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Remember when we discussed electromagnetism and electricity??  You’ll learn more in depth understanding in 8th grade but I couldn’t help but be blown away with my own learning from this video.. which of course means I must share it with you!  In short, electricity isn’t flowing of electrons through wires, it’s the oscillation and magnetic fields that produces the light we see in a light bulb.  Here’s your proof!!  Which is only another reason why studying light and using instruments like the James Webb will be so impactful with our understanding of how things work!

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Remember at the beginning of the year we talked about how time and space are relative.  The fruit fly .. perception is reality.. Here is a Brightside video Everett and I watched a few times and had enriched science talks.  I’m astonished  by the ideas a young mind can create when encouraged!  Maybe you have some ideas to help us figure out how to measure the speed of light without the reflection (trip B). Maybe the James Webb telescope will provide some insight?  Never know if you don’t try- that’s truth.

Happy Spring Break and sending cheer!

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James Webb Launch!!  Happy holidays, indeed!! 

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James Webb Launch!!  Happy holidays, indeed!! 

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Hope this finds everyone well! In 16 hours (7:20 EST) you can witness a huge day in scientific history as NASA will launch the James Webb on Christmas Day! It’s one to watch and inform others as the research will change much of what we know about space, light, and so much more.

Here’s some cool sites to excite your curiosity!

Info on James Webb Telescope

Homepage on James Webb Telescope

Cheers to all!

Mrs. Koontz

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Enrichment Podcast: The Manhattan Project

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Enrichment Podcast: The Manhattan Project

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It gets interesting at 12:15 min.  Begins with the levels of collaboration and mentions Oak Ridge, TN and how it supplied the enriched Uranium.  It was the 235 Uranium needed.

Then listen and pay close attention come min 15:20 which describes how the experiments began in 1940 separating the enriched Uranium evolved into using a centrifuge.   It mentions how Oak Ridge made HUGE contributions to this method of extraction of Uranium 235 and how they used Plutonium which was synthetically made in Hanford.  Nothing was wasted as the 235 enriched Uranium was used.  The inert 238 Uranium captured neutrons and decayed to Plutonium 239.  The advantage of using the synthesized plutonium meant it could be extracted by chemical means instead of the diffusion method.   ... all of this was built in 18 months!   They didn't end up using the plutonium because it wasn't good to work with for lots of reasons mentioned at 19:30 but it did lead to new methods of nuclear energy.
I just can't get over how a centrifuge (which is a method of separation using density) can separate out inert Uranium from radioactive 235 Uranium. Wild!

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In Our Time - The Manhattan Project - BBC Sounds

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the race to build an atom bomb before anyone else in WW2

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Am I funny if I make myself laugh? Hope this week went smoothly and I look forward to seeing you Tuesday. Stay healthy

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Love Mark Rober and the squirrel heist!  All that planning finally pays off ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvS9lvRxZ8

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Backyard Squirrel Maze 2.0- The Walnut Heist

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https://www.livescience.com/colletor-finds-rare-cookie-monster-rock.html

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(Image credit: Kennedy News & Media)

You never know what you're going to get when you crack open a geode-like rock called an agate, but a new specimen is even more surprising than usual: It looks just like Cookie Monster.

The agate, found in Soledade, a precious stone hotspot in southern Brazil, is a dead ringer for the blue, googly-eyed Sesame Street Muppet. After its owner, California mineral collector Mike Bowers, posted about the agate on Facebook, it went viral, with write-ups in newspapers from Australia to Israel to the United States.

"I didn't realize that Cookie Monster was so well known and part of the world cultural heritage!" Bowers told Live Science. He's since been contacted by the actor who plays Cookie Monster on "Sesame Street," he said. (Cookie Monster's official Twitter account also gave the agate a shout-out.)

(Image credit: Kennedy News & Media)

The agate came to Bowers in November via Brazilian gemologist Lucas Fassari, who had acquired it in a batch of many agates from Soledade. Bowers immediately purchased the Cookie Monster agate, but didn't post it online until Jan. 16, as he was ill with COVID-19.

Agates are a form of quartz, the crystalline form of dioxide, that develop within cavities in volcanic rocks. The cavities are formed by gas bubbles in hot lava. Over time, as the lava cools, water infused with silicon dioxide percolates through the cavities. As the water evaporates, the silicon dioxide is left behind on the cavity walls, creating colorful layers of crystals. The colors are caused by chemical impurities in the silicon dioxide and by the spacing of the crystals.

Some agates completely fill their volcanic voids, but many leave small spaces inside, lined with sparkly, inward-facing quartz crystals. In the case of the Cookie Monster agate, these voids just happen to look like a pair of Muppet eyes and an enthusiastically grinning mouth.

