Showing posts with label Vodcast影片學英語. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vodcast影片學英語. Show all posts
Dec 11, 2016
Aug 16, 2014
Cubelets: Small Robots Teach Big Science Lessons
Transcript:
These simple robotic cubes are the building blocks of intelligent systems
Cubelets are magnetic, electronic building blocks, each with a small computer inside, that can be connected in many different ways to move around a table, follow a hand signal, turn on a light, play sounds, or do many other creative tasks.
They were developed by Eric Schweikardt and his team at Modular Robotics, with support from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.
"Cubelets come in three categories: sense, think and act. That's our working definition of a robot--any mechanical device that senses, thinks and acts," says Schweikardt.
"Cubelets are an example of a complex system. They're made of lots of little cubes--each with a different capability, such as a distance sensor cube, a drive motor cube with wheels and a battery cube. And, when you put them together, they do something greater, such as drive when they detect an object," he continues. "They're inspired by natural systems of individuals that join forces and work together, such as insect swarms or birds flying in a 'V' formation."
These 21st century building blocks are meant to help kids learn about the basics of robotics while boosting their confidence to solve problems.
"Cubelets, by Modular Robotics, make powerful ideas of computational thinking accessible in a fun and hands-on way to students of all ages," says NSF program manager Glenn Larsen. "The next generation of citizens needs to understand complex systems like our ecosystem and our economy. Cubelets lays the foundation for this understanding by putting the building blocks of complex systems in children's hands."
Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Marsha Walton, Science Nation Producer Dec 8, 2013
How to be an evaluator for a speech?
An evaluation workshop in HOPAX by Caroline.
You not only improve your English speaking ability but also your evaluation skill when you join Tsoying Toastmasters!
You not only improve your English speaking ability but also your evaluation skill when you join Tsoying Toastmasters!
How to get better at speaking English?
How to get better at speaking English?
Join Tsoying Toastmasters and practice the three easy ways taught in the video below!
Join Tsoying Toastmasters and practice the three easy ways taught in the video below!
Nov 10, 2012
Mount St. Helens: Rising From the Ashes
Life erupts once again from the once lifeless mountain
When Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980, it wasn't a surprise that it happened, but even today the extent of the damage is hard to fathom. The eruption knocked down 100-foot trees like matchsticks and killed just about everything in its path. There have been several smaller eruptions since then, but nothing like what happened in 1980.
Evolutionary biologist and ecologist John Bishop knows Mount St. Helens well; he has been working on the mountain for 20 years. "It began with the largest landslide in recorded history that uncorked an explosion that was directed horizontally and leveled the forest 13 miles out," recalls Bishop. "It was just a barren landscape, gray-and-pumice-colored, covered with rocks."
Today, dead tree trunks still litter the landscape. But, if you take a closer look, you'll see another kind of eruption; an eruption of life on the mountainside. For Bishop, it's a blessing. "It's a rare opportunity for scientists to get to study a devastated area and how it comes back from scratch in such detail," he says.
With help from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Bishop is documenting the return of living things to the once lifeless mountain. "Up until the last 10 years, the landscape has been completely dominated by lupins," says Bishop. He says these flowering lupin plants are able to create new soil from volcanic ash. That new soil has created a habitat for the Sitka willow. But, Bishop says there is a problem. "One of the things we've realized about these willows is that they're not getting big. And that's important because they create habitat for birds and mammals."
The culprits are small invasive weevils that are on the attack. They've taken up residence inside the willows' stems, stunting the plants' growth or killing them. Bishop says there is a lesson in all of this. "Seemingly insignificant organisms, like insects that consume plants, play an extraordinarily important role in the sorting out process of deciding, essentially, which plants are going to stay in the landscape and which ones are going to disappear."
Bishop points out that the imbalance between plants and insects on Mount St. Helens should be expected in rudimentary systems and will cause instability until a more complex community of plant and animal species is sustainable, or until the day Mount St. Helens itself changes the equation once again.
Aug 18, 2012
Dragonflies: The Flying Aces of the Insect World
Transcript
Miles O’Brien: This dragonfly is grabbing the meal on the go.
Stacey Combes: This attempt is so fast that unless we film it in high-speed we can’t see whether it caught the prey. But when it gets back to its perch, if we see it chewing we know that it was successful.
Miles O’Brien: With support from the National Science Fundation, Harvard university biomechanist Stacey Combes, wants to understand how dragonflies pull off these complicated aerial feats; hunting, and even reproducing in midair. She and her team set up their lab near a pond outside Boston, right in the heart of dragonfly country.
Student: All right, I got one. I lost it.
Miles O’Brien: Clearly it's not easy to catch a dragonfly.
Student: I got one.
Miles O’Brien: Check out this frog. In this specially built netted enclosure, Combes’ team set up eight high-speed cameras. Then they release a dragonfly and some tasty fruit fly prey to watch what happens next.
Stacey Combes: They’ll go up in midair, catch the prey with their hands, or with their feet turn upside down and glide back to stick. And the whole capture will take maybe a second, or a second and a half. This one’s missing about half of its left front wing and yet it still does an amazing job catching the fruit fly in midair.
Student: It only takes about half a second for this to happen.
Stacey Combes: They caught, you know, about 90 or 95 percent of the prey that we gave them. And interestingly, they’re one of the most ancient groups of insects. They’ve had a long time to evolve their skills as predators.
Miles O’Brien: About 300 million years. These four-winged insects predate dinosaurs. They can fly straight up, straight down, hover like helicopters, and disappear in a blur. And their eyesight?
Amber DesLauriers: Almost its whole head is eye.They can see pretty much all the way around their head, except right behind them.
Miles O’Brien: Dragonflies mate and lay eggs in flight.
Stacy Combes: Do you see her like just dipping in the water?
Student: She’s trying to lay eggs; the male’s trying to mate with her.
Miles O’Brien: Combes says engineers are looking to the dragonfly for inspiration in small scale aircraft design.
Stacy Combes: There's a lot of interest in building, you know, robotic, smaller robotic devices.
Miles O’Brien: And she says better understanding of dragonflies could lead to more effective mosquito control strategies.
Stacy Combes: They may consume 30 mosquitoes a day. They could even consume hundreds a day.
Miles O’Brien: And that’s an idea that could really take flight.
Miles O’Brien: For Science Nation, I’m Miles O’Brien.
Aug 7, 2012
Curiosity Has Landed on Mars
Transcript:
Things are looking good. Coming up on entry.
Vehicle reports entry interface.
We're beginning to feel the atmosphere as we go in here. Alright, it is reporting that
we are seeing G's on the order of 11 or 12 Earth G's.
Bank reversal 2 is starting (cheering). We are now getting telemetry from Odyssey.
We should have parachute deploy around Mach 1.7.
Parachute has deployed (cheering).
We are decelerating.
Heat shield has separated, we are locked on the ground.
We're down to 90 meters per second at an altitude of 6.5 kilometer descending.
Standing by for backshell separation.
