"Wait, What?"

It is not often I get to leave people completely stunned and confused at the same time, but that is just what happened last week while I was teaching a snow science class.  I posed the following question to a group of 9th grade science students: "Imagine you have a huge amount of information you need to send from here to a computer 1,200 miles away how are you going to do it?"  We all stood next to this odd looking structure high up in the mountains as they all pondered their answers. I got some pretty logical answers; underground cable connects the two computers together, bounce the information off a satellite, or send the information using a wireless network. Ok, all good ideas I told them, but not the answer I was looking for. Then I blew their minds, "the way this data gets from one place to another is by meteor tail." A hush filled the forest and the students looked a little confused. The teacher pushed her way through the students and looked at me and said' Wait, what? Did you say meteor tails?" Yep you heard me right.

Scientists estimate 25 million pieces of space junk try to pass through the earth's atmosphere every day. When this space junk be it a part of an asteroid or piece of metal which fell of  a satellite or space craft when this junk starts moving through our atmosphere it begins to bun up creating a meteors or what we non-scientist call shooting stars.

From NASA's Website. 

 That bright tail you see behind the space junk which is burning up lasts for about 2-3 seconds and that is what two computers are using to send data to each other.  COOL!!! This is why I love science!
The big odd looking thing we were sanding next to was a SNOTEL (snow telemetry site) and it looks like this.







Every thirty minutes SNOTEL sites all across North America are sending information to computer centers with real-time data on how much snow is up in the mountains, how much new snow fell since it sent its last data set, how much rain the site gets all so scientists and city managers know how much water may be available for people to use for all sorts of things.

I did a bunch of reading of scientific papers mostly written by engineers and communication specialists, too bad I understood none of it. There was a cool graphic though on the SNOTEL website. But I and my coworker wanted to know HOW it worked. 

The very smart people who manage the SNOTEL sites were happy to help us and sent this reply to our email:
 
"You are correct in thinking the radio signals bounce off the ionized trails left behind as the meteors burn up in the atmosphere.  This happens at an altitude of approximately sixty miles.  There are literally millions of these micro-meteors every day and the trails last from a few milliseconds to a few seconds.  We operate five master receive sites to collect the data from the field sites and forward it on to us here in Portland.  The master stations are located in Idaho, Utah, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio.  The field sites transmit near forty megahertz and have an optimal range of a thousand miles and can speak to any and all of the masters.  The data is transmitted in the packet format and parts of the message can be received by multiple master stations and reassembled.  The master stations are sending out a continuous strobe.  Hourly the data is transferred from the logger to the transmit que of the meteorburst radio.  Once the radio has data it starts listening for a strobe from the master station and when it hears one it then sends its’ data and the master station acknowledges.  If the field site doesn’t receive the acknowledgment it will continue to try sending its’ data till it does get an acknowledgement or it times out after a set number of tries, waits fifteen minutes then tries again.  The data will remain in the radio’s transmit que till it is transmitted then it is deleted from the radio, but still remains in memory in the logger.  The logger can retain well over a year’s worth of data.   It all sounds very complicated, but works very nicely.  It is not true real time data, but rather near real time.  Some sites get their data through almost immediately while others take a little while.  Overall our average latency is roughly fifteen minutes."

Crazy right? All this data being sent and received off of meteor tails! 

Want to know more Google Meteor burst technology and you'll find some pretty cool stuff.




 

Spring is here, spring is here, life is.....wait....what....oh not again!!!!

All week little signs of spring have been popping up all over the place:

Sign of spring #1 The Pasque Flower
 On my walk to work I passed two blooming pasque flowers. These perennial flowers are the first to bloom in the spring even before all the snow is off the ground.

And when they go to seed they look like something from a Dr. Seuss book.















Sign  of spring #2 Mountain Blue Birds

While teaching on Tuesday we all saw two males chasing one female around the meadow.

Sign of spring #3 Frogs.
While teaching at the side of an ephemeral pool there was the mighty racket of a bunch of amorous frogs. We never saw them, but if you moved too close to one edge of the pool all went quiet.

Sign of Spring #4 Flip Flops
Yes, I liberated my feet from the hiking boots slipped on a pair of flip flops and walk to the post office to mail some letters.

Sign of spring #5 The song in my heart.
Every spring regardless of if I want to admit it, but Tom Lehrer runs through my brain. Yes, you noted wacky Harvard professor I just can't help but hum your tune.
                
                       Tom Lehrer- Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.