"It is somewhat uncommon to find a face shape in agates, but in many instances it's like looking at the clouds. You kind of ," Bowers said. "What makes the Cookie Monster unique is there is just no doubt: Clear-cut, it is Cookie Monster, no explanation required."

Another unique feature of the Cookie Monster agate is that the face appears on both sides of the cut stone, Bowers added. Usually the voids are not lined up so neatly as to create a mirror image.

For now, Bowers said, he plans to keep the stone. It may eventually end up in a museum or in the hands of a high-end collector, he said.

"It is totally unique and awesome to see everyone loving this stone as much as we do," he said.
Originally published on Live Science.

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Rock collector finds rare gemstone that looks like Cookie Monster

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(Image credit: Kennedy News & Media) You never know what you're going to get when you crack open a geode-like rock called an agate, but a new specimen is even more surprising than usual: It looks just like Cookie Monster.

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In our Science Rules questions, our first stop is mechanical gearings.  A lot of good science gets done without any sophisticated principles.  Sometimes all you need are intrinsic relationships like how two objects touch or what kind of shapes they have.  This puzzle is one of those cases.

See gif below (if needed).  The small gear has 10 teeth and the big gear has 50 teeth.  When the small gear rolls round the big gear, how many times will the tick arrow return to its initial orientation (pointing upward)?

A) 5 times
B) 6 times
C) 7 times
D) 10 times

email me your answer and I'll tell you if you're right or need to retry :)

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At the beginning of the year, I showed this video to you.  We are the iguana and our demons/things that try to steal our joy/whatever you call it.. are the racer snakes.  It's a video you must interpret and label each snake.
To me, it's us vs. the world.  First snake is the enemy of insecurity, the one the whispers to us that we aren't good enough or smart enough or whatever!  Gotta run away from that one!  Then more snakes come after us.  I labeled one anxiety, the other fear, the other sadness, the other depression.. the list goes on.  And at one point, the snakes almost take us down.  BUT in that moment, I remember you.  I remember your positive attitude on zoom or in email when things were crazy.  I remember you cheering me on or sending me prayers when Maggie got COVID.  It gave me strength to keep fighting the good fight.  .. Which, guess what that iguana does?  . it fights back.  It doesn't give in to the strangling snakes/lies.  It finds a way to BREAK FREE and run for it's life.  Is it easy- NO WAY!!  Those snakes / lies we tell ourselves follow us everywhere!  BUT KEEP RUNNING!  KEEP FIGHTING for what is right and DON"T GIVE UP!  That iguana has to dodge three dozen snakes trying to kill it, climb a lava mound that is sharp and jagged, all by itself!!!

Yeah, we are the iguana.  I'm so proud of you all and I can't wait for you to show yourselves how far you've come in Science.

I'm your biggest fan and I'm always rooting for you.
#BeTheIguana

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TIME TO CHANGE THE WORLD!!!  $100Million incentive funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation - XPRIZE Carbon Removal- is the largest incentive prize competition in history!!  Read below and click on link- LG Crew!

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TIME TO CHANGE THE WORLD!!!  $100Million incentive funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation - XPRIZE Carbon Removal- is the largest incentive prize competition in history!!  Read below and click on link- LG Crew!

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The world's leading scientists estimate that we may need to remove as much as 6 GIGATONS of CO2 PER YEAR by 2030, and 10 gigatons PER YEAR by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change.  For humanity to reach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting the Earth's temperature rise to no more than 1.5 degrees C of pre-industrial levels or even 2 degrees C we need BOLD, RADICAL tech innovation and scale up that goes beyond limiting CO2 emissions, but ACTUALLY REMOVES CO2 already in the air and oceans.  If humanity continues on a business-as-usual path, the global average temp. could increase 6 degrees C by the year 2100.  This four-year global competition invites innovators and teams from anywhere on the planet to create and demonstrate solutions that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans ultimately scaling massively to gigaton levels, locking away CO2 permanently in an environmentally benign way.  Solutions will be scientifically evaluated across multiple criteria such as: amount of CO2 removed, life cycle analysis of the removal process, energy efficiency, land footprint and sequestration capabilities.
Any carbon negative solution is eligible: nature-based, direct air capture, oceans, mineralization, or anything else that sequesters CO2 permanently.

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Snowed in and want some awesome science videos to occupy the time?!  Check these out!

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Snowed in and want some awesome science videos to occupy the time?!  Check these out!

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1) If you like stretching your mind in the world of Biology, this one is for you : One Strange Rock - found on Disney +
2) Wild Hawaii - found on Nat Geo (Disney +) - if adaptations are you're thing than you MUST watch episode 1 of Wild Hawaii.
3) LIfe : Plants : full episode you can pay for or you can find it on YouTube.
4) Fabrics of the Cosmos - full episodes found on YouTube.