We are in powered flight (cheering).
We're at an altitude of 1 km descending.
Standing by for sky crane. Sky crane has started
Signal from Odyssey remains strong.
Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars (loud, sustained cheering).
We got thumbnails (cheering).
Aug 2, 2012
What's Up for August 2012?
Transcript:
What's Up for August? View Mars as the rover Curiosity lands on its surface this month.
Hello and welcome. I'm Jane Houston Jones at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
On August 5 at 10:31 p.m. Pacific time NASA's Mars rover named Curiosity will touch down in Gale Crater. The best time to view Mars this month is right after sunset. Saturn, Mars and the bright star Spica [1] form a trio almost all month long. Look low in the west, 30 degrees above the horizon. You should be able to see the difference in color between the three. Saturn appears golden. Spica is blue-white. And Mars is rusty red.
On the 21st the moon joins the lineup.
On the night of the 5th, Mars sets a few hours after sunset everywhere in the U.S.
You can find a Mars viewing party on this night by checking with your local planetarium, science center or astronomy club. If you get a chance to view Mars through a telescope on that night, you might be able to see the dark Martian feature called Syrtis Major [2] near the center of the planet.
Although you can't see Gale Crater, Curiosity's landing site, through the telescope, it's near the limb to the east of Syrtis Major that night.
On the opposite limb is the rover Opportunity, who's been exploring Mars since 2004.
The most popular meteor shower of the year, the Perseids [3], peaks on a summer weekend Saturday night through Sunday morning, August 11th and 12th.
The constellation Perseus [4] rises in the northeast soon after sunset. Just follow the Milky Way from the south to the north to find it.
You'll see dozens of fast, bright meteors, some leaving persistent trains or smoky trails.
You can find information about Curiosity's landing at www.nasa.gov/mars and jpl.nasa.gov/mars. And look for MarsCuriosity on Twitter and Facebook.
You can learn about all of NASA's missions at www.nasa.gov.
That's all for this month. I'm Jane Houston Jones.
-----------------
Notes:
[1] Spica 角宿一
[2] Syrtis Major
It is a "dark spot" located in the boundary between the northern lowlands and southern highlands of Mars. For more information, visit at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrtis_Major_Planum
[3] Perseids 英仙座流星雨
[4] Perseus 英仙座
Apr 27, 2012
Leaf-cutter Ants
Farmers, pharmacists and energy experts!
Leaf-cutter ants put on quite a show.
In established colonies, millions of "workers" cut and carry sections of leaves larger than their own bodies as part of a well choreographed, highly functioning society.
"Anyone who has ever come across a trail of ants cutting leaves and watched that trail run through the forest can recognize how charismatic, and what kind of large impact they have on the tropical ecosystems in which they occur," says bacteriologist Cameron Currie.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Currie and his team study ants and their complex, productive societies to help address some of human society's most pressing challenges, such as better drugs and cleaner energy.
But for Currie, the research is more than just finding solutions to problems. "My doctoral work on leaf-cutting ants was not from an 'Oh, we can discover enzymes for bio-energy,' or 'Oh, we can discover antibiotics for medicinal use.' It was from a fascination with understanding the interaction of organisms in the natural world," says Currie from his lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For example, these ants may have been the planet's first farmers. The insects chew up the leaves they cut and integrate them into a fungus garden, which then becomes both their food and their living space. This "mutualism" between the ants and the fungus was discovered in the late 1800s.
In the wild, primarily in Central and South America, large colonies may have as many as five to 10 million workers, with up to seven different castes, or job categories. Different-sized animals do different tasks. The queen, far larger than the others, may lay 50 million eggs over a lifetime. Soldiers protect the nest; workers gather leaf material. "Minima" or smaller workers are specialized for moving around in the small spaces of the fungus garden.
"This includes elaborate behaviors for tending their food crop. So, they actually groom it, and clean it, and prune it," explains Currie.
There is also a specialized group of ants that are the trash workers, who carry the old garden material and put it in specialized refuse dumps.
A third "player" is also crucial in this symbiotic city.
Bacteria found on the bodies of the ants produce antibiotics that help maintain the health of the fungus garden. "Our current evidence indicates that the ants have been dealing with diseases in their fungus gardens for millions of years," says Currie.
Over the years, these bacteria appear to have evolved new antibiotics to keep the gardens healthy. This co-evolution could help researchers create new antibiotics for humans.
Energy experts
Leaf-cutter ants are also adept teachers in energy research. The Currie Lab works with a wide range of experts at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), a multi-institutional partnership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working to create fuel from the non-edible parts of plants, known as cellulosic ethanol.
"Our understanding of the process of breaking down that plant material to produce digestible nutrients for the ants is very limited," says Currie.
Figuring out how the ants do it could lead to cleaner replacements for petroleum.
"We hope to both reduce society's dependence on fossil fuels and generate those fuels from a feedstock that isn't part of the food chain," explains Tim Donohue, professor of bacteriology and director of GLBRC. "We think biofuels have a clear position in replacing the fossil fuels that go into the automotive and aviation sector, and we hope that we'll be able to generate fuels that are efficient, cost effective, [and] equally important, sustainable, from an economic and environmental perspective."
GLBRC is supported by the office of science in the U.S. Department of Energy. Donohue says the success of this renewable energy work could also provide farmers and foresters with a second revenue stream from their agricultural products; essentially another income from what is now a waste product.
Still fun to watch!
The nonstop work of these social insects can be mesmerizing to just about anyone who observes them. There's a display of a live leaf-cutter community in the lobby of the Microbial Sciences Building on the Madison campus, and an Ant Cam.
"The display is really a great thing for education," says Joseph Moeller, a lab technician in the Currie Lab. "We have lots of people of all ages, always interested in the types of things these leaf-cutter ants can do, and interested in how we travel down to Panama and Costa Rica to collect these ants to come back and study them."
For Currie, who has had his share of bites from angry "soldiers" over the years, the discoveries never get old.
"Working on leaf-cutter ants, doing field work is a major passion," he says. "The connection of seeing your study organism in the field, what it is doing, watching the ants carry leaves, it's captivating, and very exciting seeing the ants in their ecosystem, and their role and their function."
Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Marsha Walton, Science Nation Producer
Leaf-cutter ants put on quite a show.
In established colonies, millions of "workers" cut and carry sections of leaves larger than their own bodies as part of a well choreographed, highly functioning society.
"Anyone who has ever come across a trail of ants cutting leaves and watched that trail run through the forest can recognize how charismatic, and what kind of large impact they have on the tropical ecosystems in which they occur," says bacteriologist Cameron Currie.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Currie and his team study ants and their complex, productive societies to help address some of human society's most pressing challenges, such as better drugs and cleaner energy.