Then Thursday the unthinkable happened it GOT UP TO 60 DEGREES!!!  WOOO HOOO! About this time the evil weather people started predicting a snowstorm for the weekend.  Won't happen everyone at work said with a nervous chuckle......will it.  We all thought back to 2007 where in a 24 hour period we got 5 and a half feet of snow.  Nah, it's too late in the season for that.  Saturday weather forecast for Sunday 6-15 inches of snow in the mountains 4-8 inches in the valley, their kidding right.

After 15 hours of straight snow we have 7-8 inches on the ground and as of a few minutes ago it started to snow again.  Looking at the long range forecast for the week I am not amused; they are predicting 2 separate days of snow mid week.  Maybe I should have gone to Death Valley last week with a friend of mine, maybe I would be appreciating the snow right now after 2 days of over 100 F.

Maybe the week after next will be nicer..........I hope......PLEASE!



Other Tom Lehrer songs
new math
Masochism Tango
Elements Song
 

"Want me hit you with a bolt of lightening?"

 

"Want me to hit you with a bolt of lightening?"

Think about that question for a second what would your reaction be?  I was asked just this question a number of years ago as I sat inside a Van der Graff generator with a few of my coworkers.  We all looked back and forth at each other in nervous silence for a minute before someone offered up a feeble sounding "sure."

The Museum of Science's Van der Graff Generator (Photo from the Museum of Science Boston)

I should probably explain how we all got to be sitting in the top of the generator in the first place.  One afternoon at lunch the man in charge of the lightening shows at the Museum of Science, I'll call him Len,  mentioned to us he was going to be cleaning out the insides of the generators and if any of us were curious what they looked like on the inside to meet him there tomorrow morning.  The next morning my boss and I along with some other curious coworkers gathered at the agreed on time in the lightening theater.  Len popped open the door at the bottom and instructed us to climb up the ladder to the ball at the top so we could see it innards.  One by one we climbed up the ladder next to a very long conveyer belt which had little brushes over it at the very top.  Once Len had joined us in the big ball at the top he proceeded to explain the generator worked like a big static electricity producer. The faster the conveyer belt ran the more static was produced by the brushes and the extra charge would build up on the outside of  the metal before discharging to create the lightening bolts we saw in his demonstrations.  After a few more minutes of questions from us Len then looks at us with a glint in his eye and asks "want me to hit you with a bolt of lightning?" After agreeing he slips back down the ladder and closes the door at the bottom.  We all let out a nervous giggle as the conveyer belt began to build up its static charge.  "Should this be open?" I shouted down to Len who now sat inside the Faraday cage at the controls.  "You're fine just keep your heads inside" he reassured us.

After a few tense minutes there was an audible crack and we all looked out the hole as the lightening hit the cage Len sat inside.  Cool we all thought as the belt began to spin faster now. After a few minutes of watching rather small lightening bolts hit the cage Len called up "Close the window." We did as instructed an sat completely enclosed in our metal sphere and waited.  Then there was another loud crack and a sound like someone throwing a tennis ball against the side of the metal.  On and on this went for a few minutes the belt spinning faster and faster, the cracks and bangs against the metal getting louder and louder.  When the banging reached deafening proportions we pounded on the sides of the metal sphere, our agreed on signal for Len to stop.  We waited for the belt to stop moving and the door at the bottom to be opened before descending back down the ladder.

"So?" Len asked after we had all safely made it out of the generator.  "Cool!" was our response. "How many volts was that last strike?" someone asked. "Enough to blow up a large redwood." Len casually responded.   

If your trying to figure out how we were all not blasted in to millions of little pieces the answer is simple and complex at the same time; we put our faith in the skin effect. Since I never took physics I can't really explain how this works, but because of the frequency of a bolt of lightening the charge was spread over the surface of the copper metal in which we sat and never penetrated the metal sphere. 

The same idea works if your sitting inside your car in a lightening storm as long as you DON'T touch anything inside the car, just sit there with your feet flat on the floor and hands in your lap. See this in action on BBC's Top Gear.

To see the Museum of Science's Van der Graff Generator in action check out this YouTube Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-mFl_YXqiA  But it is MUCH cooler in person!

For More information:

For a great explanation on how the generator works and why Van der Graff created them in the first place see the HowStuffWorks website.
For a really in-depth explination of how the skin effect works. http://fermi.la.asu.edu/w9cf/skin/skin.html
More information on cars and lightening http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/vehicle_strike.html
How to be safe outside in a lightening storm. http://www.ready.gov/thunderstorms-lightning

For a brief glimpse inside the generator I sat in watch Since Bob's video. http://www.sciencebob.com/experiments/videos/video-van_de_graaff.php

What is it about chocolate?

