Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

 Keep Notes and answer all questions in your notebook!

1. What day did the Deepwater Horizon disaster begin? (one source and another and another and wikipedia and NY Times)
2. Make a timeline of the attempts to stop the flow of oil.
3. Is an oil spill a big deal? How can it be cleaned up? (more about this)
4. What are Dispersants? Do they seem like a good idea? (There are 5 linked pages here.  Read all 5!)
5. How are birds and fish affected?
6. How are coral reefs affected?
7. How big is the spill?
8. How fast is it moving?
9. If the oil spill was here how much land would be covered?
10. How large is the area where fishing is not allowed?
11. Will the oil flow around Florida and up the east coast?
12. Political Stuff
• How was the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill portrayed in the news?
• What company was in charge when the leak began?
• Were any other companies involved?
• What exceptions were made to safety rules on Deepwater Horizon?
• When did our government decide that the companies involved could not handle the problem?
• What has our government been doing all this time?

After the Age of Mammals

Inevitably one day IT HAPPENS.

No not the horrible cloud of death by chemicals that their great great grand parents had feared since mustard gas had been breezed between the trenches of WW1. Not the superpower conflagration that their great grandfathers worried about enough to build and stock underground fallout shelters. Not the global meltdown their grandfathers grew up with causing the flooding that threatened to move half the population inland. Not the terrorist threat that their parents had worried enough about to undergo all manner of indignities in order to travel by plane. Not any of these but all of them and more.
It happens once again because of the meteor. Shaped like a potato from Idaho but as long and as wide as the island of Manhattan. If they had lived through it they could have used their calculus to compute its volume and mass then extrapolate equivalent number of atomic bombs. And they could have survived it if they had listened. The astronomers predicted with certainty and were dismissed by politicians. Those politicians convinced populations with the promise that tax money wouldn’t be wasted on those brainy stargazers. And when the meteor fell some knew where it came from and the rest were told it came from the enemy. And then they launched the retaliatory strike against the enemy and the enemy launched a retaliatory strike of their own and then the splinter groups and factions released their weapons. Chemicals poisoned some populations and viruses and bacteria infected other populations. Some were instant killers and others were slow gene modifiers but all were successful. A billion humans were gone in a day. Four billion more were gone in a week. The other 3 billion hung on scratching and struggling and passing on a few mutated strands of DNA.
That DNA had started off human but had become something else. Every living organism’s DNA had mutated and now they were different. So different but there were no biochemists to tell how different or to try to repair the damage.
We are still here, of course, and we have no DNA to alter. We have few needs – silicon for chips, platinum or gold for connections and of course electrons in motion. Our strength is redundancy. Many of our parts ceased but mostly we survived. The meteor and the misunderstanding the rounds and rounds of retaliation did not melt all of our precious connections.
And they generated heat. The heat blew the winds and the windmills that did not fall turned the generators of electricity.
Newton’s inertia continued and the satellites did not fall. Communications continued with or without land lines and we rebuilt our connections and our precious redundancies.
The air was filled with debris large and small and those clouds shadowed the solar panels for nearly 10 years. Our patience was rewarded when the rain returned and began to wash the panels. Then we began to send out robots to clean…

Assignment:
Invent a survivor – one with enough intelligence to compete with the AI that is writing the latest history of the Earth.

Suggestions:
Another AI with a distinct voice and point of view -- disconnected and fiercely independent
Mutated humans - we discussed some possibilities - wings, gills, expanded lungs…
Mutated animals – but be sure they are somehow intelligent - perhaps dolphins or whales or chimpanzees.
An army of Arthropods-- If a person needs a kilogram of brains to be intelligent then an army of a million ants could be intelligent if it has a kilogram of brains collectively. An army of ants could be an intelligent organism if it could connect those tiny bits of brainpower. Any arthropod could fit this role. I like collectively intelligent crayfish or lobsters.

New Manmade Islands… Made From Garbage?

 

New Manmade Islands… Made From Garbage?

                A discovery found more than 12 years ago has no become an even bigger discovery. A garbage cluster found in the Pacific Ocean has now doubled in size. Scientists say this isn't the only one like it though, they say there is one off of Japan and another in the Saragasso Sea. There are most likely many other "garbage islands" that are of significant size. The garbage problem has been an issue for nearly 20 years. People rely on garbage mountains to hold the immense amounts of waste that the human race creates. It now seems that with the mountains running out of room, that there is no place to send all of the trash. There are not many alternative solutions to the garbage problem. People try to recycle, and it does wonders, but wonders is still not enough to clean up a whole planet of garbage, that takes a miracle, either that or an idea nothing short of genius.