But for Currie, the research is more than just finding solutions to problems. "My doctoral work on leaf-cutting ants was not from an 'Oh, we can discover enzymes for bio-energy,' or 'Oh, we can discover antibiotics for medicinal use.' It was from a fascination with understanding the interaction of organisms in the natural world," says Currie from his lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
For example, these ants may have been the planet's first farmers. The insects chew up the leaves they cut and integrate them into a fungus garden, which then becomes both their food and their living space. This "mutualism" between the ants and the fungus was discovered in the late 1800s.
In the wild, primarily in Central and South America, large colonies may have as many as five to 10 million workers, with up to seven different castes, or job categories. Different-sized animals do different tasks. The queen, far larger than the others, may lay 50 million eggs over a lifetime. Soldiers protect the nest; workers gather leaf material. "Minima" or smaller workers are specialized for moving around in the small spaces of the fungus garden.
"This includes elaborate behaviors for tending their food crop. So, they actually groom it, and clean it, and prune it," explains Currie.
There is also a specialized group of ants that are the trash workers, who carry the old garden material and put it in specialized refuse dumps.
A third "player" is also crucial in this symbiotic city.
Bacteria found on the bodies of the ants produce antibiotics that help maintain the health of the fungus garden. "Our current evidence indicates that the ants have been dealing with diseases in their fungus gardens for millions of years," says Currie.
Over the years, these bacteria appear to have evolved new antibiotics to keep the gardens healthy. This co-evolution could help researchers create new antibiotics for humans.
Energy experts
Leaf-cutter ants are also adept teachers in energy research. The Currie Lab works with a wide range of experts at the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), a multi-institutional partnership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working to create fuel from the non-edible parts of plants, known as cellulosic ethanol.
"Our understanding of the process of breaking down that plant material to produce digestible nutrients for the ants is very limited," says Currie.
Figuring out how the ants do it could lead to cleaner replacements for petroleum.
"We hope to both reduce society's dependence on fossil fuels and generate those fuels from a feedstock that isn't part of the food chain," explains Tim Donohue, professor of bacteriology and director of GLBRC. "We think biofuels have a clear position in replacing the fossil fuels that go into the automotive and aviation sector, and we hope that we'll be able to generate fuels that are efficient, cost effective, [and] equally important, sustainable, from an economic and environmental perspective."
GLBRC is supported by the office of science in the U.S. Department of Energy. Donohue says the success of this renewable energy work could also provide farmers and foresters with a second revenue stream from their agricultural products; essentially another income from what is now a waste product.
Still fun to watch!
The nonstop work of these social insects can be mesmerizing to just about anyone who observes them. There's a display of a live leaf-cutter community in the lobby of the Microbial Sciences Building on the Madison campus, and an Ant Cam.
"The display is really a great thing for education," says Joseph Moeller, a lab technician in the Currie Lab. "We have lots of people of all ages, always interested in the types of things these leaf-cutter ants can do, and interested in how we travel down to Panama and Costa Rica to collect these ants to come back and study them."
For Currie, who has had his share of bites from angry "soldiers" over the years, the discoveries never get old.
"Working on leaf-cutter ants, doing field work is a major passion," he says. "The connection of seeing your study organism in the field, what it is doing, watching the ants carry leaves, it's captivating, and very exciting seeing the ants in their ecosystem, and their role and their function."
Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Marsha Walton, Science Nation Producer
Jul 19, 2011
Decoding Disasters: Are We Prepared for Another 9-11?
Disaster Research Center scientists study world's worst disasters in hopes of saving more lives in the future.
At the site of a terrorist attack, an earthquake or a tsunami, emergency responders are focused on search and rescue, and saving lives.
Some disaster sites provide an opportunity for experts with different skills than the police, firefighters and aid organizations that are first on the scene.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), sociologist Tricia Wachtendorf and teams from the Disaster Research Center (DRC) go to devastated locations to learn more about how lives may be saved in the future.
The DRC started in 1963 at the Ohio State University, and moved in the mid-1980s to the University of Delaware in Newark.
"We try to learn from disasters, not only to make a contribution to science, but also to try to take our findings and find out how we can apply that to better emergency management practice more generally," says Wachtendorf.
"We also have a very strong educational component," she adds. "We involve graduate and undergraduate students in all of our research."
Wachtendorf spent several weeks near ground zero after the 9/11 attacks in New York City. She spent time in command centers, watching how critical decisions unfolded.
Wachtendorf says DRC had a good working relationship with New York City emergency personnel before the terrorist attacks and this allowed the center important access even in the chaos.
"They lost friends, they lost family members, and they were very willing to have us shadow them, answer questions, and to actually say, 'Come here, you need to hear this, you need to learn from this,' and tell us what's going right and what's going wrong," says Wachtendorf.
Over the years, DRC research has recommended better ways to recover and handle human remains, streamline accounting of donations and supplies, and ways for small businesses to quickly reopen after a disaster. Through outreach to practitioners, many of their recommendations find their way into practice.
One specific study of the 9/11 response focused on the evacuation of half a million people from lower Manhattan the day of the attacks, including a spontaneous and successful effort by tug, ferry, dinner cruise and sightseeing boats. DRC Director James Kendra had a major part in that research.
"The mariners have a very particular culture and having worked in that environment in different kinds of ships, I think it was very helpful for us in being able to speak their language," says Kendra, who, in addition to a doctorate in geography, also has an undergraduate degree in marine transportation and a Merchant Marine Master Mariner license.
It was a case of ordinary people springing into action, making good decisions in spite of the danger and uncertainty surrounding them.
"We talked to 100 people who were involved in the evacuation," says Kendra.
"Many of them were mariners. They knew there was a terrible calamity at the World Trade Center, and they figured boats would be helpful in some way. That largely stems from what seafarers have to do ordinarily, which is to be creative, to be improvisational, to be ready for anything, even if you don’t know what the danger is going to be. They always have to be alert for surprises. That experience and that training carried over into their ability to take part in this evacuation."
Along with a library containing 60,000 publications related to disasters, at DRC, there are also several display cases that contain items from both ancient and recent disasters. Wachtendorf showed some items from the 2008 China earthquake. These objects, she says, are powerful teaching tools.
"A little bit from a teacup and a mah-jongg piece are very indicative of the daily life of what was going on when the earthquake happened. People were engaged in cooking and playing games and sometimes, it's these very small items that we pick off the ground that helps resonate how much this impacted daily life," she explains.
"It's one thing to read a paper about the disruption of a disaster on daily life; it's another to actually take a piece of an item that was scattered on the ground and to bring that message home; to be able to touch it, to feel it and use that in our conversations about the impact of disaster events."
One recurrent observation from DRC field studies is the kindness of strangers.
Kendra documented that compassion when analyzing some responses to the 9/11 attacks.
"People will delay their own evacuation in an effort to help somebody else," says Kendra. "That was reported to us over and over. The crowds were orderly and basically respectful even though they were obviously very shaken up."
And Wachtendorf found a similar sense of community after the 2004 Asian tsunami, meeting with residents of devastated fishing villages in India and Sri Lanka.
