You can find updates and pictures from our events at www.facebook.com/cascadescience.
Hope to see you there!
You can find updates and pictures from our events at www.facebook.com/cascadescience.
Hope to see you there!
Cascades Science Center Foundation needs you! You do not have to be a scientist to be part of our team. We are a new non-profit organization with a mission to help underserved kids get excited about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
At part of 2011 United Way of King County Day of Caring on September 16, Cascades Science Center Foundation is partnering with 20 Microsoft Employees to lead a fun-filled science day at Enatai Elementary School in Bellevue, WA. The event will host chemistry, physics, software, engineering, biology and other science interactive activities for the 4th and 5th grade students at Enatai. The science day is branded Science Squad. Check out the event flyer here.
Hurricane Irene is the first named storm and the first major hurricane in 2011. There is much news coverage about this at this time of the year. It is very important to track these huge storms and to make accurate predications about their movements. Many people live in areas affected by hurricanes.
News agencies report the path of the hurricane to notify residents of the area who may be impacted. If the National Hurricane Center scientists believe a hurricane is threatening to reach a populated area within 24 hours, they will issue a hurricane warning. People prepare by gathering and sheltering property and boarding up homes and businesses. Sometimes people will even be evacuated from an area if the forecast calls for an extremely strong storm. Many lives have been saved by these preparations.
Did you ever wonder how these names get assigned? The National Weather Service names hurricanes to quickly identify them. The names are assigned in alphabetical order alternating between female and male names. There are separate lists of names for hurricanes in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Origin of hurricane is WIND. The hurricane takes its name from the West Indian word huracan which means “big wind.” Storms that occur over the Atlantic or the eastern Pacific Oceans are called hurricanes. The same kind of storm that forms over the western Pacific or Indian Oceans is called a typhoon. This name comes from the Chinese word taifun or “great wind.”
STRONG WINDS. Hurricanes have top wind speeds of at least 74 miles per hour, but wind speed can reach 180 miles per hour. The closer you are to the storm’s center, the faster the wind will be. The top wind speed will be reached within 60 miles from the center of the hurricane. As you move away from the center, wind speed is slower. At 300 miles from the center, the wind speed may be only 18 miles per hour.
How to predice the hurricane? To study conditions inside hurricanes, teams of pilots and weather scientists fly regular missions into these storms. They get measurements of wind speed, temperature, air pressure, and other weather conditions at different altitudes. These investigations help scientists make predictions about hurricane formation and movement. NASA satellites are also flying above Hurricane Irene, providing forecasters at NHC with temperature, pressure, wind, and cloud and sea surface temperature data. All of those things are critical in helping forecasters determine how Irene will behave and track.
How do hurricanes form? Hurricanes and typhoons are not just violent winds. They are giant, whirling storms that develop in a special way. The energy of a hurricane comes from the heat released when water vapor condenses to liquid water. The atmosphere above a tropical ocean is the only place enough warm, moist air is available to produce the energy necessary to create a hurricane. Hurricanes form only in the tropics where extremely moist air and heat are concentrated over the ocean, near the equator. Hurricanes develop during the season when it is a wet season (typically late spring to early autumn) and the water temperature is at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit both day and night.
Here is what’s going on:
Check out the following experiment from Steve Spangleer science on how to simulate creating your own hurricane in a water bottle.
Courtesy: http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/experiment/00000122
We had our first Science Squad event at the Des Moines Library in Des Moines, WA. This was our first time venturing south of Seattle. The Des Moines Library is very beautiful and the staff was very helpful throughout the process of organizing this event. The event was targeted at kids 8 – 12 years old, but we had kids younger than that coming into the room. In our next event, we are now thinking of accommodating a less complex activity in the subject, if possible for the younger kids, when they come to the booth. Despite the (rare) gorgeous summer day outside and holiday season, we had a decent turnout for this event.
Thank you Activity Leads
Such a 1:1 hands-on event is not possible without the help of our activity leads who guided the kids through their activities. We would like all the activity leads for their participation and donation of the material involved.
It was really exciting to see the kids get fascinated when they saw how slime was made, or how lemons actually powered the clock or even when the bulb lit up due to solar panel.
You can check out the photos of this event posted at our Facebook site.
We are now looking forward to our next such event!
The 2011 Space Elevator Conference
Thursday Evening, August 11 through Sunday, August 14, 2011
Microsoft Conference Center,
Redmond, Washington, USA
http://spaceelevatorconference.org/
As part of this conference, there are Family Science Fest FREE Events.
