Physical Science with Mr.S

I will not have a Physical Science class for the 2010-2011 school, so this site will be inactive for at least a year

I will have 3 Physics & 3 Geometry

Who had the “best” one.  Who had the most information?  What did you learn?  Whose was most interesting or different?

Check out the projects and leave a good paragraph of thoughts here.

This video was about a group of scientists who wanted to stop the melting of Greenland’s glaciers, as well as glaciers around the world. Their theory was that placing a reflective blanket on the glacier’s surface would slow, and eventually stop, the melting of the glaciers due to global warming. To test this, they covered 2 acres of a glacier in Greenland in a reflective, polypropylene “blanket.” They transported the massive rolls of material to the glacier with massive helicopters normally used for transporting tanks. Once there, they took massive rolls of the material and rolled them out across the glacier’s surface. The scientists then stitched the sheets together, and drove long, bamboo poles into the edges of the material, making one enormous, reflective sheet. This gave the entire “blanket” much more strength and stability. The first roll took several hours to unroll, but the scientists did eventually cover the 2 acres. We don’t know if this experiment worked or not, because we didn’t completely finish the video, but judging from the theory and the short term effects of the sheet, it may very well have worked.

Video “Raining Forests” was about a team of people trying to think of a way to accelerate the rate of reforestation of decimated forests.  Since trees are our environmental buddies by recycling carbon dioxide and giving out oxygen, we need to help keep the trees populated because they are being torn down far to excessively.  The main idea is to make a container for the seedlings that could be dropped from the airplane so that they could take root and flourish which would be faster than the previous method of planting by hand.  First they had to decide how to get the required spred pattern of at least four feet apart between seeds.  The physicist of the team figured that only one of four ways would give them the pattern, low and fast, low and slow, high and fast, high and slow.  The only method to give the pattern was high and slow but it put the engines in danger of stalling so the team had to use a different aircraft.  They put that problem to the side for the moment and tried to come up with the container that would allow the seeds safe transport into the ground and yet not inhibit its growth.  Also the container had to be made of easily gatherd materials so that people could make them even after a disaster.  The final form chosen was a wax ball shell with dirt and the seed inside.  The shell could keep the seed safe and not inhibit the growth but they had to see if the ball would fly straight so it would hit what it was aimed at.  At first, the ball was all over the place but  they added to kite tails to give it more stability which resulted in the better accuracy of the ball.  When the aircraft was decided on being a helicopter with a net underneath to carry and then drop the seeds.  After planting all the seeds, the team left the island for three months then came back to see if it succeeded but unforunately, the seeds didn’t grow more than a few days.  The new method was not successful in planting the seeds faster than planting by hand.

In this video, a team of reearchers were attmpting to make clouds 10% more reflective . This would help global warming or climate change because clouds are a natural cooling system for the planet.  The rain droplets reflect the light away from Earth and they also provide shade.  The researchers were trying to find a way for the droplets  to go into the clouds and the only clouds this could possibly work with is marine cumulous stratus, which are always over salt water. Also for this to work the droplets must be very small o get them this small they used flares, to make them as small as salt particles. when they tested out their experiment, they at first noticed that the flare did not get the particles high enough to go to the condensation layer. Then they tried releasing all 300 flares at once which creted a cloud that went in the condensation layer. The experiment was successful.

there are seventy three million tons of co2 in our atmosphere, that is about 20% of out atmosphere. there is endless supply of  winds in our upper atmosphere. they want to capture wind energy. with wind turbines we could reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. then the tether that holds up the balloon has to be srong and conductive. Staability is an issue at 300 ft. so instead of 3 single disk they removed two of them. the tether was then made of bectrin a strong plastic fiber. the weight of the generators pulled he balloon down on both ends. The higher you get the less turbulant it is. it produces 200 watts a minute. yes, it works but it has many design flaws, it only works when its windy.

Our movie was about scientest trying to find large populations of plankton. To find the plankton the scientist find a place in the ocean where the crabon is the highest, and if the carbon is high the plantons populatin will grow at arappied rate. They wanted to study the growing population of the plant plakton and to see how much crbon it is taking in and how much oxygen it is sentingout in to the ocean. to study this, the scientest built 2 tarp to go under to oceans surface and take sampels of the water. the first tube they set into the water about 1000 feet from the surface, the tube ripped in half and it was unsuccessful. but the second tube they placed into the ocean did not rip and they did get a very little sample. but mostly the tubes were unsuccessful.

The discovery video was about a space sunshield. Roger Angel wants to launch 20 in disks into space a million miles across. This is supposed to block about 2% of the sun’s rays from Earth. Unfortunately, it would cost 1.4 million trillion dollars and would bankrupt the world for centuries. They need to find a safe inexpensive way to build and ship the disks into space. The lenses would have to be 1 micron thick. Each silicone wafer holds 12 lenses. One way of transportation would be a coil gun, but that exerts too much force on the lenses. A rocket shake has a 25g force but with certain conditions the lenses may be able to servive.

In this video scientist tried to take solar energy to a whole new level. The goal of their experements was to test new and stronger solar energy cells as an alternative energy source. as for the time being solar panles on Earth are ineffective.  Do ti this fact, scientists want to put solar panels in space, similar to a satilite.  They used a silicon lens, with microscopic prisems covering one side, to consentrate the suns rays to 8 times the power of one today.  They figured out how to send the energy through microwaves the distance through the atmosphere.  Most of these experements were a success, and maybe, in the near future, we will be using this energy source.

Fixing carbon was about scientists who wanted to take carbon out of the atmosphere. They did this by capturing and freezing CO2 and putting it on a rocket. They sent to rocket down to the bottom of the ocean and burried it in the ground. The scientists also  created a “carbon scruber” This tool was used for getting carbon out of the air. This was successful in it’s first try.