"In one village, we found over 50 fishermen who needed to get back to sea. They only had seven boats they were able to get donated to them. They made an arrangement that those boats became the community boats, so they took turns sharing the catch. It was a way to make sure everybody was able to get back in the sea and begin working again," she says.
But Wachtendorf also found inequality in the distribution of resources following some disasters. Often, she says, it's simply the result of access.
"Sometimes we also end up seeing that there are particular areas that get a lot of media attention. They are sometimes the areas that are easy to get into. They might have areas for journalists. And we hear a lot about those communities.
Unfortunately, what sometimes happens is, aid flows to those communities and doesn't always reach neighboring communities that are equally impacted, but don’t make it on TV," she explains.
Field study is important for graduate students at the DRC. Rochelle Brittingham is a doctoral student in the School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware. She has studied evacuation and sheltering projects in North Carolina. She's also doing field work in Japan, following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster there.
"After such a large-scale disaster in Japan, we want to see, what did the Japanese government do, were non-governmental organizations involved, basically how did it all work? We're going to go and see if there are any answers there," says Brittingham.
Lucia Velotti is also a doctoral student in the School of Public Policy and Administration. She says an understanding of local cultures is critical when spending time in a disaster zone. She did research in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
"Listening is very, very important and so is listening to different perspectives. You need to have the whole picture. You need to try to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. When I went to Haiti, we interviewed people from UN agencies. We also talked to non-governmental organizations and grassroots community leaders. We really wanted to understand different perspectives," says Velotti.
DRC's work involves input from many social and physical scientists. Civil engineer Rachel Davidson finds the collaboration critical.
"If you are looking from only one disciplinary domain, you can't see the big picture," says Davidson, who does modeling and analysis of building codes and evacuation strategies.
Speaking of her social science colleagues, she says, "I've learned a lot from them. In a way they kind of keep us honest. Because (in) developing engineering models, sometimes we're tempted to make assumptions about how the world works. And they'll often tell us, 'No, that's not actually how people make decisions.' Or 'No, that's not how people actually behave'. And so, we want to try to work together to develop better models and better understanding to improve the decision making in the long run. And hopefully, they've learned something from us as well."
Wachtendorf says compared to 50 years ago, there's been a tremendous emphasis on emergency management planning in the United States. Both federal agencies like FEMA--the Federal Emergency Management Agency--and state and local emergency managers have invested in facilities and planning.
But she also notes disaster planning is constantly changing.
"As we have a combination of new threats that face us--natural and technological--as we have changes in climate, as we have changes in population density, in where people are living, people are put at risk and new issues are created. It's never a stagnant field. So something that we might know back in the 1960s, we need to learn again in the 1980s to see how much of that is still relevant, and what has changed. (It's) the same thing now as we look back at that historical research, how do we need to adapt our plans in terms of political context or economic context?" says Wachtendorf.
From Science Nation
At the site of a terrorist attack, an earthquake or a tsunami, emergency responders are focused on search and rescue, and saving lives.
Some disaster sites provide an opportunity for experts with different skills than the police, firefighters and aid organizations that are first on the scene.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), sociologist Tricia Wachtendorf and teams from the Disaster Research Center (DRC) go to devastated locations to learn more about how lives may be saved in the future.
The DRC started in 1963 at the Ohio State University, and moved in the mid-1980s to the University of Delaware in Newark.
"We try to learn from disasters, not only to make a contribution to science, but also to try to take our findings and find out how we can apply that to better emergency management practice more generally," says Wachtendorf.
"We also have a very strong educational component," she adds. "We involve graduate and undergraduate students in all of our research."
Wachtendorf spent several weeks near ground zero after the 9/11 attacks in New York City. She spent time in command centers, watching how critical decisions unfolded.
Wachtendorf says DRC had a good working relationship with New York City emergency personnel before the terrorist attacks and this allowed the center important access even in the chaos.
"They lost friends, they lost family members, and they were very willing to have us shadow them, answer questions, and to actually say, 'Come here, you need to hear this, you need to learn from this,' and tell us what's going right and what's going wrong," says Wachtendorf.
Over the years, DRC research has recommended better ways to recover and handle human remains, streamline accounting of donations and supplies, and ways for small businesses to quickly reopen after a disaster. Through outreach to practitioners, many of their recommendations find their way into practice.
One specific study of the 9/11 response focused on the evacuation of half a million people from lower Manhattan the day of the attacks, including a spontaneous and successful effort by tug, ferry, dinner cruise and sightseeing boats. DRC Director James Kendra had a major part in that research.
"The mariners have a very particular culture and having worked in that environment in different kinds of ships, I think it was very helpful for us in being able to speak their language," says Kendra, who, in addition to a doctorate in geography, also has an undergraduate degree in marine transportation and a Merchant Marine Master Mariner license.
It was a case of ordinary people springing into action, making good decisions in spite of the danger and uncertainty surrounding them.
"We talked to 100 people who were involved in the evacuation," says Kendra.
"Many of them were mariners. They knew there was a terrible calamity at the World Trade Center, and they figured boats would be helpful in some way. That largely stems from what seafarers have to do ordinarily, which is to be creative, to be improvisational, to be ready for anything, even if you don’t know what the danger is going to be. They always have to be alert for surprises. That experience and that training carried over into their ability to take part in this evacuation."
Along with a library containing 60,000 publications related to disasters, at DRC, there are also several display cases that contain items from both ancient and recent disasters. Wachtendorf showed some items from the 2008 China earthquake. These objects, she says, are powerful teaching tools.
"A little bit from a teacup and a mah-jongg piece are very indicative of the daily life of what was going on when the earthquake happened. People were engaged in cooking and playing games and sometimes, it's these very small items that we pick off the ground that helps resonate how much this impacted daily life," she explains.
"It's one thing to read a paper about the disruption of a disaster on daily life; it's another to actually take a piece of an item that was scattered on the ground and to bring that message home; to be able to touch it, to feel it and use that in our conversations about the impact of disaster events."
One recurrent observation from DRC field studies is the kindness of strangers.
Kendra documented that compassion when analyzing some responses to the 9/11 attacks.
"People will delay their own evacuation in an effort to help somebody else," says Kendra. "That was reported to us over and over. The crowds were orderly and basically respectful even though they were obviously very shaken up."
And Wachtendorf found a similar sense of community after the 2004 Asian tsunami, meeting with residents of devastated fishing villages in India and Sri Lanka.
"In one village, we found over 50 fishermen who needed to get back to sea. They only had seven boats they were able to get donated to them. They made an arrangement that those boats became the community boats, so they took turns sharing the catch. It was a way to make sure everybody was able to get back in the sea and begin working again," she says.
But Wachtendorf also found inequality in the distribution of resources following some disasters. Often, she says, it's simply the result of access.
"Sometimes we also end up seeing that there are particular areas that get a lot of media attention. They are sometimes the areas that are easy to get into. They might have areas for journalists. And we hear a lot about those communities.
