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Membean helps students remember vocabulary for the GRE/SAT/ACT. It tunes into students' forgetting patterns and teaches words in multiple ways by applying learning techniques from linguistic research.

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Please play me!

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CKWJ A  Use this code.

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Enter this Code JDOZM and your initials.

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Nearpod is an interactive classroom tool for teachers to engage students with interactive lessons

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Rampant Roots: STRUCT - Vocabulary List : Vocabulary.com

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A vocabulary list featuring Rampant Roots: STRUCT. An itemization of words containing the root 'struct' or the variation 'stru'. Other: --

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Read this. Whats is your funniest burping incident? PS It can be made up! 

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Read this. Whats is your funniest burping incident? PS It can be made up! 

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Email me a story! DWALKER@MCPSS.COM

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Posted by The Conversation |

Tuesday 12 February 2019, 03:50 PM (EST)

The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they'd like an expert to answer. Byron from Sydney wants to know why burps are so loud. An expert in mutrition and dietetics explains.

Some burps can be really loud, but they can be quiet too. How loud a burp is depends of a few factors, like how much gas is in your stomach to burp up and the structure of your food pipe that the burp travels along before it leaves your mouth. Let's look at burps in a bit more detail.

What is a burp?

"Burp" is the word that describes the release of gas that builds up in your stomach and food pipe after eating and drinking. The food pipe, also called the gullet, has the scientific name oesophagus. The oesophagus is a muscular tube, about the length of a ruler, that joins the stomach to the back of your throat.

Where does the 'burp' noise come from?

If you open your mouth wide in front of a mirror, you can see a flap of tissue hanging down at the back of your throat. This is called the epiglottis. When you swallow, the epiglottis tips back to block off the windpipe that leads down to your lungs and that means the opening to your food pipe is now clear. (The epiglottis is a bit like a traffic controller.)

Wikimedia

The noise made when you burp comes from gas that is trapped in your stomach and upper oesophagus when the food pipe is shut. This gas is under pressure, especially when there is a lot of it. As the pressurised gas flows up the food pipe, over the surface of the upper esophagus and past the epiglottis, it makes the surface of the upper part of your oesophagus rattle and vibrate. It is a bit like windows that rattle during a windy storm. The other factor is that because the oesophagus is long and round, the noise echoes as it travels up the food pipe.

Can you make yourself burp more loudly or quietly?

Take an empty cardboard tube from inside a roll of lunch wrap, or a toilet roll. Put your lips over the end and softly hum. This makes a louder noise compared to when you just hum without the tube, because of the echo. Now do it again, but put a lot of power into your hum. The noise is much louder. Forcing more air into the tube makes a louder echo. This is why bigger burps are noisier.

Whether you can make yourself burp more loudly or softly depends on how big your food pipe is and how much gas you have in there. Windows rattle more during a wild storm compared to when there is a gentle breeze blowing.

If you drink a small glass of soda water then you will only have a small amount of gas from the bubbles of carbon dioxide gas in the soda to burp up, but if you drink a whole can and take lots of gulps so you swallow more air and you can hold on so you burp all the gas out in one go, then you can produce a really loud burp.

Babies have small food pipes and small stomachs and produce burps that are more quiet than burps from children and adults.

Where does the gas come from?

The gas comes from a few different places. It can be from air that you swallow when you eat and drink which ends up in your stomach. Some people swallow more air if they eat too fast or when they drink from a straw. The "fizz" in soft drinks is the gas carbon dioxide, and some other gasses are produced in your intestines during digestion.

Hello, curious kids! Have a question you'd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send it to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au. Make sure they include your name, age and which city you live in. All questions are welcome - serious, weird or wacky!

Clare Collins, Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Newcastle. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Image 1: Natasha Kasim/Unsplash, CC BY-SA

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Posted by The Conversation | Tuesday 12 February 2019, 03:50 PM (EST) The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they'd like an expert to answer. Byron from Sydney wants to know why burps are so loud. An expert in mutrition and dietetics explains.