Family Science Fest FREE Events (more details here)
http://www.meetup.com/cascadescience/events/27998951/
Electric Motors are used in so many real-world applications. In fact, you can see them being used in household items such as fans, refrigerators, washing machines and vacuum cleaners. An electric motor uses electrical energy to produce mechanical energy, while a generator (or dynamo) uses mechanical energy to produce electrical energy. Let’s build a simple motor to understand the basic science principles behind it.
What do you need?
Instructions
What’s happening?
An electric motor uses electrical energy to produce movement or mechanical energy. The key to understanding the electric motor is to know how electric current behaves in a magnetic field. The operative principle in an electric motor is the same as an
electromagnet.
Electricity is created when particles become charged. Some are negatively charged (electrons), some are positively charted (protons) and others have no charge (neutrons). The opposite charges attract, while particles with similar charges repel each other. Combining electricity with magnets makes an electric motor. An electric current in a magnetic field will experience a force.
What makes a motor turn is based on the fact that magnetic fields produce physical force that can move things. If you have
ever played with magnets you have seen this in action as you use one magnet to attract another magnet or force it to move without touching it, depending on how you line up their poles. All magnets have a north pole and a south pole. Like poles repel each other and unlike poles attract each other. So, in a motor, electricity is used to create magnetic fields that oppose each other and cause something to move. For a detailed explanation, see How does an
electric motor work.
Why does your hair stand on end at the Van de Graaff generator in the Museum?
The Museum’s Van de Graaff generator removes electrons from the large globe, giving it a high positive charge. If you stand on an
insulated plate and touch this globe, all parts of your body become positively charged, including your hair. Since like charges repel, every hair on your head is now trying to get away from every other hair. The best way is to stand straight up. Result – flyaway hairdo!
Resources
Have you ever placed a water bottle in the freezer for some time? What did you notice when you take it out? Did you ever wonder why people put covers on their outside faucets in the winter? Why isn’t it a good idea to leave water in a garden hose during freezing temperatures? It’s the power of ice.
What do you need?
Instructions
What’s happening?
When water freezes, it expands. (Peculiar!!) When water is left in a garden hose during freezing temperatures, the force of
the ice expanding can cause the hose to break open. The same thing can happen with the water pipes in your house. If the water freezes in the pipe, it can break the pipe open. As water cools further and freezes into ice, another property takes place: it actually becomes less dense. Most substances are most dense in their solid (frozen) state than in their liquid state, however water
is not. Have you noticed ice floats in water? This explains why icebergs float and lakes freeze from the top down. If
water froze from the bottom up then all life in the water would be killed and life might not have evolved on Earth.
Do you find computer programming daunting? Perhaps it doesn’t have to be when the folks at Microsoft are trying to make it fun and easy. Let’s write a simple Small Basic program.
What do you need?
Instructions
GraphicsWindow.BackgroundColor = “Red”
paddle = Shapes.AddRectangle(120, 12)
ball = Shapes.AddEllipse(16, 16)
words = Shapes.AddText(“Hello Science Explorers!”)
Shapes.Move(words, 25, 30)
If all the instructions you have given to the computer are right, you should see the following output window:
Want to tell the computer to do other cool things? To learn more about it follow the links below. There are other interesting samples available within the Small Basic guide:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/gg604844.aspx
What’s happening?
When you click on “Run” to run the program, behind the scenes, Small Basic is converting the high level statements to machine language, which then produces the results you see on the output window.
“Microsoft Small Basic puts the fun back into computer programming. With a friendly development environment that is very easy to master, it eases students of all ages into the world of programming.”
Small Basic 1.0 Blog Announcement:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/smallbasic/archive/2011/07/12/small-basic-1-0-is-here.aspx
New Small Basic Home Page on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ff384126.aspx
Small Basic Teaching Curriculum in different languages:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/hh314609.aspx
E-Book content licensed for use on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/hh308208.aspx
In these fascinating water experiments you will learn how many paperclips you can add to a glass full of water.
What do you need?
Instructions
What’s going on?
Believe it or not water is sticky – not sticky like glue – but water molecules are very attracted to each other. If you had a glass of water, then the water molecules in the centre of the glass would be attracted to the water molecules above them, below them and to the side of them. But the water molecules on the surface of the water do not have any molecules above them to be attracted to, so they become more attracted to the molecules to the side and below them – this causes surface tension.
Water molecules have a positive and negative charge like little magnets. the negative part of the water molecule is attracted to another water molecules opposite pole where they stick together. The attraction of water molecules to other water molecules is called cohesion. The force of the cohesion allows water to form a small dome over the top of a glass as you add the paperclips without overflowing.
Bonus Question: Can you make the paper-clip float? See answer here.
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