Unfortunately, what sometimes happens is, aid flows to those communities and doesn't always reach neighboring communities that are equally impacted, but don’t make it on TV," she explains.
Field study is important for graduate students at the DRC. Rochelle Brittingham is a doctoral student in the School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware. She has studied evacuation and sheltering projects in North Carolina. She's also doing field work in Japan, following the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster there.
"After such a large-scale disaster in Japan, we want to see, what did the Japanese government do, were non-governmental organizations involved, basically how did it all work? We're going to go and see if there are any answers there," says Brittingham.
Lucia Velotti is also a doctoral student in the School of Public Policy and Administration. She says an understanding of local cultures is critical when spending time in a disaster zone. She did research in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
"Listening is very, very important and so is listening to different perspectives. You need to have the whole picture. You need to try to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. When I went to Haiti, we interviewed people from UN agencies. We also talked to non-governmental organizations and grassroots community leaders. We really wanted to understand different perspectives," says Velotti.
DRC's work involves input from many social and physical scientists. Civil engineer Rachel Davidson finds the collaboration critical.
"If you are looking from only one disciplinary domain, you can't see the big picture," says Davidson, who does modeling and analysis of building codes and evacuation strategies.
Speaking of her social science colleagues, she says, "I've learned a lot from them. In a way they kind of keep us honest. Because (in) developing engineering models, sometimes we're tempted to make assumptions about how the world works. And they'll often tell us, 'No, that's not actually how people make decisions.' Or 'No, that's not how people actually behave'. And so, we want to try to work together to develop better models and better understanding to improve the decision making in the long run. And hopefully, they've learned something from us as well."
Wachtendorf says compared to 50 years ago, there's been a tremendous emphasis on emergency management planning in the United States. Both federal agencies like FEMA--the Federal Emergency Management Agency--and state and local emergency managers have invested in facilities and planning.
But she also notes disaster planning is constantly changing.
"As we have a combination of new threats that face us--natural and technological--as we have changes in climate, as we have changes in population density, in where people are living, people are put at risk and new issues are created. It's never a stagnant field. So something that we might know back in the 1960s, we need to learn again in the 1980s to see how much of that is still relevant, and what has changed. (It's) the same thing now as we look back at that historical research, how do we need to adapt our plans in terms of political context or economic context?" says Wachtendorf.
From Science Nation
Apr 12, 2011
Silver Saver
Nanotechnology keeps the shine on silver
Anyone who's ever polished silver knows that keeping the tarnish at bay[1] is never ending work. But, you may not know that polishing also rubs away some of the precious metal, whether it's your grandmother's silver bowl or a 19th century museum treasure.
"We're always looking for some kind of barrier that will protect the surface so we don't have to keep polishing it," says Terry Drayman-Weisser, director of conservation and technical research at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Twenty miles from the museum, materials scientist Ray Phaneuf and his team at the University of Maryland are working on a small solution to this big problem. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), they're producing and testing a protective coating so thin, you can't see it with the naked eye.
"The method that we use to apply it is called atomic layer deposition. So, literally, we're able to control the thickness of the film at a sub-nanometer level," explains Phaneuf.
Using a special reactor inside a clean room, they apply nanometer thick films of aluminum oxide to a sample silver wafer about the size of a silver dollar. Phaneuf says the films conform to the recesses and protrusions of the silver, creating a protective barrier.
Art conservators say atomic layer deposition, or ALD, will have to pass rigorous testing before they use it to protect irreplaceable treasures.
At the lab, the coating is put through a series of tests. Using a spectrometer the research team measures how light reflects off the surface of a test wafer, and how the ALD coating affects the wafer's color.
Another test measures how quickly sulfur penetrates the coated wafer. Sulfur is what tarnishes silver. The test will help determine how many layers of coating will be needed to keep the silver shiny. In another controlled chamber, the team heats a coated wafer to speed up the tarnishing. Phaneuf says this helps scientists figure out how long a barrier will last.
"Part of the challenge is to determine what the optimal thickness is that keeps sulfur off the silver surface. Eventually, thermodynamics tells us that the sulfur will diffuse through any layer we put down. The denser the layer, the slower the diffusion," explains Phaneuf. "So we'll start with films that may be a few nanometers thick and investigate the efficacy of these films all the way out to maybe a few hundred nanometers. If we can increase the lifetime of these films to a century, you may not need to do this very often."
Art conservators won't give ALD a thumbs-up until they can show that it works better than the lacquers they are using now, which have to be reapplied every decade or two. The conservators also will have to be able to remove the coating without damaging the piece.
"When it comes to art objects, the less treatment the better," says Glenn Gates, a scientist at the Walters Art Museum. "The standard treatments that use lacquers or nitrous cellulose coatings can give off a plastic look. The ALD coating is very, very thin, and orders of magnitude thinner than the wavelength of light; the idea being that it's going to impact the aesthetic presentation of the object much less than a thick organic lacquer coating that we generally apply these days."
If ALD proves a shining success, silver works of art will remain at their best for future generations to enjoy. And for many of us, it may mean never polishing silver again.
From Science Nation
--------------------
notes
[1] hold/keep somebody/something at bay
--To prevent an enemy from coming close or a problem from having a bad effect
Anyone who's ever polished silver knows that keeping the tarnish at bay[1] is never ending work. But, you may not know that polishing also rubs away some of the precious metal, whether it's your grandmother's silver bowl or a 19th century museum treasure.
"We're always looking for some kind of barrier that will protect the surface so we don't have to keep polishing it," says Terry Drayman-Weisser, director of conservation and technical research at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
Twenty miles from the museum, materials scientist Ray Phaneuf and his team at the University of Maryland are working on a small solution to this big problem. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), they're producing and testing a protective coating so thin, you can't see it with the naked eye.
"The method that we use to apply it is called atomic layer deposition. So, literally, we're able to control the thickness of the film at a sub-nanometer level," explains Phaneuf.
Using a special reactor inside a clean room, they apply nanometer thick films of aluminum oxide to a sample silver wafer about the size of a silver dollar. Phaneuf says the films conform to the recesses and protrusions of the silver, creating a protective barrier.
Art conservators say atomic layer deposition, or ALD, will have to pass rigorous testing before they use it to protect irreplaceable treasures.
At the lab, the coating is put through a series of tests. Using a spectrometer the research team measures how light reflects off the surface of a test wafer, and how the ALD coating affects the wafer's color.
Another test measures how quickly sulfur penetrates the coated wafer. Sulfur is what tarnishes silver. The test will help determine how many layers of coating will be needed to keep the silver shiny. In another controlled chamber, the team heats a coated wafer to speed up the tarnishing. Phaneuf says this helps scientists figure out how long a barrier will last.
"Part of the challenge is to determine what the optimal thickness is that keeps sulfur off the silver surface. Eventually, thermodynamics tells us that the sulfur will diffuse through any layer we put down. The denser the layer, the slower the diffusion," explains Phaneuf. "So we'll start with films that may be a few nanometers thick and investigate the efficacy of these films all the way out to maybe a few hundred nanometers. If we can increase the lifetime of these films to a century, you may not need to do this very often."