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Are fish intelligent?  Is this innate or learned behavior?  What evidence supports your claim? ...anyone want to discuss if this is a sign of intelligence. Be ready with evidence because I have some to back up my claim ;) Come to zoom at 10a to discuss!

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BBC-Earth , Life Story Ep05 - Courtship - Puffer Fish (From Netflix)

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My parents used to hang our good grades and pictures on our family fridge.  So guess what!?!  I'm going to be posting S/O to those that are making huge gains in Edgenuity or are going above and beyond for their family and/or community behind the scenes.  You have to send me your good news via email in order to be posted ;)

S/O to Alston for the super cool video on painting an entire room with the darkest black of blacks.  Really neat optical illusions .. makes me wonder how we can get our hands on some.. hmm.. where there's a will, there's a way..

S/O to Sophia for finishing 3rd in the Poetry contest in the TN Magazine!!  For some reason, I can't enter the link.. grr.. but you can google it.  We are so proud of you!

S/O to the 2x AMAZING students that have FINISHED our course in Edgenuity!  Yes, I said FINISHED.  100% complete.  As in, it's Feb 2nd and they have zero work in Science each day unless they do an enrichment project with yours truly complete. I hope to meet with you tomorrow and start some awesome enrichment- sky is the limit.. or space ;)

S/O to my inquisitive group of students that join the 10a daily science zoom.  We always start with a recap of what's in Edgenuity and then we just talk science, technology, chemistry in foods, cultures and foods around the world- we even share recipes.  So much fun!

S/O to Varshini for making an awesome Inquiry and real-world connection to Potassium and how it reacts with water.  I love how something we can learn online in Edgenuity can relate to our real-world!

S/O to the people that send me the logic question- I LOVE SOLVING PUZZLES!!

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Amaze your students with smarter worksheets. Wizer.me is a platform where teachers build beautiful, engaging online worksheets.

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Strategic Deductions
Is it possible to arrange the words below such that
1) two words are only next to each other if they have at least one letter in common and
2) every word, except "INFINITY" is shorter than at least one of the words next to it?

The words are:
ACORN
INFINITY
PI
PIES
YEN

Email me when you think you have your answer ;)

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Mars helicopter set to take flight no earlier than 4-11!  LG!

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Mars helicopter set to take flight no earlier than 4-11!  LG!

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Let me catch you up.. Couple weeks ago Woodland's awesome Principal, Dr. Boyd, (@wcsWMSpb) and I set an invite in our calendar to see OLP Science in action!!  At the conclusion of our zoom, he posed an enrichment question that tied to our Properties of Matter crash course.  "How do you fly a helicopter on a planet you've never visited?"

*insert emoji with big eyes*

It sparked an AWESOME discussion about what properties we know and would need to know about flying Mars Helicopter.  We brainstormed about gravity on Earth vs Mars, mass and density, atmosphere of Earth vs Mars.. the list goes on!
Thus far, we've concluded that we'd have to build a simulation here on Earth that would mimic Mars and start testing.

Here is a video sent to me by my friend that works at NASA.  He recommended it to me when I told him about our awesome discussion... OF COURSE, I'm now a proud supporter of the channel because it's AMAZING!

Feel free to email me your ideas!!  I'd love to hear from you ;)
Happy Science all and S/O to Dr. Boyd!!   #matterstous

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NASA's Robotic Lunar Lander - Smarter Every Day 252

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If you've completed our course or have some down time and want to stretch your thinking... Here is a FAVORITE short YouTube video Playlist.. (Fabrics of the Cosmos is still my top video followed by a close tie for second: One Strange Rock on Nat Geo and X-Ray Earth on Disney +).

Warning: this Playlist won't hurt your brain until you THINK about what it's modeling/saying/demonstrating.. Doesn't need to be viewed in order either ;) Happy Exploring & Happy Science Day!!  YEAH!

Power of Ten (Micro/Macro)

How Small is an Atom

The Geometry of Causality (to really understand this you could also view The Speed of Light is NOT about Light)

The Illusion of TIme (clip from Fabrics of the Cosmos - GO WATCH THE FULL VIDEO!)  I've been watching the video for 5 years and STILL learn new things each view.

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See how easy it is to understand Cell Transport when you look at this picture!

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Algorithms

Algorithms are important to computer science, but they aren't exclusively part of computer science. You'd need to think about algorithms if you went out of town and needed to get a pet sitter for your beloved hamsters! :)

Imagine your pet sitter is very good at following directions, but they're not very good at using their own judgement, so you need to give very detailed feeding instructions.
- Check the hamster's food bowl.
- If the food bowl is empty, put five pellets in the bowl.
- Otherwise, if the food bowl does have some leftover food pellets in it, put three pellets in the bowl.

There are four pellets in the bowl after your sitter runs this algorithm and before the hamsters have a chance to nibble on anything.  What can you conclude?

a) The sitter saw an empty bowl when they started.
b) The sitter saw leftover food in the bowl when they started.
c) Can't conclude either of these.