Quick run to your kitchen throw open the cupboards and the refrigerator and look to see how many pieces of chocolate you find. Go on I'll wait.

So what did you find?  If your like me there is a lot of chocolate in your house or in my case there was until this last weekend when things when from good to poop in a rather short period of time. 

I was listening to the TED Radio hour on NPR over the weekend like I normally do and something caught my attention.....the mention of chocolate. This was kinda weird since the topic of the day was about success.  I perked up to hear Ron Gutman talk about smiling your way to success. "A smile, he reported, has the same brain stimulation as eating 2,000 bars of chocolate."  This was not the first time I had heard some scientific research related in terms of chocolate, but since I don't know who is reading this I will refrain from posting it because it is not appropriate for all age groups.

I started looking for fun sort of motivational facts about chocolate and here is what I came up with:

1)  "One chocolate chip can give a person enough energy to walk 150 feet.^"
                        (Bring on the chocolate chip cookies I say. )
2) "A Hershey's bar was dug up after 60 years from Admiral Richard Byrd’s cache at the South Pole.  Having been frozen all those years, it was still edible."
3) "Chocolate melting in a person’s mouth can cause a more intense and longer-lasting “buzz” than kissing."
                        (On the same note I read once that there are 22 calories in a Hersey Kiss and you burn 25 calories in a passionate one minute kiss. Not a bad way to burn calories if you ask me.)

4)   "Chocolate is a perfect food, as wholesome as it is delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power. It is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits. – Baron Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), German chemist"
                         (I'm not sure exactly how these go together.)
5)  "Chocolate is a Vegetable: chocolate is derived from cocoa beans. Bean = vegetable. Sugar is derived from either sugar cane or sugar beets. Both are plants, which places them in the vegetable category. Thus, chocolate is a vegetable. To go one step further, chocolate candy bars also contain milk, which is dairy. So candy bars are a health food."
                          (It isn't but I like the logic here)

Why are we so enamored with chocolate is it the way it melts on the tongue, the fact that it gives us the same chemical happy feeling in our brains that other pleasurable things do, or is something coded in our DNA from way way back. Imaging being the Aztecs your trying to make something like beer and come up with chocolate were you bummed out by this or after some taste testing by your friends did you decide it was the best thing on earth?

Ruth Wakefield, who invented the  chocolate chip cookie, sold her recipe to Nestle for a lifetime supply of chocolate. You go girl! 

Whatever it is that has us so addicted may it never be factored out of chocolate.  I tip my hat to you Aztecs for your mistake is one of my favorite things.

Want more chocolate?
http://www.facts-about-chocolate.com/chocolate-quotes/
Even local bears love chocolate.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3GiXckb9z0
http://facts.randomhistory.com/chocolate-facts.html
http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/rm-quiz-chocolate

It's Raining Antlers?

As I was returning home from a walk last week I saw a sight which just made me stand there and laugh. The one antlered elk. Try as the pour guy might he just could not make the other one fall off. Each year around the middle of March our antlered friends, the deer, elk, caribou, and moose loose their antlers. A hormonal change causes their antlers to fall to the ground. Sometimes they both fall off at once and other times.... Well let's just say there are some funny looking elk walking around. Why would you want to loose your antlers each year you ask? Simple to win over the girls. Imagine that during a particularly rough mating season you smashed heads with another make of your kind and broke off part of an antler. Now, since the females of your kind look for antlers which are the same on both sides you have just lost your chance at mating.  

                                            Copyright Peter Zuzga

 However, since antlers fall off each year as long as the animal has not damaged the part of the skull where the antler grows next year his rack will come back good as new.  Antlers unlike horns are made from bone and are shed each spring. Within a few weeks our antlered friends start to regrow their antlers and while they are in velvet antlers act as a built in cooling system for the animal. There is blood circulating underneath the velvet. It is hard to imagine an animal growing an antler of this size in just one season (April-early September), but they do.  Antlers are the fastest growing bone known to man and can grow as much as an inch a day at the height of the growing season.

                                                                   My Final Antler

Their weight is pretty impressive too. A full grown healthy male elk can have a rack which weighs a total of 40 pounds. That's a lot of weight to be carrying on your head all the time.

Since I am on the topic of antlers why don't I tell you about some of the differences between antlers and horns.