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Games, news, contests, puzzles, and fun activities for kids.

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European honey bee extracts nectar from an Aster flower (Credit: John Severns/ Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)

In addition to providing us with delicious honey, the hardworking honey bees also pollinate about a third of food crops and almost 90 percent of wild grasses, like alfalfa, used to feed livestock. Hence, it is not surprising that their declining population, caused by climate change, habitat loss, and deadly microbial diseases, has researchers scrambling to find ways to protect the vulnerable insects, which are so crucial to our existence. Now, scientists from the University of Helsinki in Finland have found a way to help honey bees fight off infectious diseases with a sweet, edible vaccine!

Vaccinating non-humans is not a novel idea. Domesticated dogs and cats have been inoculated against rabies, Lyme disease, and even the flu for many years. However, using them to protect insects has never been considered possible. That's because vaccinations entail injecting a dead, or weakened, version of the virus into the body and allowing the immune system to create antibodies to fend off the disease. Since insects do not possess antibodies, they lack a "memory" for fighting infections and therefore do not benefit from traditional vaccinations.

Some of the foods that could be affected if honey bees disappear (Credit: Specialtyfood.com)

Dalial Freitak, a biologist at the University of Helsinki, came up with the idea of an edible insect vaccine in 2014, after observing that when a moth was fed certain bacteria, it was able to pass on immunity to its offspring. Meanwhile, her colleague, Heli Salmela, had noticed that vitellogenin, a bee protein, appeared to have a similar effect to invasive bacteria in bees.

"So they could actually convey something by eating. I just didn't know what the mechanism was. At the time, as I started my post-doc work in Helsinki, I met with Heli Salmela, who was working on honeybees and a protein called vitellogenin. I heard her talk, and I was like: OK, I could make a bet that it is your protein that takes my signal from one generation to another. We started to collaborate, got funding from the Academy of Finland, and that was actually the beginning of PrimeBEE," Freitak explains.

How the American foulbrood bacteria invade and decimate hives (Credit: Current Opinion in Insect Science/Sciencedirect.com)

The first PrimeBEE vaccine, which is still undergoing safety tests, aims to protect honeybees against American foulbrood, or AFB, an infectious disease which affects bee colonies worldwide. The harmful bacteria, introduced to the hive by nurse bees, feed on larvae and generate spores which spread and infect the entire hive. "It's a death sentence for a hive or colony to be diagnosed with the disease," says Toni Burnham, president of the D.C. Beekeepers Alliance in Washington.

The researchers, who unveiled their findings on October 18, 2018, say the vaccine teaches honeybees to identify harmful diseases, similar to how antibodies function in humans and animals. They explain, "When the queen bee eats something with pathogens in it, the pathogen signature molecules are bound by vitellogenin. Vitellogenin then carries these signature molecules into the queen's eggs, where they work as inducers for future immune responses." The researchers believe that once the first PrimeBEE vaccine is perfected, defense against other pathogens will be easy to create.

"We need to help honey bees, absolutely. Even improving their life a little would have a big effect on the global scale. Of course, the honey bees have many other problems as well: pesticides, habitat loss and so on, but diseases come hand in hand with these life-quality problems," Freitak says. "If we can help honey bees to be healthier and if we can save even a small part of the bee population with this invention, I think we have done our good deed and saved the world a little bit."

Resources: Smithsonianmag.com, NPR.org, mnn.com.

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Finnish Scientists Develop Edible Insect Vaccine To Save Bees

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In addition to providing us with delicious honey, the hardworking honey bees also pollinate about a third of food crops and almost 90 percent of wild grasses, like alfalfa, used to feed livestock.

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Can't wait to see the leader board. Use code  874252

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http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/athens_games/gameGreekToMe.htm

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Membean helps students remember vocabulary for the GRE/SAT/ACT. It tunes into students' forgetting patterns and teaches words in multiple ways by applying learning techniques from linguistic research.