Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It
eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation.
— Johnny Hart
Category: Education
bookmark_borderThe Science Suite
Music and lyrics based on science:
Potential Energy
Gravitational potential energy The gravity of the position that is me Alas, my mass (times) gravity (times) height Is that right? Position in a force field I’ve got power to yield From on tall as I fall I drop potential Just as quick climbs kinetic Me as energy Spring into action The potential of […]
Space-Time Continuum
I am… caught up in… the space-time continuum Four dimensional sensational For dimensional sensation realization I am Space-time continuum I am in time I’m in time Time’s role is fourth dimensional Not that unusual The I I ignite traveling at the speed of light I know I’m in the flow of the space-time continuum. […]
Chaos
Though I may appear sloppy I’m happy And if you pull back, you just might see The anomaly of me Through chaos theory If you’re in the hurricane, you can’t see the eye But, when you pull back, you can eye I You can see me Unordered system that I am Or may appear […]
bookmark_borderThe FED (Federal Reserve Bank)
by Daniel Brouse
The FED tries to control our spending… and that ain’t easy.
It seems to happen around election time — all these wacky posts about the FED. (Luckily, I’ve a degree in international economics for just such an occasion.) If you are posting about the FED, please remember these facts:
* The FED regulates banks to the best of their ability. (They also try to keep inflation and employment under control.) It is called “monetary policy”.
* No one owns the FED as it is part of our government oversight.
* Those that borrow money from the FED fund the FED (usually banks foot the bill.)
* The FED has too little power and no control over fiscal policy (spending).
* If we control our own spending, the FED doesn’t do anything.
Though I hated it happening, thank God the FED went beyond their powers. When the Fiscal Policy of “us” USA citizens was (and still is) in crisis, the FED was forced to intervene in an unprecedented manner; however, even under these circumstances the FED made money for USA citizens. (The “bailouts” made billions of dollars for the Treasury. OUTFLOWS: $617 billion / INFLOWS: $681 billion) Please blame us before blaming the FED. Check out your responsibility for fiscal policy.
bookmark_borderDeath Star
NASA — Scientists using NASA’s repurposed Kepler space telescope, known as the K2 mission, have uncovered strong evidence of a tiny, rocky object being torn apart as it spirals around a white dwarf star. This discovery validates a long-held theory that white dwarfs are capable of cannibalizing possible remnant planets that have survived within its solar system.
“We are for the first time witnessing a miniature “planet” ripped apart by intense gravity, being vaporized by starlight and raining rocky material onto its star,” said Andrew Vanderburg, graduate student at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lead author of the paper published in Nature.
As stars like our sun age, they puff up into red giants and then gradually lose about half their mass, shrinking down to 1/100th of their original size to roughly the size of Earth. This dead, dense star remnant is called a white dwarf.
bookmark_border72 Million Light Years Away
Hubble Space Telescope: Captures New Image of Galaxy 72 Million Light-Years From Earth
The telescope, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, was used to photograph NCG 4639, a barred spiral galaxy located in the Virgo constellation.
bookmark_borderNestle and the California Drought
by Daniel Brouse
There is a lot of misleading information trending in social-media about Nestle and the California drought. The facts of the matter are:
Most of the water in California is used for agriculture. Nearly 50 billion cubic metres (13 trillion gallons) of water is used in California each year. Nestle bottled water plants only use 705 million gallons a year. Almond growers use about as much water each year as the entire city of Los Angeles. What percentage of California’s water is used by agriculture? 80 %.
The real cause of the problem is Human Induced Climate Change. As droughts increase in frequency and intensity, the sea level is rising. So not only are the droughts a problem, but salt water intrusion is also a problem. As these problems worsen, the solution is not to blame bottled water companies. Nor is the solution to build desalination plants. Not only do desalination plants contribute to global warming, they also are devastating to the ocean. “Fish and other marine organisms are killed on the intake screens (impingement); organisms small enough to pass through, such as plankton, fish eggs, and larvae, are killed during processing of the salt water .” [Heather Cooley, Newsha Ajami, Matthew Heberger, The Pacific Institute December 11, 2013]
The solution is for humans to take responsibility for the climate change and take action.
bookmark_borderHealth And Air Quality
by Daniel Brouse
Q: What causes the most illness in the United States?
A: Bad air quality
The leading causes of bad air quality are Particulate Matter, Ground Level Ozone, Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) and Nitrogen Oxide (NOx).
Asthma is a chronic lung disease that affects an estimated 16.4 million adults and 7.0 million children in the United States, regardless of age, sex, race, or ethnicity.(1) Although the exact cause of asthma is unknown and it
cannot be cured, bad air quality is believed to be the main cause. In particular, low level ozone is causing an increase in asthma-like symptoms.(2) What many people believe are food allergies are just symptoms of respiratory and immune system damage caused by ozone.