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l enjoy learning about Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry.  Mostly, stretching my imagination to visualize or model what we know about our Universe and how we can learn more.  What technologies would we need?  As I find myself lost in thought, I come back to this article to rethink and reimagine what I know, want to know, or question.   Then, I usually spend my evening rereading Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and/or watching Fabrics of the Cosmos by Brain Greene.  It has caused me many strange thoughts, so approach with caution and remember: Your perception is your reality.  So protect it and Science on.

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When you gaze out at the night sky, space seems to extend forever in all directions. That's our mental model for the universe, but it's not necessarily correct. There was a time, after all, when everyone thought the Earth was flat, because our planet's curvature was too subtle to detect and a spherical Earth was unfathomable.

Today, we know the Earth is shaped like a sphere. But most of us give little thought to the shape of the universe. Just as the sphere offered an alternative to a flat Earth, other three-dimensional shapes offer alternatives to "ordinary" infinite space.

We can ask two separate but interrelated questions about the shape of the universe. One is about its geometry: the fine-grained local measurements of things like angles and areas. The other is about its topology: how these local pieces are stitched together into an overarching shape.

Cosmological evidence suggests that the part of the universe we can see is smooth and homogeneous, at least approximately. The local fabric of space looks much the same at every point and in every direction. Only three geometries fit this description: flat, spherical and hyperbolic. Let's explore these geometries, some topological considerations, and what the cosmological evidence says about which shapes best describe our universe.

Flat Geometry

This is the geometry we learned in school. The angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, and the area of a circle is π r ². The simplest example of a flat three-dimensional shape is ordinary infinite space - what mathematicians call Euclidean space - but there are other flat shapes to consider too.

These shapes are harder to visualize, but we can build some intuition by thinking in two dimensions instead of three. In addition to the ordinary Euclidean plane, we can create other flat shapes by cutting out some piece of the plane and taping its edges together. For instance, suppose we cut out a rectangular piece of paper and tape its opposite edges. Taping the top and bottom edges gives us a cylinder:

Next, we can tape the right and left edges to get a doughnut (what mathematicians call a torus):

Now, you might be thinking, "This doesn't look flat to me." And you'd be right. We cheated a bit in describing how the flat torus works. If you actually tried to make a torus out of a sheet of paper in this way, you'd run into difficulties. Making the cylinder would be easy, but taping the ends of the cylinder wouldn't work: The paper would crumple along the inner circle of the torus, and it wouldn't stretch far enough along the outer circle. You'd have to use some stretchy material instead of paper. But this stretching distorts lengths and angles, changing the geometry.

Inside ordinary three-dimensional space, there's no way to build an actual, smooth physical torus from flat material without distorting the flat geometry. But we can reason abstractly about what it would feel like to live inside a flat torus.

Imagine you're a two-dimensional creature whose universe is a flat torus. Since the geometry of this universe comes from a flat piece of paper, all the geometric facts we're used to are the same as usual, at least on a small scale: Angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees, and so on. But the changes we've made to the global topology by cutting and taping mean that the experience of living in the torus will feel very different from what we're used to.

For starters, there are straight paths on the torus that loop around and return to where they started:

These paths look curved on a distorted torus, but to the inhabitants of the flat torus they feel straight. And since light travels along straight paths, if you look straight ahead in one of these directions, you'll see yourself from the rear:

On the original piece of paper, it's as if the light you see traveled from behind you until it hit the left-hand edge, then reappeared on the right, as though you were in a wraparound video game:

An equivalent way to think about this is that if you (or a beam of light) travel across one of the four edges, you emerge in what appears to be a new "room" but is actually the same room, just seen from a new vantage point. As you wander around in this universe, you can cross into an infinite array of copies of your original room.

That means you can also see infinitely many different copies of yourself by looking in different directions. It's a sort of hall-of-mirrors effect, except that the copies of you are not reflections:

On the doughnut, these correspond to the many different loops by which light can travel from you back to you:

Similarly, we can build a flat three-dimensional torus by gluing the opposite faces of a cube or other box. We can't visualize this space as an object inside ordinary infinite space - it simply doesn't fit - but we can reason abstractly about life inside it.

Just as life in the two-dimensional torus was like living in an infinite two-dimensional array of identical rectangular rooms, life in the three-dimensional torus is like living in an infinite three-dimensional array of identical cubic rooms. You'll see infinitely many copies of yourself:

The three-dimensional torus is just one of 10 different flat finite worlds. There are also flat infinite worlds such as the three-dimensional analogue of an infinite cylinder. In each of these worlds there's a different hall-of-mirrors array to experience.

Is Our Universe One of These Other Flat Shapes?