Art conservators won't give ALD a thumbs-up until they can show that it works better than the lacquers they are using now, which have to be reapplied every decade or two. The conservators also will have to be able to remove the coating without damaging the piece.
"When it comes to art objects, the less treatment the better," says Glenn Gates, a scientist at the Walters Art Museum. "The standard treatments that use lacquers or nitrous cellulose coatings can give off a plastic look. The ALD coating is very, very thin, and orders of magnitude thinner than the wavelength of light; the idea being that it's going to impact the aesthetic presentation of the object much less than a thick organic lacquer coating that we generally apply these days."
If ALD proves a shining success, silver works of art will remain at their best for future generations to enjoy. And for many of us, it may mean never polishing silver again.
From Science Nation
--------------------
notes
[1] hold/keep somebody/something at bay
--To prevent an enemy from coming close or a problem from having a bad effect
Mar 28, 2011
Babies and Learning
The good, the bad and the baby
Babies know when their diapers are clean or dirty, or when their tummies are empty or full. All you have to do is ask any sleep-deprived parent. But can babies tell when someone is acting good or bad? With the help of some creative puppetry, Yale University psychologist Karen Wynn is proving they can.
Wynn runs the Infant Cognition Lab at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. With help from the National Science Foundation (NSF), she studies the roots of morality, addressing such questions as: what makes us cooperative and altruistic individuals, even from a very young age?
"Babies are oriented towards pro-social individuals. They prefer interacting with a pro-social individual over an anti-social individual," she explains.
Weekdays are often busy at the lab, with babies and their parents coming and going on the hour as scheduled. On the day we visit, Wynn demonstrates how the noon appointment, a 19-month-old named Sara, can easily distinguish a puppet's good behavior from bad behavior.
Sara is subjected to one puppet show starring a helpful, well-behaved doggy puppet displaying pro-social behavior, and then to another show starring a misbehaving doggy puppet. The shows are actually clever experiments devised by Wynn and her team to observe the reaction of toddlers to the good and bad puppets.
"We have a puppet who is trying to open a box; he sees a nice toy inside of it. It's a Plexiglas® box he's just trying to open--he can't lift [the] lid. Then another puppet comes along and helps him open the lid so he can get to the toy inside; so that's the helpful puppet," explains Wynn.
Then Sara is exposed to the second show, but this time the puppet that is trying to open the box is exposed to a different doggy puppet, with a very different outcome.
"Next, he's again trying to open up the box," continues Wynn. "And, a different puppet comes along and jumps on top of the box lid, slamming it shut and dashing his hopes of getting in there."
Sara watches each show a number of times. Now it's time for the plot twist that a 19-month old can appreciate. After the shows, a researcher brings out both doggy puppets to within Sara's reach, and each puppet has a plastic treat in a bowl placed in front of them.
The researcher then introduces a third puppet that also wants a treat, and Sara must decide which doggy must give up its treat to the new puppet: the nice doggy that opened the box or the mean doggy that jumped on top of the box. Wynn says a majority of the time, toddler's choices "are pretty clear, they will take the treat from the cad who was rude enough to slam the lid on the puppet."
Wynn says there is evidence that distinguishing between good and bad behavior starts even younger. For example, three-month-old Addisyn participates in an experiment for infants. She watches a different show. She bears witness to a kitty cat puppet playing ball with two bunny puppets. When they're done with their little game, one bunny returns the ball, while the other just takes it and goes away.
After the show, Addisyn, like 80 to 90 percent of the infants Wynn tests, spends more time paying attention to the "good" bunny that returned the ball. When Wynn first started testing infants she was surprised. "We weren't necessarily expecting to find responses as strong as we have found at such young ages," she says.
"In their first year, young infants appear to like others who reward good behavior and punish bad behavior, and in their second year, they themselves reward and punish deserving individuals appropriately," Wynn explains. "It shows that young infants have the capacity to assess others by their social behavior."
Wynn suspects these capacities and inclinations are universal and unlearned biological adaptations that make the cooperative social structure of human society possible. "It is essential for navigating the social world," she explains. "Adults assess the actions and intentions of the people around us, and make decisions about who's a friend and who's a foe, who's a potentially useful social partner and who is not. We judge good behavior as deserving of reward and bad behavior as deserving of punishment."
Wynn also believes there are benefits to understanding moral development. "Maybe we'll gain a better understanding of sociopathy or psychopathy. Understanding the roots of moral development could lead to a better understanding of developmental disorders like autism," she notes. "The more we understand about normal development, the better we are able to address problems when it goes awry."
From Science Nation
Babies know when their diapers are clean or dirty, or when their tummies are empty or full. All you have to do is ask any sleep-deprived parent. But can babies tell when someone is acting good or bad? With the help of some creative puppetry, Yale University psychologist Karen Wynn is proving they can.
Wynn runs the Infant Cognition Lab at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. With help from the National Science Foundation (NSF), she studies the roots of morality, addressing such questions as: what makes us cooperative and altruistic individuals, even from a very young age?
"Babies are oriented towards pro-social individuals. They prefer interacting with a pro-social individual over an anti-social individual," she explains.
Weekdays are often busy at the lab, with babies and their parents coming and going on the hour as scheduled. On the day we visit, Wynn demonstrates how the noon appointment, a 19-month-old named Sara, can easily distinguish a puppet's good behavior from bad behavior.
Sara is subjected to one puppet show starring a helpful, well-behaved doggy puppet displaying pro-social behavior, and then to another show starring a misbehaving doggy puppet. The shows are actually clever experiments devised by Wynn and her team to observe the reaction of toddlers to the good and bad puppets.
"We have a puppet who is trying to open a box; he sees a nice toy inside of it. It's a Plexiglas® box he's just trying to open--he can't lift [the] lid. Then another puppet comes along and helps him open the lid so he can get to the toy inside; so that's the helpful puppet," explains Wynn.
Then Sara is exposed to the second show, but this time the puppet that is trying to open the box is exposed to a different doggy puppet, with a very different outcome.
"Next, he's again trying to open up the box," continues Wynn. "And, a different puppet comes along and jumps on top of the box lid, slamming it shut and dashing his hopes of getting in there."
Sara watches each show a number of times. Now it's time for the plot twist that a 19-month old can appreciate. After the shows, a researcher brings out both doggy puppets to within Sara's reach, and each puppet has a plastic treat in a bowl placed in front of them.
The researcher then introduces a third puppet that also wants a treat, and Sara must decide which doggy must give up its treat to the new puppet: the nice doggy that opened the box or the mean doggy that jumped on top of the box. Wynn says a majority of the time, toddler's choices "are pretty clear, they will take the treat from the cad who was rude enough to slam the lid on the puppet."
