Who is this @Cmdr_Hadfield tweeting from space with such infectious enthusiasm and posting sensational pictures of Earth from orbit? His name is Commander Chris Hadfield. He is a Canadian astronaut who is currently serving as a flight engineer aboard the International Space Station. We were so charmed by his tweets that we searched out this pre-launch interview with him. He is every bit as cool on video and great at describing his mission as an astronaut.
In March, Commander Hadfield will go from flight engineer to commander of the International Space Station’s Mission 35. He will be a real life spaceship captain just as he says in the video.
William Kamkwamba was born to a farming family in Malawi in Africa in 1987. His home and the homes of his neighbors didn’t have electricity or running water. The family’s crops depended on the amount rainfall that they received because their farm had no irrigation. When he was 14, a horrible drought struck Malawi and the crops failed. Many Malawians died of starvation. William and his family survived but suffered horrific deprivation. His father was deep in debt from buying food for the family so couldn’t afford tuition. William had to drop out of school.
After surviving the famine, William was inspired by a textbook he borrowed from his local library called Using Energy to build a windmill to make electricity and eventually pump ground water from a well to irrigate the family’s farm. He was determined to give his family a more secure food supply with two maize harvests a year as well as an irrigated garden for a variety of vegetables.
William Kamkwamba slowly built his windmill from salvaged and modified scrap material. He describes how he did it in his autobiography The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. The ingenuity involved in the design and construction of his windmill is astounding. This book is *highly* recommended to all young people over the age of 12. Read it. Listen to it. Do it.
There is also a picture book version of William Kamkwamba’s story for younger children because it is *that* good.
Lily the astrofrog says, “I love water bears. They are the first known animal to survive the vacuum of space in low Earth orbit.”
That great video is by Hank Green and SciShow. Check out their whole YouTube channel. It rocks!
Tardigrades, also known as waterbears or moss piglets and even bug bears, are fascinating little creatures. If you have ever looked at soil under a microscope you might have seen some of these little guys. Under ideal lighting they almost look cute–like micro manatees with eight legs.
Tardigrades have evolved to be able to survive in extreme conditions including vacuum, high radiation, and temperatures from near absolute zero up to 151 degrees centigrade. They can also survive almost decade without water. They are truly amazing little creatures.
This is an excellent video introduction to tardigrades that explains what makes them so awesome.
Tardigrades might make a great science fair project. They are easy to find outside and are reported to love to live in moss. Get some moss wet and start scanning some of the water drops on your microscope slide. Notice what happens when the water bears dry out. What happens if you then add water? After doing some more research, test some of the claims made about the extreme survivability of tardigrades. Design an experiment that tests water bears under extreme conditions.
Have you ever played with a gyroscope? They’re pretty fascinating little gadgets. Gyroscopes can do things that we don’t see in any other objects. Here’s a video showing some kids doing tricks with their gyroscope. See if you can spot what it is that seems so strange about gyroscopes.
Chillaxed? Me too. Loved that swanky bossa nova music.
What does a gyroscope do that a regular toy top can’t? Did you see the gyroscope defying gravity by floating in mid air horizontally as it spun on a base? That’s what makes a gyroscope so special. This gravity defying effect is called precession. Here is a video by YouTuber, adambarito. It is also especially soothing and features some splendid sideburns and snarky ‘tude:
(He’s a growing boy. Very hungry.)
You will see a lot of bicycle wheels during demonstrations of gyroscopic effects. Surprisingly, the gyroscopic effect is not the reason that we are able to stay upright on our bikes when we ride them. Dr. Hugh Hunt has a web page describing his experiment to find out if the gyroscopic effect is responsible for keeping bikes upright. Go check it out.
This positively soporific video introduces you to some of the physics involved in the otherwise unusual behavior of the gyroscope.
As you saw there gyroscopes are often used in aviation for stability.
Helicopters, unlike bicycles, are heavily influenced by the gyroscopic effect. Helicopters have huge gyroscopes in the form of their rotors spinning on them and must account for the gyroscopic effect when maneuvering. Smarter Every Day has this awesome video explaining why navigating helicopters can be so tricky. As you will see, the gyroscopic effect doesn’t always make intuitive sense.
I’m awake and 90 degrees out of phase now! It was great the way they got their bike wheel up to speed by holding it up to the back wheel of their bike as they cranked the pedal.
Finally, if it is extreme, cutting-edge gyroscoping you crave to get you going and alert, program and sync up your flying gyroscopes like the folks from University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP lab:
Back in 1981, the big toy of the year was the Rubik’s cube. We –the kids of olden times of yore– went bananas over this thing. We fiddled with them constantly and everywhere to the dismay of our parents, teachers, and that poor little old lady we accidentally knocked over because we weren’t paying attention to where we were going on the sidewalk. (Sorry again, Mrs. Theibault.)
