reasons for this outcome, the first and most important is that classroom teachers are pressured to raise scores in other subjects like math and reading (very important subjects also) while science takes a back seat until junior high. I feel since I have a passion for this subject I might as well use it for good, rather than evil. :-) But fear not fellow readers, while it may seem that my astronomy blurbs might destroy a bit of the mystique and magic of an event or object you see from time to time, it can also bring in more majesty than it had before. Take this picture of the rainbow for instance, it is very beautiful and awe inspiring if you know nothing about how it's created. But, even with the knowledge that it is created by refracted white light from the Sun by millions of water droplets can still be amazing. Especially if you add this: Although light from the Sun is in fact many colors and wavelengths it can't help but be perceived by us as a white light because it is moving way too fast to be separated by our brains. The second that light from the sun hits the falling droplet of water in a rainstorm the light bends and is refracted, spreading it into its many colors. I know, perhaps this is redundant information from our days in 5th or 6th grade, but did you know that that every rainbow on Earth contains all the information about what our Sun is made of, from every specific element to how old it is and how long it has before it dies? A crazy way of looking at it is, the rainbow actually is the Sun's DNA. And when one of those colorful photons of light from that rainbow hit the cone cells in your eye it is literally ending what is on average a million year plus 8.5 minute journey for that photon! More on that journey in another post. ;-)
So in conclusion I can only hope that my blogs at least entertain you, and maybe teach you something you didn't know. I am of course constantly learning and I love to tackle questions even if I don't know the answers. So fire away on those questions and as we say in the Astronomy community, "Keep looking up."

Thank You.

Sincerely,
Todd Gonzales

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no power

The island is without power and has been since yesterday morning. I promise I will post as soon as I can. I am posting from my husbands phone. The main generator at the power plant is down! St. Thomas and St. John have no light. Woo for gas stoves! Happy Thanksgiving!

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