Wynn says there is evidence that distinguishing between good and bad behavior starts even younger. For example, three-month-old Addisyn participates in an experiment for infants. She watches a different show. She bears witness to a kitty cat puppet playing ball with two bunny puppets. When they're done with their little game, one bunny returns the ball, while the other just takes it and goes away.
After the show, Addisyn, like 80 to 90 percent of the infants Wynn tests, spends more time paying attention to the "good" bunny that returned the ball. When Wynn first started testing infants she was surprised. "We weren't necessarily expecting to find responses as strong as we have found at such young ages," she says.
"In their first year, young infants appear to like others who reward good behavior and punish bad behavior, and in their second year, they themselves reward and punish deserving individuals appropriately," Wynn explains. "It shows that young infants have the capacity to assess others by their social behavior."
Wynn suspects these capacities and inclinations are universal and unlearned biological adaptations that make the cooperative social structure of human society possible. "It is essential for navigating the social world," she explains. "Adults assess the actions and intentions of the people around us, and make decisions about who's a friend and who's a foe, who's a potentially useful social partner and who is not. We judge good behavior as deserving of reward and bad behavior as deserving of punishment."
Wynn also believes there are benefits to understanding moral development. "Maybe we'll gain a better understanding of sociopathy or psychopathy. Understanding the roots of moral development could lead to a better understanding of developmental disorders like autism," she notes. "The more we understand about normal development, the better we are able to address problems when it goes awry."
From Science Nation
Jan 11, 2011
Rome in a Day: Virtual Reality Maps
Rebuilding the world one pixel at a time.
Who says Rome wasn't built in a day?
With the muscle of about 500 computers and 150,000 still images, Steve Seitz, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington's Seattle campus, and his colleagues have reconstructed many of Rome's famous landmarks in just 21 hours.
"The idea behind "Rome in a Day"' is that we wanted to see how big of a city or model we could build from photos on the internet," says Steve Seitz from the university's graphics and imaging laboratory. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), they're rebuilding Rome pixel by pixel rather than brick by brick.
Calculations that once took months now take hours. "This is the largest 3-D reconstruction that anyone has ever tried," explains Seitz. "It's completely organic; it works just from any image set."
The project starts with a trip to the photo-sharing site Flickr to search for images of the real thing. Once pictures are identified, the computer starts the process of making 3-D objects from 2-D stills. Sameer Agarwal, a former postdoctoral scholar, at the university is mostly responsible for creating the algorithm that makes 3-D objects in virtual space from thousands of 2-D images.
"If I am a sculpture and there were three photographs of me, we would try to find three points in each photograph that point to my nose. From that we know that there are three points in these images that correspond to a single point in the 3-D world," explains Agarwal. "We would be able to say where in a particular image corresponding to that camera, the image of my nose should show up. This statement can be written as an equation involving the position and orientation of the camera, the position of my nose and where in the image my nose shows up. And you can connect all of these equations together and solve them to, in one shot, obtain both the positions of the cameras as well as the position of my nose in the 3-D world relative to those cameras."
Computers map huge clusters of points in 3-D space creating ghost-like images called "Point Clouds."
Seitz says the imaging is very accurate. "For the buildings, I think we can get accuracy to within a few centimeters. We've measured this. For individual objects that are photographed closer, we can potentially do a lot better, like millimeter accuracy."
Finally, color and texture are added. What Seitz and his colleagues have gotten are virtual 3-D tours of cities like Dubrovnik, Croatia or Venice, Italy.
"What excites me is the ability to capture the real world; to be able to reconstruct the experience of being somewhere without actually being there," says Seitz.
In the future this "next generation" technology may show up in places online like mapping sites, video games or real estate sites--it's a virtual guarantee.
From Science Nation
Who says Rome wasn't built in a day?
With the muscle of about 500 computers and 150,000 still images, Steve Seitz, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington's Seattle campus, and his colleagues have reconstructed many of Rome's famous landmarks in just 21 hours.
"The idea behind "Rome in a Day"' is that we wanted to see how big of a city or model we could build from photos on the internet," says Steve Seitz from the university's graphics and imaging laboratory. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), they're rebuilding Rome pixel by pixel rather than brick by brick.
Calculations that once took months now take hours. "This is the largest 3-D reconstruction that anyone has ever tried," explains Seitz. "It's completely organic; it works just from any image set."
The project starts with a trip to the photo-sharing site Flickr to search for images of the real thing. Once pictures are identified, the computer starts the process of making 3-D objects from 2-D stills. Sameer Agarwal, a former postdoctoral scholar, at the university is mostly responsible for creating the algorithm that makes 3-D objects in virtual space from thousands of 2-D images.
"If I am a sculpture and there were three photographs of me, we would try to find three points in each photograph that point to my nose. From that we know that there are three points in these images that correspond to a single point in the 3-D world," explains Agarwal. "We would be able to say where in a particular image corresponding to that camera, the image of my nose should show up. This statement can be written as an equation involving the position and orientation of the camera, the position of my nose and where in the image my nose shows up. And you can connect all of these equations together and solve them to, in one shot, obtain both the positions of the cameras as well as the position of my nose in the 3-D world relative to those cameras."
Computers map huge clusters of points in 3-D space creating ghost-like images called "Point Clouds."
Seitz says the imaging is very accurate. "For the buildings, I think we can get accuracy to within a few centimeters. We've measured this. For individual objects that are photographed closer, we can potentially do a lot better, like millimeter accuracy."
Finally, color and texture are added. What Seitz and his colleagues have gotten are virtual 3-D tours of cities like Dubrovnik, Croatia or Venice, Italy.
"What excites me is the ability to capture the real world; to be able to reconstruct the experience of being somewhere without actually being there," says Seitz.
In the future this "next generation" technology may show up in places online like mapping sites, video games or real estate sites--it's a virtual guarantee.
From Science Nation
Nov 1, 2010
What's Up for November, 2010:
Crescent Venus, Brilliant Jupiter, and Shower Meteors
What's Up for November?
Venus in the morning, gas giants in the evening and meteors after midnight.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome! I'm Jane Houston Jones at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. If your skies are clear this month, you're in for some real treats!
Venus is up first ... literally. Start looking for our nearest planetary neighbor just before dawn. You'll be treated to a very slender crescent. On the fifth, two crescents rise 35 minutes before dawn: first Venus and then the Moon. By the 15th, the crescent Venus widens to 10% of the planet's disk. And by month end, it's 25 percent lit. Galileo captured sketches of the changes in the appearance of Venus 400 years ago.
Jupiter reigns supreme again in November. You can really see the light and dark bands of clouds on the planet.
Uranus and Neptune are both easy to see through a telescope, too.
Comets are storytellers, preserving the stuff from which our solar system's family was born. November 4 marks the EPOXI spacecraft's flyby of comet Hartley 2. Last month offered the best time to view this comet.
The bright and slow Taurid meteor shower peaks the first two weeks of November. You'll only see about 5 of the distinctive Taurids per hour.
November's more famous shower is the Leonids. The faint and swift Leonids peak on the 17th and 18th. Wait until the moon sets in the hours before dawn for your best chance of seeing them.