When we look out into space, we don't see infinitely many copies of ourselves. Even so, it's surprisingly hard to rule out these flat shapes. For one thing, they all have the same local geometry as Euclidean space, so no local measurement can distinguish among them.

And if you did see a copy of yourself, that faraway image would show how you (or your galaxy, for example) looked in the distant past, since the light had to travel a long time to reach you. Maybe we're seeing unrecognizable copies of ourselves out there. Making matters worse, different copies of yourself will usually be different distances away from you, so most of them won't look the same as each other. And maybe they're all too far away for us to see anyway.

To get around these difficulties, astronomers generally look not for copies of ourselves but for repeating features in the farthest thing we can see: the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation left over from shortly after the Big Bang. In practice, this means searching for pairs of circles in the CMB that have matching patterns of hot and cold spots, suggesting that they are really the same circle seen from two different directions.

In 2015, astronomers performed just such a search using data from the Planck space telescope. They combed the data for the kinds of matching circles we would expect to see inside a flat three-dimensional torus or one other flat three-dimensional shape called a slab, but they failed to find them. That means that if we do live in a torus, it's probably such a large one that any repeating patterns lie beyond the observable universe.

Spherical Geometry

We're all familiar with two-dimensional spheres - the surface of a ball, or an orange, or the Earth. But what would it mean for our universe to be a three-dimensional sphere?

It's hard to visualize a three-dimensional sphere, but it's easy to define one through a simple analogy. Just as a two-dimensional sphere is the set of all points a fixed distance from some center point in ordinary three-dimensional space, a three-dimensional sphere (or "three-sphere") is the set of all points a fixed distance from some center point in four-dimensional space.

Life in a three-sphere feels very different from life in a flat space. To get a feel for it, imagine you're a two-dimensional being living in a two-dimensional sphere. The two-dimensional sphere is the entire universe - you can't see or access any of the surrounding three-dimensional space. Within this spherical universe, light travels along the shortest possible paths: the great circles. To you, these great circles feel like straight lines.

Now imagine that you and your two-dimensional friend are hanging out at the North Pole, and your friend goes for a walk. As your friend strolls away, at first they'll appear smaller and smaller in your visual circle, just as in our ordinary world (although they won't shrink as quickly as we're used to). That's because as your visual circle grows, your friend is taking up a smaller percentage of it:

But once your friend passes the equator, something strange happens: They start looking bigger and bigger the farther they walk away from you. That's because the percentage they're occupying in your visual circle is growing:

When your friend is 10 feet away from the South Pole, they'll look just as big as when they were 10 feet away from you:

And when they reach the South Pole itself, you can see them in every direction, so they fill your entire visual horizon:

If there's no one at the South Pole, your visual horizon is something even stranger: yourself. That's because light coming off of you will go all the way around the sphere until it returns to you.

This carries over directly to life in the three-dimensional sphere. Every point on the three-sphere has an opposite point, and if there's an object there, we'll see it as the entire backdrop, as if it's the sky. If there's nothing there, we'll see ourselves as the backdrop instead, as if our exterior has been superimposed on a balloon, then turned inside out and inflated to be the entire horizon.

While the three-sphere is the fundamental model for spherical geometry, it's not the only such space. Just as we built different flat spaces by cutting a chunk out of Euclidean space and gluing it together, we can build spherical spaces by gluing up a suitable chunk of a three-sphere. Each of these glued shapes will have a hall-of-mirrors effect, as with the torus, but in these spherical shapes, there are only finitely many rooms to travel through.

Is Our Universe Spherical?

Even the most narcissistic among us don't typically see ourselves as the backdrop to the entire night sky. But as with the flat torus, just because we don't see a phenomenon, that doesn't mean it can't exist. The circumference of the spherical universe could be bigger than the size of the observable universe, making the backdrop too far away to see.

But unlike the torus, a spherical universe can be detected through purely local measurements. Spherical shapes differ from infinite Euclidean space not just in their global topology but also in their fine-grained geometry. For example, because straight lines in spherical geometry are great circles, triangles are puffier than their Euclidean counterparts, and their angles add up to more than 180 degrees:

In fact, measuring cosmic triangles is a primary way cosmologists test whether the universe is curved. For each hot or cold spot in the cosmic microwave background, its diameter across and its distance from the Earth are known, forming the three sides of a triangle. We can measure the angle the spot subtends in the night sky - one of the three angles of the triangle. Then we can check whether the combination of side lengths and angle measure is a good fit for flat, spherical or hyperbolic geometry (in which the angles of a triangle add up to less than 180 degrees).

Most such tests, along with other curvature measurements, suggest that the universe is either flat or very close to flat. However, one research team recently argued that certain data from the Planck space telescope's 2018 release point instead to a spherical universe, although other researchers have countered that this evidence is most likely a statistical fluke.

