Quick News Bit: Conserving Gasoline by Changing Traffic Light Patterns

My local Fox 59 news station just aired a story about how Indianapolis is changing the patterns on the city traffic lights so people don't have to stop as often. The lights are normally timed to increase the number of stops you have to make, the theory being that you'll drive closer to the speed limit if you're constantly doing the stop and go. But the process of getting a car from a stop to moving takes more energy than going continuously at a set speed. So if you stop less, you'll save gas. And with our gas prices up to about $4.25 per gallon, anything the city can do to help us save gasoline will be much appreciated!

I'll share some problems you could do with students about this idea in a future post. I worked in a national petroleum lab for two summers so I have some interesting petroleum science I could share. Gasoline is a great example of lots of scientific principles in action that we take for granted as long as we remember to fill the tank!

The Human Brain is so COOL! Part 1: Sense of Smell

Have you ever smelled something, and suddenly you remembered something from a long time ago that you had completely forgotten about. The smell itself triggered that memory in your brain to resurface. The memories can be very old, and they can be very, very powerful.

Last night, the t.v. show Modern Family  was all about the extended family celebrating Mother's Day. Jay, the patriarch of the family, decided to make a special recipe that he loved that his mom had made for him as a kid. At the end of the episode, he took a big wiff of the delicious dinner, and it made him cry. The smell of the dinner triggered powerful memories of his mom and  and the happy times he had with her.

Your sense of smell can be a very powerful trigger of memories. But how? And why? After all, the part of your brain that detects smells is very close to your nose but not close to the places where memories are stored.

The sense of smell is one of the most basic processes in the human body as well as other animals, yet our understanding of how your brain captures molecules and translates that into something that your brain recognizes as a smell is cutting edge science. In 2004, Richard Axel and  Linda Buck won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking work in how the sense of smell works. That just goes to show that there are plenty of basic things about science that we still don't understand very well, even things that are so basic to the human experience.

Here's a link to Richard Axel's Nobel Prize lecture.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2004/axel-lecture.html
And here's one for Linda Buck's Nobel Prize lecture.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2004/buck-lecture.html

There's a lot going on in the small space that a human nose takes up I like using Google Chrome's interactive   You can adjust what you see, adding and removing the cardiovascular and nervous system, as well as human organs. You can even fade any of the three so the system is visible but not so much that it blocks your view of other features. You have to download Google Chrome to use this tool.
http://www.google.com/chrome/thankyou.html?hl=en&brand=CHMI&oneclickinstalled=&statcb=&installdataindex=defaultbrowser

Once Chrome is installed, you can click here to access Google Body.
http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/

In my next post, I hope to talk a bit more about how the brain stores memories, then I'll tackle how scents trigger those memories.

Other resources for images of the nasal system:
A very detailed set of slides showing the anatomy of a nose can be found at this site by Kansas State University.  http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/yousryelsayed/Atlas%20ENT%20teaching%20slides/Atlas%20Anatomy%20of%20the%20nose%20and%20paranasal%20sinuses.pdf

If you'd like to see some images that are more appropriate for younger children, The Children's Hospital Boston has some good images that separate the sinuses from the rest of the nasal system (olfactory).
http://www.childrenshospital.org/az/Site1366/mainpageS1366P0.html

Observations from an amateur meteorologist

When I was in high school, I was one of those kids that liked to do science for fun. So I did science fair projects on weather forecasting. I lived in Oklahoma, where I think everyone becomes an amateur meteorologist. You almost have to. We didn't need the Weather Channel to tell us when a cloud was a wall cloud.

Today my old skills kicked into action when I saw this.

We had a gorgeous day today with beautiful blue skies and unseasonably warm temperatures (over 70 deg F), but it was very windy--for Indiana--and this morning is was over 25 degrees F colder just a couple of hours north of us. All in all, the perfect conditions for a big storm. This cloud type is called a cumulonimbus cloud, and if you look closely, you can see that the winds were really strong in the upper atmosphere.

I was using my camera phone, so the photo wasn't the greatest to show this, but you could see straight lines in the clouds. A lot of times strong upper winds like that lead to hail formation. When I got home, I captured what the radar looked like.

The red area near Anderson is what I captured in the cloud photo. Some of these storms have produced ping-pong size hail. Eeek! Unfortunately my concerns about the upper air winds were correct about the hail. You see, hail form because it's cold enough in the upper part of the cloud for water to freeze, and the wind causes the frozen water to bounce around in the cloud. While the frozen water bounces around, more frozen water accumulates on it. The frozen water continues to bounce around until the wind that's holding it up isn't strong enough to keep the frozen water/hail in the cloud anymore. That's when the hail falls to the ground. This isn't a very diagram, but hopefully it helps you see what I'm talking about.

(In case you're not familiar with severe storm radar, green means light rain, yellow means stronger rain, and red is the strongest. Red not only means strong rain, but also hail and possibly tornadoes if the conditions are right.)

We're continuing to have lots of storm cells like this tonight.  The storm I captured in the photo luckly has started to lose its strength.

My neighborhood has been very lucky. The main storm cell in our county was much stronger just south of my neighborhood. Hopefully no one will have serious damage tonight.

P.S. Sometime I'll talk about why I prefer the Fahrenheit scale for outdoor temperatures. :)

Come Explore the World with Me!

Do you ever think to yourself, "I wonder how that works", but you don't know where to learn more? Maybe you wish you could be a 4-year old again and ask "Why? Why? Why?" about something you've observed, but you don't have anyone to ask. I hope to be your guide into the world of science, the kind of science that's all around you. I'll explore animal behavior by telling stories about my silly dog. I'll talk about botany and meteorology using observations in my backyard. And I'll use field trips and experiments to show you how cool chemistry can be. Who knows what else we might discover together! So stay tuned!