NASA's Year of the Solar System missions will shed light on our solar system family's birth story. The Cassini Solstice mission is making new discoveries about the mini-solar system at Saturn, complete with a disk of rings and moons orbiting the dynamic gas giant. JUNO launches in 2011 and will seek to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter.
Learn more about this month's Year of the Solar System resources at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/yss
And you can learn all about NASA's missions at www.nasa.gov
That's all for this month. I'm Jane Houston Jones.
Venus in the morning, gas giants in the evening and meteors after midnight.
Transcript:
Hello and welcome! I'm Jane Houston Jones at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. If your skies are clear this month, you're in for some real treats!
Venus is up first ... literally. Start looking for our nearest planetary neighbor just before dawn. You'll be treated to a very slender crescent. On the fifth, two crescents rise 35 minutes before dawn: first Venus and then the Moon. By the 15th, the crescent Venus widens to 10% of the planet's disk. And by month end, it's 25 percent lit. Galileo captured sketches of the changes in the appearance of Venus 400 years ago.
Jupiter reigns supreme again in November. You can really see the light and dark bands of clouds on the planet.
Uranus and Neptune are both easy to see through a telescope, too.
Comets are storytellers, preserving the stuff from which our solar system's family was born. November 4 marks the EPOXI spacecraft's flyby of comet Hartley 2. Last month offered the best time to view this comet.
The bright and slow Taurid meteor shower peaks the first two weeks of November. You'll only see about 5 of the distinctive Taurids per hour.
November's more famous shower is the Leonids. The faint and swift Leonids peak on the 17th and 18th. Wait until the moon sets in the hours before dawn for your best chance of seeing them.
NASA's Year of the Solar System missions will shed light on our solar system family's birth story. The Cassini Solstice mission is making new discoveries about the mini-solar system at Saturn, complete with a disk of rings and moons orbiting the dynamic gas giant. JUNO launches in 2011 and will seek to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter.
Learn more about this month's Year of the Solar System resources at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/yss
And you can learn all about NASA's missions at www.nasa.gov
That's all for this month. I'm Jane Houston Jones.
Mar 7, 2010
I tried. And I made it! -- How I harnessed the wind.
Here is a touching story from an African boy who harnessed the wind.
Transcript:
Two years ago I stood on the TED stage in Arusha, Tanzania. I spoke very briefly about one of my proudest creations. It was a simple machine that changed my life.
Before that time I had never been away from my home in Malawi. I had never used a computer. I had never seen an Internet. On the stage that day, I was so nervous. My English lost, I wanted to vomit. I had never been surrounded by so many azungu, white people.
There was a story I wouldn't tell you then. But well, I'm feeling good, right now. I would like to share that story today.
We have seven children in my family. All sisters, except me. This is me with my dad when I was a little boy.
Before I discovered the wonders of science, I was just a simple farmer in a country of poor farmers. Like everyone else, we grew maize. One year our fortune turned very bad. In 2001 we experienced an awful famine. Within five months all Malawians began to starve to death. My family ate one meal per day at night. Only three swallows of nsima for each one of us. The food passes through our bodies. We drop down to nothing.
In Malawi, the secondary school, you have to pay school fees. Because of the hunger, I was forced to drop out of school. I looked at my father, and looked at those dry fields. It was the future I couldn't accept.
I felt very happy to be at the secondary school. So I was determined to do anything possible to receive education. So I went to a library. I read books, science books, especially physics. I couldn't read English that well. I used diagrams and pictures to learn the words around them.
Another book put that knowledge in my hands. It said a windmill could pump water and generate electricity. Pump water meant irrigation, a defense against hunger, which we were experiencing by that time. So I decided I would build one windmill for myself. But I didn't have materials to use. So I went to a scrap yard where I found my materials.
Many people, including my mother, said I was crazy.
I found a tractor fan, shock absorber, PVC pipes. Using a bicycle frame and an old bicycle dynamo, I built my machine. It was one light at first. And then four lights, with switches, and even a circuit breaker, modeled after an electric bell. Another machine pumps water for irrigation.
Queues of people start lining up at my house to charge their mobile phone. I could not get rid of them. And the reporters came too, which lead to bloggers and which lead to a call from something called TED.
I had never seen an airplane before. I had never slept in a hotel. So, on stage that day in Arusha, my English lost, I said something like, "I tried. And I made it."
So I would like to say something to all the people out there, like me, to the Africans, and the poor who are struggling with your dreams.
God bless! Maybe one day you will watch this on the Internet. I say to you, trust yourself and believe. Whatever happens, don't give up!
Transcript:
William Kamkwamba
Two years ago I stood on the TED stage in Arusha, Tanzania. I spoke very briefly about one of my proudest creations. It was a simple machine that changed my life.
Before that time I had never been away from my home in Malawi. I had never used a computer. I had never seen an Internet. On the stage that day, I was so nervous. My English lost, I wanted to vomit. I had never been surrounded by so many azungu, white people.
There was a story I wouldn't tell you then. But well, I'm feeling good, right now. I would like to share that story today.
We have seven children in my family. All sisters, except me. This is me with my dad when I was a little boy.
Before I discovered the wonders of science, I was just a simple farmer in a country of poor farmers. Like everyone else, we grew maize. One year our fortune turned very bad. In 2001 we experienced an awful famine. Within five months all Malawians began to starve to death. My family ate one meal per day at night. Only three swallows of nsima for each one of us. The food passes through our bodies. We drop down to nothing.
In Malawi, the secondary school, you have to pay school fees. Because of the hunger, I was forced to drop out of school. I looked at my father, and looked at those dry fields. It was the future I couldn't accept.
I felt very happy to be at the secondary school. So I was determined to do anything possible to receive education. So I went to a library. I read books, science books, especially physics. I couldn't read English that well. I used diagrams and pictures to learn the words around them.
Another book put that knowledge in my hands. It said a windmill could pump water and generate electricity. Pump water meant irrigation, a defense against hunger, which we were experiencing by that time. So I decided I would build one windmill for myself. But I didn't have materials to use. So I went to a scrap yard where I found my materials.
Many people, including my mother, said I was crazy.
I found a tractor fan, shock absorber, PVC pipes. Using a bicycle frame and an old bicycle dynamo, I built my machine. It was one light at first. And then four lights, with switches, and even a circuit breaker, modeled after an electric bell. Another machine pumps water for irrigation.
Queues of people start lining up at my house to charge their mobile phone. I could not get rid of them. And the reporters came too, which lead to bloggers and which lead to a call from something called TED.
I had never seen an airplane before. I had never slept in a hotel. So, on stage that day in Arusha, my English lost, I said something like, "I tried. And I made it."
So I would like to say something to all the people out there, like me, to the Africans, and the poor who are struggling with your dreams.
God bless! Maybe one day you will watch this on the Internet. I say to you, trust yourself and believe. Whatever happens, don't give up!
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