Antlers	Horns
Made out of bone	Made out of keratin (like your fingernails)
Are solid	Are hollow in the middle
On an elk they can weigh 40 pounds	On a Bighorn Sheep up to 30 pounds
Shed every year	With the animal for life

Just remember if you see a shed antler out in the woods it is best to leave it where it is there are many small rodents out there which eat the antlers to get much needed nutrients to help them grow. Think of shed antlers as vitamins for wildlife.  Happy antler spotting. 

Don't Do It! Don't Investigate The Wiggly Thing!

It lays curled on top of the snow, silent and motionless except for the end of it's tail. From across the snow alert eyes of a mouse see something small and back moving on the snow's surface. Could it be food? The mouse creeps in closer and closer until WHAM! Sharp canine teeth sink into it's neck snuffing out the mouse's life. Mouse in teeth the critter scurries back to it's den, inside is the fur and feathers of other unsuspecting creatures; ptarmigan, marmots, snowshoe hare, and weasels.

Who is this terrifying predator roaming the woods you wonder. None other than this guy, the ermine.

You were thinking some HUGE predator something like a coyote or fox weren't you. He maybe small but he shouldn't be overlooked or dismissed as some cute little furry creature. Ermines are one fierce predator taking on prey as large as a snowshoe hare or something as small as a mouse.       

These cunning carnivores often are seen hunting in a zig-zag pattern leaping over a foot in each jump, which is mighty impressive for a critter that is only 6-12 inches long. They use their keen sense of smell to locate their prey by investigating every hole, crevice, and cave in the rocks. In the winter if the snow is too deep they will tunnel into the subnivian layer, or under the snow to those non-scientists out there, and move around in tunnels looking for prey.  They will even flick their tail with it's small black tip in order to lure prey in closer, their white body perfectly camouflaged against the stark white snow.

In the spring these crafty little critters change color to be white on their belly and brown on top.  (Science moment: The increasing light levels in the spring trigger a hormonal change which causes their fur to gradually fall out leaving changing them from white to brown. The same thing happens in the fall. As the days shorten the hormonal change is triggered and the fur changes from brown to white.) Their high metabolism means they have to eat every day, so to make sure they always have a meal ready even when they can not catch one. They cache dead things in hole so there is always something to eat.

Look hard the next time your out in the snow and see if there are two small eyes starting back at you.

If you want to see some other cute ermine pictures check out Meg Sommers' web page she just captured some amazing photographs of an ermine in Yellowstone National Park. 

Cool Stuff You Never Knew About Snow!

Snow everybody's favorite four letter word has been falling a lot lately even in places where snow is a whole new concept. Well, I've been pondering snow, walking in snow, snowshoeing in snow, post-holing in snow up to my waist a bunch recently. So, here are three interesting facts I have learned about snow over the last few weeks as I prepared to teach an advanced snow science class.




1) It doesn't need to be warm to melt snow.
The temperature here in Colorado has been all over the map, 50 degrees one day 20 degrees the next with a lovely (said with a huge amount of sarcasm) wind. I was pondering the snow fluctuations recorded by our SNOTEL trying to get a handle on why if we get 241 inches of snow (that's a little over 20 feet) in an average year (October to June) why there never seems to be more than about 41-70 inches at any one time at the SNOTEL gauge?  The obvious answer is it melts. The only thing is while it can be 50 degrees at my house at the SNOTEL site, 3,000 feet above my house, the temperature ranged from 24-31 degrees Fahrenheit. So where the heck is all the snow going? Sublimation is the answer!  The constant 30-60 mile per hour winds are causing the snow to go straight from a solid into a gas without needing to melt first. A scientific paper I read showed the snow pack in the research location, not too far from where I work, decreased by 15% each year just due to sublimation.


2) Fresh power makes my eyes hurt!
Ever wonder why it seems brighter right after a light fluffy snow falls than a few days later?  Freshly fallen snow has the ability to reflect 90% of the solar rays which hit it's surface. After a few days when the snow has a chance to compact it looses some of its ability to reflect sunlight and only can reflect about 50% f the sunlight hitting it.


3) Best Insulation Ever!
There is naturally a small amount of heat radiating up from under the surface if the ground. Build yourself a snow cave and you can trap some of that radiating heat to help keep yourself warm.  Small animals, such as mice, have figured this out. While the surface of the snow maybe frozen solid the natural heat radiating from the ground causes the lower layers to melt slightly changing the shape of the ice crystals. This new crystal shape looks like sugar grains, hence the name sugar snow, this snow is much easier for small critters to move through than the hard wind packed snow on the surface.