As you can see from the picture above it was a simple cube made up of what appeared to be 3x3x3 equal cubes with one cube always hidden in the middle. The exterior surfaces of each of the cubes had colored stickers on them. When the cube was fresh out of the box all of the squares on each side of the whole cube matched with different colors on each facet. The three layers of the cube could be turned independently in all directions. Within a few turns and flips of the cube you were able to mix up the blocks of colors until you had shuffled the colors randomly around the cube. Then it was time to solve the puzzle by twisting the cube until all of the colors matched on all sides.
If you haven’t played with a Rubik’s Cube before, give it a try. Beware! It can be a little addicting. Puzzle it over for a few weeks. Remember that if this toy was actually a 3x3x3 cube of cubes there is another imaginary cube in the center that you can’t see and imagine how that is spinning around in there too.
If you are lucky, one of the pieces will fall off and you will get a glimpse of how the mechanism inside makes it work. You’ll probably want to deconstruct and reconstruct the whole thing. If so, take a look at these amazing mods:
Some people can solve the Rubik’s Cube without cheating. I never solved the Rubik’s Cube analytically. I solved it sort-of-by-accident two or three times. At best, I developed a sense that you had to get one layer solved to improve your chances.
If you have struggled with your Rubik’s Cube for a few weeks and it’s starting to pop its parts, I encourage you to cheat and watch one of the solution videos on YouTube. Why should you cheat? Because knowing how to solve it, helps you understand how to think and plan in 3-D.
Check out RuBot. It was programmed to solve the Rubik’s Cube:
(There is newer version of RuBot with a face and cheesy robot noises, but it creeps me out.)
If you enjoy the original 3x3x3 Rubik’s Cube, you will love Jaap’s Puzzle Page. It is a huge site devoted these kinds of spatial puzzle games that will continue to challenge you.
Now, I will blow your mind. A square is a 2-dimensional shape. A cube is a 3-dimensional shape. Imagine, if you can, a cube in four dimensions. This is what is known as a hypercube. Here is a pathetically inadequate two-dimensional animation that gives the impression of what a hypercube is sort of like, but not really:
We have a hard time imagining hypercubes because our brains evolved to live and survive in three dimensions. Fortunately, computers don’t trip over their own brains and can compute geometries in other dimensions for us.
Here is a YouTube video uploaded by drag0nfur of what the programmer calls “A 3D depiction of a 4D rubiks cube being solved by a computer.”
Did you catch the text at the end that said “There are actually 8 3x3x3 cubes, one is hidden in a non-visible dimension. Please don’t ask me why it’s hidden, brains will splode if you do.”
My brain already popped its parts at the mere thought of a Rubik’s Hypercube, but thanks for the warning.
Curiosity is an exciting and important robot because its job when it gets to Mars in 8 months is to look for life there. Scientists suspect that there is some very primitive form of life on Mars, but we need to send a probe with instruments and detectors built into it to test the martian environment for evidence of life.
Curiosity probably won’t find a baby plant like Wall-E does in the movie. If life is detected it’s more likely to be a type of tiny, microscopic life. That would be great because it would be the first time that people have discovered life anywhere other than Earth.
Here’s a video animation from NASA/JPL that shows us how Curiosity will travel from Earth to Mars and what Curiosity will be doing once it lands.
Yes! It will shoot laser beams at stuff on Mars.
One of the most important things you need to keep in mind if you are building a robot that will probe another planet for life, is that you don’t want to send any Earth life with your robot probe. If your rover arrives on Mars covered in Earth germs your life detectors are going to detect life, but possibly not martian life. Or perhaps the scientists would be scratching their heads when Curiosity discovered that along with unknown alien life, Mars also has athletes’ foot. Awkward…
To send a clean spacecraft to another planet you need to build it in a clean room like this:
The above picture was the Mars Curiosity Rover’s room on Earth at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. Your bedroom is a pig sty compared to Mars Curiosity Rover’s room. The interesting thing about this room is that it is cleaner than cleanest place you’ve probably ever been outside of a hospital operating room. Operating rooms and JPL’s clean room are designed to have fewer than 10,000 particles of 0.5 micrometers (microns) or more in diameter in the air. Microscopic life bigger than 0.5 microns are yeast, mold, most bacteria, spores and pollen.
Hey, wait! People are bigger than 0.5 microns! They are covered cooties! How can we prevent the people working in the clean room from contaminating the spacecraft? Here’s how. Before it traveled to Florida in preparation for launch to Mars, you used to be able to watch the clean room engineers and technicians build Curiosity on the internet via a webcam. However, Curiosity is traveling to Mars at the moment so Curiosity Cam is off air. Fortunately, we have a video of JPL clean room technicians in action:
You can’t miss that the technicians are completely covered in white clean room suits. These are also known as bunny suits.
