Don’t miss this movie!  Follow nine high school students as they compete in The International Science and Engineering Fair.  From designing a better stethoscope to Zika virus, to arsenic in our water, to a flying wing, these young scientists take this competition vey seriously.  In theaters now.

Study Hall: Improv Inspired by College Lectures

Koko the gorilla was found dead Tuesday. The Gorilla Foundation released a statement that the lowland gorilla, who mastered sign language, died in her sleep. Koko had a vocabulary of about 2000 words and communicated with humans.

Researcher and one of Koko’s keepers, Francine Patterson, had hoped that Koko would mate and have children. She wondered if Koko had offspring would she teach them sign language? But unfortunately, Koko never mated and never had children.

She was friends with Robin Williams and Fred Rogers. Researcher Francine Patterson said that Koko was quiet and very thoughtful when told of the death of Robin Williams. Koko also met Flea, the bassist in the Red Hot Chill Peppers, and the actor Betty White.

Koko was very fond of cats and had her own “pet” kittens throughout her life.

She appeared in several documentaries and appeared on the cover of National Geographic. The Gorilla Foundation said: “Koko touched the lives of millions as an ambassador for all gorillas and an icon for inter species communication and empathy. She was beloved and will be deeply missed.”

I saw the movie Hidden Figures today. Fabulous movie. But why did it take so long for me to know about these women?

Me of all people should have known about these women. I am a huge fan and “student” of modern space exploration. I do workshops for teachers about the history of the American space program and an as a science teacher in middle school I taught a class called “ Rocket Science.” We made timelines and posters and did research about the Apollo and Mercury missions. Apollo 13 is one of my favorite movies. The names Alan Shepard, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong are very familiar to me. Why did I never hear about the African American women mathematicians who helped NASA and the USA win the space race? How could that be? I thought everyone involved with NASA was a white man.

Before there was NASA there was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Before space flight there was aeronautics, and airplane flight was a new, very mathematically intense field. This was way before the computers we have today. It was even before we had calculators. There was a lot of data associated with testing planes, making planes better, and improving planes. The engineers involved felt if there was a huge “computing pool” of people, this might be an efficient way to process the data that came from aeronautic research. They hired smart math graduates, all women, all white, until 1943. Then, with the demands of World War II they began hiring African American women. Pressure from A. Phillip Randolph, a civil rights activist, to FDR, resulted in Executive Order 8802 which said: There shall be no discrimination in war industries and the federal government. Within 18 months after Executive Order 8802, a segregated group of African American women mathematicians began working at Langley Memorial Aeronautics Lab in Hampton Virginia.

The facilities were segregated: segregated bathrooms, lunchroom and workspaces. These women were called “ computers”— – someone who made calculations and crunched numbers for the engineers developing aerospace technology. Some women would analyze data from flight simulations, while others did theoretical work. There was a full spectrum of duties, everything from simple calculations to high-level math.

The story is so exciting but unknown, until now. It took courage, talent and lots of guts to do what they did.

Run, don’t walk to the theater and see this movie. Educators show this movie and discuss its significance!

For more information on this topic check out:

https://bitchmedia.org/article/hidden-figures-nasa-african-american-mathematicians-will-land-big-screen

When it snows we complain that we have to shovel the snow and clean it off our cars. We worry about driving conditions and are afraid we might fall on the ice that accompanies the snow. But if we wait a few days, the temperature will rise, and it will all melt and be gone. When it rains we complain that we are wet, that our roof is leaking or that there is flooding. But wait a few hours or days and the puddles dry up, the leak stops and the water recedes. And then when it doesn’t rain we complain that the plants are dying and the water table is low. But wait a few days and there will be rain.   This is all brought to us by the beauty of STATES OF MATTER.

Matter, and especially water changes state every second, every minute, every hour of every day on planet Earth.

Changes in state are all about energy, specifically heat energy. If we add energy (heat) to a solid, such as ice, we get water. If we keep adding more heat, we get a gas, water vapor. To reverse the process we reduce the amount of energy and the gas becomes liquid again, and then a solid if the temperature is cold enough.

