Mark your calendars for Thursday, February 18, at 1:15 pm Central/2:15 pm Eastern time, for the landing of NASA's Perseverance lander on Mars!
There is an entire toolkit for this event, so check it out. Think about all the areas of STEM that come together to make this ridiculously complex mission take place...this is part of the set of opportunities that are out there for today's students. SO exciting!!
For the writers out there:
New Student Opportunity: 2nd NYTimes/Science News STEM Writing Contest!
Science News in High Schools and The New York Times Learning Network together invite students to participate in the 2nd annual STEM Writing Contest. Students will choose an issue or question in STEM that interests them and then write a 500-word explanation that will engage and enlighten readers. Here is a rubric for the contest, which is open to students ages 11–19.
Student submissions are due on Tuesday, March 2, 2021 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern time. Winning entries will be published on The New York Times Learning Network. You can read last year’s winning essays here.
One of the constant reminders I tell my students is that "reality is always more complex than the textbook problem." And our goal is to dig into things and events that we all take for granted every day, and try to find the complexities in the seemingly simple. Here's one example of what we mean by this:
You have a superball, hold it some height above the floor, and then drop it. That's it, seems incredibly simple! And we all have done this, and know what happens. It hits the floor, and bounces back up to nearly the same height from which we dropped it.
What's the key word in this description???? What indicates within our observation that this is trickier than we tend to think????
"Nearly." The best superball in the world cannot make it back to its original height. The world's best pendulum or swing or roller coaster can never make it back to their original heights. The scientist's question is, of course, why is this the case with everything we can think of that starts high, goes down and tries to return to the same height?
When the superball falls, it is moving through air. There is air friction acting on it, and that interaction, that rubbing and collisions with air molecules, creates heat, which means there is a loss in kinetic energy. The ball then collides with the ground. ANY material in a collision get partially deformed during the collision. The two surfaces produce forces on each other and bend/deform/compress each other. The atoms and molecules in the two surfaces have their bonds disturbed, and are vibrating faster in their lattice positions...basically a shock wave goes through the materials. This is all internal heat and movements of atoms and molecules...it is taking more kinetic energy away from the ball during its journey. We hear the superball hit the ground - sound energy is produced during collisions, and that is a small loss of energy from the ball. It starts moving back up, through air, and more heat is released due to air friction.
All of this complexity, usually at small distances where the atoms and molecules themselves are being affected drastically, all requires energy of the system, and it is impossible for any object to bounce back to its original height.
If you can start to think about reality differently than the general conceptual approach of most textbooks, then you are thinking like the scientist. And this opens the door to all sorts of research questions, as we can then investigate how significant a specific parameter or effect has on a system! This is the CABS approach, and is why we can always find good, original research questions in everyday things, and don't always need the million dollar laboratory to do real, good research!!
HAPPY 2021!!! Let the exploring and curiosity begin!!!!
A two-week, intense, but FREE, summer coding camp that has a focus on girls is Kode with Klossy. This comes recommended by students who have taken it, and they loved it. Coding is part of any area of science at this point, so everyone should plan on having a course or other experience where the opportunity to learn to code (in whatever language) is available. Check it out, girls!
Some really fascinating research and results coming from the top 20 articles from phys.org.
Check some out, and enjoy! Let these motivate you to be one of the next scientists to make memorable and important discoveries!
Here's a really interesting experimental idea that can lead to a vast number of variations for students to create an original research study. Set up a hydraulic jump experiment, which consists of a water source and a stream of falling water (i.e. the water jet in a jump experiment) that lands on a hard surface.
The idea is to put a 3D object of whatever shape at the location where the jet of water is supposed to land on a flat surface. The water in the jet flows over the surface of the object, and then onto the flat surface, where the experimentalist then measures whatever jump and pattern that takes place. Here is an example of an experiment where hemispheres, spheres, cubes and cylinders were used. Students can use whatever shaped objects they have lying around their house or school lab, or they can design and create any shaped 3D object with a 3D printer, ceramics, clay, or other material that is available.
Numerous options await - be creative with the shapes of the objects being used. Measure the flow patterns and any jumps that form under a wide variety of conditions. You can vary the height from which the water jet falls, the diameter of the jet, the dimensions of the object on which a water jet falls, the material from which the 3D object is made, the orientation of the object relative to the jet, and so on. One may nbe interested in trying to find a mathematical parameter that should be added to theoretical treatments of hydraulic jump, when one needs to account for the shape of the surface water lands on.
To many, science is the process of discovery and trying to find the 'facts' of how the world works. It is supposed to be unbiased, nonpartisan, and pure. But don't ever forget that science is done and practiced by human beings, all of whom are imperfect, have biases, and make mistakes, just like everyone else. We are not 'all knowing' and have all the answers, and we never will.