The clean room suits including masks, gloves, smocks, pants, and booties are designed to keep human cooties, hair, skin cells, or whatever off the spacecraft. There are many more videos showing the assembly of Curiosity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory clean room at YouTube. Check them out.
This NASA video from a different project shows how even pieces of paper must be wiped down front and back before they can enter a clean room, or in this case, a clean tent:
Now, think about how you would get your room clean enough to make a robot for space in there.
Sometimes, people pass around untrue information. It’s often hard to disagree with a nice person or a person in authority when they seem so sure that what they are telling you is true.
Say, for example, one day you are listening to the radio or television and someone tells you that the astronauts never went to the moon and the whole moon landing was faked. For you, that would be a very surprising thing for someone to tell you since you’ve seen videos of the moon landings and heard interviews with the astronauts. Perhaps you have read books about the NASA missions to the moon in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s. Perhaps you’ve even been to a museum and have seen the battered part of the spacecraft that splashed into the ocean upon returning the astronauts to Earth. You would probably think, “This guy is full of it,” or “This guy is full of baloney.” You would be right!
BUSTED!!!
Baloney, phony baloney, and full of baloney are all words and phrases used to describe something as nonsense, silly, misleading, or untrue.
In his book, The Demon Haunted World, Dr. Carl Sagan wrote a list of steps he called the Baloney Detection Kit to think through when you hear or learn of some information that you suspect is untrue. Here is a link to Carl Sagan’s original Baloney Detection Kit on his official web site.
Not a Ronco® product. Maybe Wham-O®?
The original BDK has a lot of big words and phrases that may be unfamiliar to you. Dr. Michael Shermer kindly made a Baloney Detection Kit video that is a little easier to understand and he simplifies the basic ideas of BDK into 10 questions you can use to decide whether something is true or baloney.
Did you catch that? That college professor is asking you to think for yourself because even authorities with impressive credentials like him are sometimes wrong. That’s good advice.
The Ten Questions
How reliable is the source of the claim?
Does the source make similar claims?
Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
Does this fit with the way the world works?
Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
Do you want to create your own video game, music video, cartoon, robot slave, maniacal war machine, and much more? Of course you do! Then you need to learn the basics of programming. By learning to program, you will have complete control over the design and performance of your creation or invention.
One of the easiest introductions to beginning programming is with Scratch. Scratch is a free program developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It was developed to give kids the tools they need to be creative with computers.
Here is one of several tutorial videos, sometimes presented by kids, showing how the program works:
Go ahead and watch some of the others. See how Scratch can help you do amazing things!
The Scratch web site has many help pages and different forms of tutorials and tools to get you started. Adults will especially appreciate the handy Scratch Help Screens within the program. I found it easy to refer to while trying to figure out how to make our magic unicorn do our bidding.
We played around with it and the three of us–an adult, 5-y.o., and a 12-y.o.–designed and had a simple, silly playable game with just a few hours of trial and error.
Hungry Unicorn by One Giant Leap of Awesome
You say: “lame.”
We say: “AWESOME!”
“lame.”
“AWESOME!!”
“lame.”
“AWESOME!!!”
Alright..it might need some tweaking here and there…
The Scratch interface has a wonderful, easy to use design. The built-in image and sound editors make it easy to do everything from within the Scratch program. The colorful graphic command blocks ease novices into the concepts of programming blocks and the systematic reasoning needed for programming. Finally, once you have become used to programming with Scratch, you can graduate to learning the nitty gritty of programming without the graphic command blocks. Go for it!
In order to study caves, Dr. Boston needs to visit and explore them and do field research.
Field research!
What she has learned from her cave studies is that life forms can survive in unusual places. Some of the caves that she visits are completely dark and have poisonous fumes. Most plants and animals could not survive in such extreme environments. She needs to wear special safety gear to protect her skin and eyes and wear a mask with oxygen to breathe. In spite of these harsh conditions, the work of Dr. Boston and others has shown that there are lots of living things in these weird, dangerous, and unearth-like places. Most of these living things, or microorganisms, are too small to see with just our eyes. These cave dwellers are so freaky and fascinating that they are going to get their own post.
In this video Dr. Boston tells us what inspired her to become a cave-exploring scientist:
How cool is that? Studying how life forms evolve in harsh conditions on Earth can help us think about what kind of life we may discover on other planets! The branch of biology (the study of living things) that investigates the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe is called astrobiology. Here is a great set of links to explore astrobiology.
The following video might be challenging and is recommended for teenagers. It is important to include here because Dr. Boston describes what she does and gives us an insight into her wonderful personality and delight in her field of scientific inquiry. Enjoy!
Written
on 01/20/2013