Hyperbolic Geometry

Unlike the sphere, which curves in on itself, hyperbolic geometry opens outward. It's the geometry of floppy hats, coral reefs and saddles. The basic model of hyperbolic geometry is an infinite expanse, just like flat Euclidean space. But because hyperbolic geometry expands outward much more quickly than flat geometry does, there's no way to fit even a two-dimensional hyperbolic plane inside ordinary Euclidean space unless we're willing to distort its geometry. Here, for example, is a distorted view of the hyperbolic plane known as the Poincaré disk:

From our perspective, the triangles near the boundary circle look much smaller than the ones near the center, but from the perspective of hyperbolic geometry all the triangles are the same size. If we tried to actually make the triangles the same size - maybe by using stretchy material for our disk and inflating each triangle in turn, working outward from the center - our disk would start to resemble a floppy hat and would buckle more and more as we worked our way outward. As we approached the boundary, this buckling would grow out of control.

From the point of view of hyperbolic geometry, the boundary circle is infinitely far from any interior point, since you have to cross infinitely many triangles to get there. So the hyperbolic plane stretches out to infinity in all directions, just like the Euclidean plane. But in terms of the local geometry, life in the hyperbolic plane is very different from what we're used to.

In ordinary Euclidean geometry, the circumference of a circle is directly proportional to its radius, but in hyperbolic geometry, the circumference grows exponentially compared to the radius. We can see that exponential pileup in the masses of triangles near the boundary of the hyperbolic disk.

Because of this feature, mathematicians like to say that it's easy to get lost in hyperbolic space. If your friend walks away from you in ordinary Euclidean space, they'll start looking smaller, but slowly, because your visual circle isn't growing so fast. But in hyperbolic space, your visual circle is growing exponentially, so your friend will soon appear to shrink to an exponentially small speck. If you haven't tracked your friend's route carefully, it will be nearly impossible to find your way to them later.

And in hyperbolic geometry, the angles of a triangle sum to less than 180 degrees - for example, the triangles in our tiling of the Poincaré disk have angles that sum to 165 degrees:

The sides of these triangles don't look straight, but that's because we're looking at hyperbolic geometry through a distorted lens. To an inhabitant of the Poincaré disk these curves are the straight lines, because the quickest way to get from point A to point B is to take a shortcut toward the center:

There's a natural way to make a three-dimensional analogue to the Poincaré disk - simply make a three-dimensional ball and fill it with three-dimensional shapes that grow smaller as they approach the boundary sphere, like the triangles in the Poincaré disk. And just as with flat and spherical geometries, we can make an assortment of other three-dimensional hyperbolic spaces by cutting out a suitable chunk of the three-dimensional hyperbolic ball and gluing together its faces.

Is Our Universe Hyperbolic?

Hyperbolic geometry, with its narrow triangles and exponentially growing circles, doesn't feel as if it fits the geometry of the space around us. And indeed, as we've already seen, so far most cosmological measurements seem to favor a flat universe.

But we can't rule out the possibility that we live in either a spherical or a hyperbolic world, because small pieces of both of these worlds look nearly flat. For example, small triangles in spherical geometry have angles that sum to only slightly more than 180 degrees, and small triangles in hyperbolic geometry have angles that sum to only slightly less than 180 degrees.

That's why early people thought the Earth was flat - on the scales they were able to observe, the curvature of the Earth was too minuscule to detect. The larger the spherical or hyperbolic shape, the flatter each small piece of it is, so if our universe is an extremely large spherical or hyperbolic shape, the part we can observe may be so close to being flat that its curvature can only be detected by uber-precise instruments we have yet to invent.

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What Is the Geometry of the Universe? | Quanta Magazine

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When you gaze out at the night sky, space seems to extend forever in all directions. That's our mental model for the universe, but it's not necessarily correct. There was a time, after all, when everyone thought the Earth was flat, because our planet's curvature was too subtle to detect and a spherical Earth was unfathomable.

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This 14-year-old girl won a $25K prize for a discovery that could lead to a cure for Covid-19

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This 14-year-old girl won a $25K prize for a discovery that could lead to a cure for Covid-19

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3m young scientist challenge winner is anika chebrolu

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who won for a coronavirus discovery - cnn

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This 14-year-old girl won a $25K prize for a discovery that could lead to a cure for Covid-19

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As scientists around the world race to find a treatment for the coronavirus, a young girl among them stands out.

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Truth Seeking

You have four closed boxes as shown:

Box: Apples
Box: Bananas
Box: Carrots
Box: Dates

While you know all four types of food are inside and each box only contains one type of food, you also know that only one of the boxes is labeled correctly.

What's the minimum number of boxes that you need to open to be guaranteed to find out which one is labeled correctly?  (NOTE: Guaranteed means in all possible scenarios, so you can't assume one that is lucky.)

a) 1
b) 2
c) 3
d) 4

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Arrange the numbers below so that:
1) no tile is between two others that are both smaller, and
2) 2 is the rightmost number

3, 5, 19, 50, 99
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6. 2

If an arrangement satisfies both constraints, what number(s) might be in the leftmost position?