My favorite phase changes are sublimation and deposition.  It is possible to go from a solid to a gas, this is called sublimation, and from a gas to a sold, this is called deposition.  An example of sublimation is dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide). When dry ice is placed at room temperature, it changes from a solid to a gas, and skips the liquid phase. An example of deposition is the  thin film of ice that forms on window during winter months.

For more information on changes of state of matter check out:

http://www.chem4kids.com/files/matter_changes.html

As a former teacher and mother of three, a prediction of snow was exciting and tense. Will it be enough to close schools? We watched the weather reports closely and learned about the best conditions for the maximum amount of snow to fall. We anticipated sleeping in and possibly going sledding.   We remember fondly times when the family went to the Art Museum area and had great times sledding on the hills. A snow day was magical to us so when it snows, my old thoughts kick in and I wish for copious amounts of snow.   Not for me anymore, I am retired and my children have children of their own, but I wished for snow anyway. Here is hoping that there is enough snow to keep you home at least once each winter!

Let’s look at a couple of things about snow:

Precipitation in the form of ice crystals is called snow.   Snow originates in the clouds when temperatures are below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 Celsius) and when water vapor in the atmosphere condenses directly into ice without becoming a liquid first (this is called deposition).   Additional water vapor from the air is absorbed and frozen on the ice crystal from the surrounding air and it grows into a snow crystal or snow pellet and falls to Earth.

I was reminded of something I must have heard over 50 years ago when I was a child growing up in Chicago, a place that has lots of snow.  I remember hearing that the Eskimos have “over 50 words for types of snow.”

This kind of linguistic phenomenon makes sense.   Language evolves to suit the ideas and needs that are crucial to the lives of the speakers. People who live with snow and ice all the time need to know things like whether the ice is fit to walk on or whether a person will sink through it.   Scientists and linguists say humans speak various tongues not to make it difficult for all of us, but to express their experiences in the jungle or in the desert, or in the cold and ice.

Anthropologist Frank Boas is credited for first citing that there are lots of words to describe snow when he was traveling though Baffin the 188s. There has been a lot of academic discussion as to whether his statement is true, but it seems as the controversy has been settled if you look at the idea of polysynthesis.  Polysynthesis is the formation of a word by the combination of several simple words. Many of the languages spoken by people in the far north combine many suffixes to make various words.

“The Eskimoan language group uses an extraordinary system of multiple, recursively addable derivational suffixes for word formation called postbases. The list of snow-referring roots to stick them on isn’t that long: qani- for a snowflake, api- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning “slush,” a root meaning “blizzard,” a root meaning “drift,” and a few others—very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can “derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit.”

For more information on language and the controversy about snow words check out these sites:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000405.html

http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/eskimo2.html

http://mentalfloss.com/article/33693/how-many-words-do-eskimos-really-have-snow

January 4, 2017, 5:30pm, clear skies, Philadelphia, Pa.

The moon was in its first quarter and shining brilliantly on us as I walked with my 2 1/2 year old granddaughter down the street. Her parents must have taught her to look up at the sky (as we all should) and she told me, “Look grandma,the moon and a star!” As we walked, she said it over and over again but then started saying, “Look grandma it’s the moon and a planet!” I recall telling her mother, my daughter, that the first star you see at night may not always be a star.

A star is a fixed luminous point in the night sky that is a large, remote incandescent body like the sun. Stars are so far away that the light we see may have travelled for millions of years before it reaches our eyes.

But a planet is a celestial body moving in an elliptical orbit around a star that reflects light from that star.

Sometimes, we can see Venus as the first “star” at night. She twinkles like a star because light is being reflected off her thick clouds and because Venus is relatively close to earth.   Venus can often be seen within a few hours after sunset or before sunrise as the brightest object in the sky other than the moon.

The other planet we sometimes see first in the sky is Jupiter. It also reflects light that makes it appear to twinkle like a star.

If you do see a star, it will be Arcturus, the first star in the Big Dipper. It will appear overhead in the Western Hemisphere and be slightly reddish.

Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight,

I wish I may, I wish I might,

Have this wish I wish tonight.

It makes me wonder then, if we chant this children’s poem are we really wishing to Venus, or Jupiter (planets) or to Arcturus?