Welcome to Our Science Blog!

The LHC is the Large Hadron Collider on the border between France and Switzerland went operational on September 10th and had some terrible malfunctions that will make shut down for at least a couple of months just two days later.

In case you have no idea what the LHC is, here’s a short summary.  It is a particle accelerator.  You’ve been learning about subatomic particles in science (protons, neutrons, electrons) and physicists like to see what happens when they take subatomic particles and smash them together at speeds of over 99 percent of the speed of light.  This causes the particles to break and split and other particles are formed.   It is shaped like a circle so that the particles can be accelerated over long distances by going in circles.

It has been the subject of some controversy in the last few months because of a popular idea that the experiments conducted there could cause miniature black holes and end life in the universe as we know it!  Physicists dismiss this possibility, but you know how the public is when a sensational idea gets into its brain!

A science writer recently made a rap video about this collider that has really accurate science and a fun beat.  You should check it out.   You won’t understand everything in it unless you study particle physics, but it does help us understand the experiments they are doing over at the LHC.  Here’s the youtube link.

Youtube video of LHC rap.

You should keep an eye out for the result coming out of this research facility in the future.  It looks very promising!

One of my heroes was good ol’ Ben Franklin. I know, I know. Most of you are thinking that he’s a politician and shouldn’t my heroes be scientists, but he was! Ben Franklin was an all around great guy. He invented so many things that he’s just as important to science as he is to history. I even have a Ben Franklin doll–I mean action figure. Maybe I shouldn’t have admitted that…

Daylight Saving Time was thought up by Franklin to make evenings longer in the summer time. As you know, days get longer in the summertime because we are tilted toward the sun and the rays can reach us earlier and stick around later. Some places have daylight 14, 16, or even 24 hours a day in the Summer! The closer you get to the poles, the longer the daylight lasts in the summer. The north pole can have daylight all day long! The problem with this, as Ben Franklin wrote, is that the sun comes up so early. The sun was coming up way early in the morning and most people would have liked it to stay up later. So, the whole time-shifting idea came into being.

Daylight savings is NOT observed by everyone. Hawai’i and Arizona don’t participate, so sometimes we are 1 hour ahead of them and sometimes we are 2 hours ahead. It can be confusing. Talk about confusing, check out THIS PAGE for some really, really funny daylight saving time bloopers, such as 30 minute bus rides that had people changing their watches 7 times!

One of the major reasons for Daylight Saving time now is energy savings! People are awake in the evenings, therefore they need light. If it is sunny later in the evenings, people use less energy lighting the place. So DST will save the planet! Yea!

For more info, look here…

Thanks to Alex C. for this question! Way to be curious!

Think about this:  There are millions of stars in a galaxy.  There are billions of galaxies, if not an infinite amount!  It is likely, and supported by observations of close stars, that all stars have some sort of planetary bodies orbiting them.  If only 1 percent, that’s 1 out of 100 stars have planets circling them, and only one percent of those planets is an Earth-like planet with liquid water, then that still leaves billions of habitable planets.  Are we the only life in the universe?  We could be, but with all those possibilities, I certainly wouldn’t bet against it! 

Don’t go buying alien repellent or anything just yet.  Think about this, now.  Traveling faster than the speed of light is somewhat impossible for us at the moment, and may be impossible at all.  Even if we could travel at or near the speed of light, it would take us almost 5 years to reach the nearest star.  Even if we knew which direction to head, we would have to travel years and years to reach other life.  Then we might just find some weird bacteria or something.  No, I think the odds of two intelligent species finding each other in all this vast space is somewhat improbable.  What do you guys think?  Will we be visited by aliens?  Have we already been? 

Check out this NASA article about nearby stars with planets.

NASA is already planning to have astronauts living on the moon starting in the year 2020. They’ll start with shorter visits of about a week, but with each successive visit getting longer. But astronauts don’t just decide to go to the moon and jump in the shuttle. They are already practicing living in inhospitable environments down in Antarctica. Since space shuttles have to be very, very lightly loaded in order to escape Earth, the houses that they will take with them have to be very light indeed! Right now, some NASA employees are trying out inflatable habitats to take to the moon. The coldness and barren land of Antarctica mimics those properties of the moon, but if something goes wrong there, the men inside won’t die! They will extensively test any type of house before taking it on a space voyage. Visit this link to part of NASA’s website to read
Larry Toups journal about setting up and living in an inflatable house in Antarctica!

2020 is in 12 years. That means that my current students will be around 25 when these voyages start. I think it would be the height of coolness if one of my kids were one of the future inhabitants of the lunar outpost! Any of you interested?