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CK-12 PLIX labs!  Super fun way to enrich your understanding in Life Science

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CK-12 PLIX labs!  Super fun way to enrich your understanding in Life Science

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Everything from what makes us living, cell structure, cell transport, diffusion, mitosis, meiosis, etc. is located here! Explore and Enjoy learning more about topics we cover in Life Science.

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Observe how molecules diffuse, what blood types a patient can receive and explore life science with PLIX interactives!

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Earn your Problem Solving Badge by completing our Brain Logic Questions!

Want your Homework Badge? Stay on Pace with Edgenuity's pacing guide.

Lead by example.  Earn your Leadership Badge by working AHEAD of pace in Edgenuity for two or more consecutive weeks!

Earn your Participation Badge by asking questions and/or engaging in our optional Zooms!

Perhaps you’re not ahead in Edgenuity yet, BUT you’ve made a HUGE comeback!!  The Most Improved Badge is for you because we appreciate your hard work and grit ;)

Attitude of Gratitude = Positive Attitude Badge. We have so much to be thankful for!!  Email me or post in our zoom chat a time when a peer or teacher helped you.  Or if you’d like to share good news, sharing is caring!

If you are a good listener and can repeat something neat you’ve learned in our Course or something we talked about during our optional zoom lectures, then you’ve earned yourself the Good Listener Badge!

Perfect Attendance is for those that have logged into Edgenuity each week and completed our Course by the desired due date!  GOOD FOR YOU!!

Star Performer is designed for those that have googled and read the Starfish Story (it’s my motto in teaching ;)  Use the hashtags #matterstome #matterstothatone to reference a time someone or an event made a difference to you.

Student of the Month Badge coming soon!!- stay tuned!!

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I'm posting another one for this week because you all did AWESOME on Question 2!  Keep up the critical thinking!

Strategic Deductions:
If two words are next to each other, they must share at least one letter and NOT be the same length.

There are six words below and the word for number 1 is "CAT."

Place all the words in a way that satisfies the condition above.
WIN, MOON, STOP, STUDY, RENT

1. CAT
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

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There are 3 boxes, exactly one of which contains gold.  You can keep the gold if you pick the correct box and never have to work on Edgenuity again ;)  On each box there is a statement, EXACTLY ONE of which is true.
Box 1: The gold is in this box
Box 2: The gold i not in this box
Box 3: The gold is not in box 1

Which box has the gold?

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I love learning about Technology and Science!  One of my favorite topics to read about and have nightmares over (other than black holes ;) is Quantum Physics.  IT'S SO COOL!  And I hope you have read or are going to google the Quantum Computer- that will be something neat for your generation to perfect... I think...

check out this article that popped up on my Twitter feed. Pretty neat to think about.

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In "A Sound of Thunder," the short story by Ray Bradbury, the main character travels back in time to hunt dinosaurs. He crushes a butterfly underfoot in the prehistoric jungle, and when he returns to the present, the world he knows is changed: the feel of the air, a sign in an office, the election of a U.S. president. The butterfly was "a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time."

This "butterfly effect" that Bradbury illustrated - where a small change in the past can result in enormous future effects - is not reserved for fiction. As the famed mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered by accident, natural systems do exist in which tiny shifts in initial conditions can lead to highly variable outcomes. These systems, including weather and even how fluids mix - are known as chaotic. Chaotic systems are normally understood within the realm of classical physics, which is the method we use to predict how objects will move to a certain degree of accuracy (think motion, force or momentum from your high school science class.)

But a new study shows that the effect doesn't work in a quantum realm. Two researchers at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico, created a simulation where a qubit, a quantum bit, moved backwards and forwards in "time" on a quantum computer. Despite being damaged, the qubit held on to its original information - instead of becoming unrecognizable like the time traveler's world after he killed the butterfly. In the study, the process used to simulate time travel forwards and backwards is known as "evolution."

"From the point of view of classical physics, it's very unexpected because classical physics predicts that complex evolution has a butterfly effect, so that small changes deep in the past lead to huge changes in our world," says Nikolai Sinitsyn, a theoretical physicist and one of the researchers who conducted the study.

The finding furthers our understanding of quantum systems, and also has potential applications in securing information systems and even determining the "quantum-ness" of a quantum processor.

Not Quite an Alternate World

The rules of the quantum realm, which explain how subatomic particles move, can be truly mind-boggling because they defy traditional logic. But briefly: Particles as small as electrons and protons don't just exist in one point in space, they can occupy many at a time. The mathematical framework of quantum mechanics tries to explain the motion of these particles.