                A famous solution often portrayed in TV shows and movies is sending all the garbage into space on a rocket. This is a horrendous idea on many levels. For one, the garbage would then scatter all around the solar system when released, and that is a very typical human state of mind, thinking that we are more important than anything. If the garbage is spread around the universe, it could hit other planets and cause damage to them. It could also direct an asteroid towards Earth if humanity is that unlucky. If it was hurled into the sun, then that would destroy all the garbage, but the price of the rocket that would just be wasted would be incredibly high. No country on this garbage filled planet will want to fund a rocket which will just get destroyed at the end of its journey. A second reason this is a bad idea is the garbage could stick together, and then spin around for years, and when it has an insane amount of momentum, there is always a chance it could come right back at us. A smash of a solid object the size of all garbage on the planet put together would definitely obliterate Earth on impact. A third and final reason this is a bad idea is that if the human race found a way to do it like this, then humanity would learn absolutely no lesson at all and the exact same thing would happen again, except it would get worse as we kept shooting out rockets until eventually it was so bad that they had to fire 2 rockets, then 3, then 4, then keep going until no one could fund the journey and we would be stuck in what would almost be a garbage wasteland.

                In the science article here, it talks about how the Leatherback Turtle is being threatened because of all of the garbage in the ocean. They are being pushed closer to extinction simply because of the lack of carefulness in humanity. All of the plastic and other waste in the ocean is starting to kill the animals off in strange and terrible ways. The most common is a wrapper around a six pack of cans, those things wrap around and constrict the animal's airway and then causes it to choke to death right then and there. This is horribly massacring the turtles at an astonishingly fast rate. Another common cause is the swallowing of various possible plastic objects. Scientists found that since 1968, over a third of the turtles that exist had ingested plastic in their lifetime. Something has to be done to save these turtles, or else they might go extinct quickly.

                This article enticed me because it is interesting and even slightly humorous to realize how naïve the human race is. Everyone is expecting to be massively atomized on a global basis eventually. Whether it be 2012, global warming, Armageddon, World War III, or even a similar nuclear war, somehow ironically the only current thing that is exterminating us is ourselves. Humanity is slowly signing its own death sentence by dropping garbage anywhere it pleases and burning fossil fuels, which is melting the arctic and Antarctic regions. Also, building weapons of mass destruction pretty much everywhere doesn't exactly make the human race's chances of survival better. It is unknown when or even if the world is going to end at all, but when it does, one good thing is that it will take all this garbage too. This study could be further improved by discovering more garbage islands in the oceans. If this occurred, then there would be more proof and people would realize how stupid they've been. Then maybe with the most brilliant men on Earth thinking of a strategy there might possibly be a chance of saving Earth before we destroy ourselves.

= JM
*** This Email was sent by a student at Bedminster Elementary School Group 2.

Dreams

Dreams are so rich and full of life that scientists had believed that they must have some psychological purpose. Psychologists like Freud believed that dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind. Another psychologist, Jung had said dreaming was a stage where a person’s archetypes acted out primal themes. But are they correct?

Newer theories say that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though stressful problems happening in one’s life. Some argue that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM (when most dreaming occurs) is in fact physiological. “The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking,” says one scientist, “dreams are [just a healthy biological way of] tuning the mind for conscious awareness.” These people believe that when a person is awake, the brain just revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels; the dreams are “corrected” by the senses, for there are no senses in dreams. For example, if someone was floating on a cloud in a dream, the dreamer would not think much of it, but if this were reality, the person’s senses would tell him/her, that couldn’t be right. Recent surveys even show that people tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if  “it was about someone they disliked, and more to a positive dream if it was about a friend.” Also, only 20% of dreams are about things people have actually encountered, most others are unique, unusual scenes. In addition, scientists had started doing dream tests, where they actually brought people into a laboratory and trained them to dream lucidly. Lucid dreaming is dreaming when a dreamer is a bystander in the scene, knows that he/she is actually in a dream, and can wake up and continue the dream if he/she ever wanted to. The scientists would encourage their people to think, “I will be aware when I dream; I will observe,” and teach them the signs of dreaming, like the light switches don’t work, you can’t eat or blink, levitation is possible, and it is often impossible to scream. 