Low level ozone (tropospheric ozone) is highly volatile and is created in large part due to vehicle emissions. “Ground level ozone is a serious problem in cities with lots of traffic, such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Houston and New York City. In 2013, according to the American Lung Association, nearly four in 10 people in the United States (38 percent) lived in areas with unhealthful levels of ozone.” (3) The use of ethanol in gasoline is causing a dramatic increase in low level ozone.(4)
The EPA monitors ozone levels and issues action alert days. “Action days are usually called when the AQI gets into the unhealthy ranges. Different air pollution control agencies call them at different levels. In some places, action days are called when the AQI is forecast to be Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups, or Code Orange. In this case, the groups that are sensitive to the pollutant should reduce exposure by reducing prolonged or heavy exertion outdoors. For ozone this includes: children and adults who are active outdoors, and people with lung disease, such as asthma. For particle pollution this includes: people with heart or lung disease, older adults and children.”(5)
“When ozone levels are very high, everyone should be concerned about ozone exposure.”(6)
1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2008)
2. “Although the data are inconsistent, some epidemiological studies suggest that long-term exposure to ozone could play a role in the development of asthma.” — EPA (2015)
3. National Resources Defense Counsel (2014)
4. Gasoline Plus Ethanol Equals Bad Ozone — The Membrane Domain (2009)
5. AirNow — EPA (2015)
6. Are you at risk from ground-level ozone? — EPA (2009)
bookmark_borderBlack Minquas
The Black Minquas were a Native American tribe that had a village in Chinklacamoose.
Learn more about the Black Minquas.
Pictures:
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bookmark_borderEarth
It’s been many years since NASA has taken a picture of Earth. Now, they released the Blue Marble image captured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s #DSCOVR spacecraft.
This is the first photo of the entire Earth taken in 43 years:
bookmark_borderIs Opposition To GMO Crops Irrational?
By Daniel Brouse
There is evidence of genetically modified crops for over 8,000 years. There is no evidence of harm from eating GM foods. The Bible compares the grafting of an olive branch to a human being grafted to God. Romans 11:17 — “But some of these branches from Abraham’s tree — some of the people of Israel — have been broken off. And you Gentiles, who were branches from a wild olive tree, have been grafted in. So now you also receive the blessing God has promised Abraham and his children, sharing in the rich nourishment from the root of God’s special olive tree.”
The BBC program “The Inquiry” asks:
“Ask a scientist, and they will almost certainly tell you genetically modified food is safe to eat. Yet an awful lot of consumers disagree. Is their fear of GM food irrational? Earlier this year the Pew Foundation released a US poll which suggested 88% of scientists think GM food is generally safe to eat, while only 37% of the public agree. It is the issue on which American scientists and the general public are most divided, more so than climate change or vaccines. If the scientific consensus says it is safe, should we embrace a technology that could help solve hunger and feed the world? Or is GM food a lightning rod for justified concerns about the impact of global agribusiness and industrial food production?”
The BBC report mentions flood-tolerant rice. The Ronald Laboratories of UC Davis state:
“Each year millions of small farmers in the poorest areas of the world lose their entire crops to flooding. Although 24% of the global rice crop is grown in paddies, most rice varieties will die if fully submerged for more than three days. In India and Bangladesh alone, submergence destroys 4 million tons of rice each year, enough to feed 30 million people.
About 50 years ago, breeders discovered an unusual and ancient variety of rice that could withstand 2 weeks of complete submergence. Using conventional approaches, breeders tried to introduce this submergence tolerance trait into rice varieties favored by farmers in India and Bangladesh. However, because the breeding was imprecise, the resulting varieties were rejected by farmers. In the 1990s, rice breeder David Mackill (University of California, Davis) and graduate student Kenong Xu (University of California, Davis) demonstrated that tolerance to complete submergence mapped to the Submergence tolerance 1 (Sub1) Quantitative trait locus (QTL)
In 1996, Ronald began a project with Mackill and Xu, funded by the USDA, to isolate the genes at the Sub1 locus. Over a period of 10 years, Dr. Xu carried out fine mapping and physical isolation of the Sub1 gene in the Mackill and Ronald laboratories at the University of California, Davis (Xu. et. al., 2000). While working as a postdoctoral fellow in Ronald’s laboratory, Xu identified and sequenced the Sub1 QTL genomic region, revealed that it carried three ethylene response transcription factors (ERF) and demonstrated that one of the ERFs, designated Sub1A, was up-regulated rapidly in response to submergence. Xu and Ronald further demonstrated that overexpression of Sub1A conferred robust tolerance to submergence in genetically engineered plants ( Xu. et. al., 2006). This work revealed an important mechanism with which plants control tolerance to environmental stress and set the stage for in-depth molecular-genetic analyses of Sub1A-mediated processes”