The laws of quantum mechanics can also be applied to quantum computers. These are very different from computers we use today, and can solve certain problems exponentially faster than normal computers can because they adhere to these completely different laws of physics. A standard computer uses bits with a value of either 0 or 1. A quantum computer uses qubits, which can attain a kind of combined state of 0 or 1, a unique characteristic of quantum systems - for example, an electron - called "superposition."

Information Preservation

In a quantum system, small changes to qubits - even looking at or measuring them - can have immense effects. So in the new study, the researchers wanted to see what would happen when they simulated sending a qubit back in time while also damaging it. Researchers constructing quantum experiments often use the stand-ins "Alice" and "Bob" to illustrate their theoretical process. In this case, they let Alice bring her qubit back in time, scrambling the information as part of what they call "reverse evolution." Once in the past, Bob, an intruder, measures Alice's qubit, changing it. Alice brings her qubit forward in time.

If the butterfly effect had held, the original information in Alice's qubit would have been exponentially changed. But instead, the evolution forward in time allowed Alice to recover the original information, even though Bob's intrusion had destroyed all the connections between her qubit and others that travelled with hers.

"So normally, many people believe that if you go back in time, and scramble the information, that information is lost forever," says Jordan Kyriakidis, an expert in quantum computing and former physicist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. "What they have shown in this paper is that for quantum systems, that under certain circumstances, if you go back in time, you can recover the original information even though someone tried to scramble it on you."

The Flap of a Butterfly's Wings?

So does this mean that the butterfly effect doesn't exist at all? No. Sinitsyn and his coauthor, Bin Yan, showed it doesn't exist within the quantum realm, specifically.

But this does have implications for real-world problems. One is information encryption. Encryption has two important principles: It should be hidden so well that no one can get to it, but who it was intended for should to be able to reliably decipher it. For example, explains Kyriakidis, if a hacker attempts to crack a code that hides information in today's world, the hacker might not be able to get to it, but they could damage it irreparably, preventing anyone from reading the original message. This study may point to a way to avoid this by protecting information, even after it's damaged, so the intended recipient can interpret it.

And because this effect (or non-effect) is so particular to quantum systems, it could theoretically be used to test the integrity of a quantum computer. If one were to replicate Yan and Sinitsyn's protocol in a quantum computer, according to the study, it would confirm that the system was truly operating by quantum principles. Because quantum computers are highly prone to errors, a tool to easily test how well they work has huge value. A reliable quantum computer can solve incredibly complex problems, which have applications from and medicine to direction and strategy.

Quantum computing is only in its birth - but if Yan and Sinitsyn's quantum time machine can exist in a realm usually saved for subatomic particles, well, the possibilities could be endless.

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Does the Butterfly Effect Exist? Maybe, But Not in the Quantum Realm

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In "A Sound of Thunder," the short story by Ray Bradbury, the main character travels back in time to hunt dinosaurs. He crushes a butterfly underfoot in the prehistoric jungle, and when he returns to the present, the world he knows is changed: the feel of the air, a sign in an office, the election of a U.S.

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Thanks Evan! ;)

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Thanks to Emma C. and our quiz on Metals, I learned today mirrors have a thin layer of METAL that sticks to the glass. We rely on the luster of the metal for the reflection. Check out this GIF I found on twitter .. my mind will never be the same..

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Post with 3682 votes and 121935 views. Tagged with science, awesome, oddly satisfying, mirror, science and tech; Shared by SamirBelhamra. How Mirrors are made

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With Google's free online calendar, it's easy to keep track of life's important events all in one place.

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You come across a mysterious stoppered flask.  You know it contains either a powerful invisibility potion or poison, but you're not sure which.  Below is the sign, which you know is FALSE.
IT IS UNTRUE THAT THIS IS NOT POISON.  Remember the sign is false.  What's in the flask?

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YOU ARE GOING TO WANT TO USE THIS WEBSITE!!! I'm an organizational guru and this is our one stop shop for ALL resources!! You want notes, it's here! You want study guides, right here! You want life changing videos that will cause you to never view the world the same.. oh yeah, it's here ;) Still under construction, but come explore!!

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I am so proud of you all.  Seriously.  Through all the ups and downs you have advocated for yourself by emailing me and your other teachers, provided feedback so we can improve, AND caught up to be ON PACE with Edgenuity's pacing guide all while keeping a positive attitude.  UNBELIEVABLE!!

This week, you have the opportunity to earn 2 badges.

1)HOMEWORK BADGE - earn this badge by being ON PACE OR AHEAD in Edgenuity in SCIENCE only by Friday (9/4)

2) STAR PERFORMER: Earn this badge by being ON PACE OR AHEAD in Edgenuity in ALL YOUR CLASSES by (9/4)

If you are a Star Performer, you also earned the Homework Badge.. so that's two for you :)

Go seize the day and discipline yourselves to grow through challenges.   We got this ;)