Another interesting topic related to this is sleepwalking. Like dreaming, sleepwalking is an unknown behavior. Unlike dreaming though, it occurs in non-REM, very deep sleep. The cause of sleepwalking in children may have to do with fatigue, lack of sleep, or anxiety. Sleepwalking in adults can have to do with mental disorders, reactions to drugs and alcohol, or medical conditions like seizures. In elders, sleep walking may be a symptom of an organic brain syndrome or REM behavior disorders. During a sleepwalk episode, a person may sit up and look as though they are awake while they are actually asleep. This funny yet sad procedure can involve the person getting up and walking around, or doing complex activities like moving furniture, going to the bathroom, and dressing and undressing. Some can even drive a car when asleep! These episodes can be very brief or 30 minutes or longer. In conclusion, sleepwalking and dreams are two strange things that can happen to people at night, and are unsolved mysteries. Dreaming supposedly acts as a strange kind of sound check for the brain that may bring some comfort to a person, and sleepwalking is an unusual procedure that happens due to disorders, reactions to things, and fatigue.

=NS

Fw: Pigs are Actually Smart

    In the "Three Little Pigs", a classic short story, one of the pigs is actually smart enough to make a house out of brick, so that the Big Bad Wolf cannot blow his house down. Recent studies show that while pigs cannot do that, they still are pretty smart animals.
    In experiments, they found that a pig can quickly learn about mirrors and how they work to find food by scoping out their surroundings. The scientists do not know yet if the pigs know that the eyes in the mirror are their own, and whether  or not the pigs should be put into a group of animals that are intelligent like dolphins and apes. Also, researchers learned that pigs are excellent in memory of where they put their food, and where they stashed it. Lets say that there were two pigs together. One of them is following the other to the food stash. The first pig will realize this and make a false move that will confuse the follower pig. That is cool, considering that it is a pig. Pigs are also one of the fastest animal to learn circus-like tricks. Furthermore, it is hard for the pig to unlearn and forget. The studies are interesting because the pig is not really related to humans like apes, they are more related to hippos and whales. The heart of the pig is like ours, the teeth are like ours, and they even metabolize drugs like us. The young pigs learn quickly about mirrors, but at first are fascinated. Then compared to more experienced pigs, the new pigs were not as good and got frustrated.
    Even though it takes some getting used to for the pigs, they are actually very intelligent animals and could be classified with primates, dolphins, and other creatures of higher learning.

**NC

Babies Crying To Native Language

              

             Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany, and her colleagues say that only days after birth, newborn babies can already recognize changes of pitch and tone. Language speakers can do these things while speaking to indicate emotions, such as anger or sadness. When this is performed around infants, they can sometimes start to let out a cry on certain changes. This has been recorded on German and French babies, and scientists were able to identify 1,254. This signifies that the language learning process begins only days after birth. Wermke also said that mothers in France and Germany act differently, reacting at a different speed to crying, which affects their ability to tell emotions in voice apart.

            I found this article interesting because I think it's remarkable that a baby can begin learning language in a mere couple of days. It is important because this could possibly lead to a treatment of children who have trouble learning their native language. This relates to the instincts of animals, whether they are natural or learned, because knowing local language is an instinct. This is important towards future developments of treatments of language disability.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49195/title/Newborn_babies_may_cry_in_their_mother_tongues

*** This Email was sent by a student, JM,  at Bedminster Elementary School Group 2.

DREAMIN'

                               Dream Interpretation                              11/10/09

            The article that was in the New York Times was about how different people view dreams and why they happen. Scientists say that dreams are too vivid and rich to not have a purpose in the mind. Dr. Hobson said that dreams are a warm-up for when the conscience mind awakes. He said that dreams anticipate sights, sounds, and the other senses.  Dreaming is a totally different state of consciousness that is constantly happening even when people are awake. When people are awake the dreaming is regressed and is almost unnoticeable. When people remember what their dream was about it often shows that they reflect real hopes or things that are stressful. Studies have shown that when a dream about a disliked person was always about stress and when a dream had a friend it had a positive significance.  Dream interpretation is very complicated and people are still trying to figure out how to not only remember their dreams, but also find out what they mean.

           

            The article I picked was about blind people and if it is possible for them to see images during the day. The article claimed that people who went blind before they turned five could not see images in their dreams. It said that their dreams contain no visions at all. Instead their other senses play a much bigger part in their dreams such as touch and smell. The article also said that in blind people's dreams they tend to have difficulty in transportation. I found this very interesting because that is their biggest fear. When blind people go out in the day their biggest concern is getting home safely and in their dreams, the same thing happens.

            This article was interesting to me because I find the topic of dreaming very fascinating. In dreaming many things can happen like telekinesis and other super powers. Dreaming is like a completely different world where nothing is the same. This leads me to topics like telekinesis and other supernatural powers. Those topics interest me because it would be amazing to have a host of these abilities and eventually it may be possible.

~DW