Local optician supports science specialist

You may remember a couple weeks ago I was trying to borrow a pair of polarized sunglasses for the science demo. Our friendly local optician, Mickey Stasey of South Austin Optical ( 4413 Pack Saddle Pass, 447 2333) lent me one for the day. Thanks to him, our kids got to see that a pair of polarized lenses at right angles to each other blocks nearly 100% of a laser beam.

Re-usability, and Weekly World News

It was neat to re-use something I built awhile ago for a home demo. A questioner in Silver Surfers had asked How Do Bodies Move. When my li'l one asked me that a couple years ago, I cobbled together a human arm out of two pieces of scrap lumber, a few nuts and bolts, and some string. The pieces of wood represented humerus and ulna, and the pieces of string represented bicep and tricep. When you tighten one of the strings, the lower arm flexes or extends accordingly. I left this model in the classroom for all to try.

The K class had asked about trilobytes - - very convenient as I have a lovely trilobite fossil at home (technically, I borrow the trilobyte fossil that belongs to my daughter). The question had been How Much Does a Trilobyte Fossil Weigh (that group has been asking about two things all year: 1. How much does x weigh, 2. What does the inside of x look like). So we weighed it (1706g). I was about to remark that trilobytes came in many sizes, when a teeny voice piped up "trilobytes come in many sizes". So I agreed, and was about to remark as a general interest item that trilobytes were the first animals to have eyes, when the same teeny voice piped up "trilobytes were the first animals to have eyes".

This week began a new classroom feature, Science News Story of the Week. Every week I receive my Science magazine from the AAAS, a somewhat frustrating process because it usually has about a month's worth of good reading, so that amounts to about 52 months' worth of reading material per year. Anyway, my challenge to myself is to find at least one article each week that can be explained to persons under 9 years old. For the K class, who have been asking about black holes all year, the winner was an article about a gigantic pair of black holes orbiting each other at a distance of 6 billion light years from earth. This where a different teeny voice started piping up from another part of the classroom. Apparently these kids have been reading Science magazine ahead of me or something. He already knew that there was an orbiting pair of black holes, and he even knew that the orbit was expected to collapse in a fabulous explosion in a few thousand years. Apparently the orbital instability is caused by a distortion of space time due to the extreme gravitational force. I'm not clear on the math here, and I probably should have pressed the student for more details ...

Science news of the week for SilverSurfers was about a new approach to selective breeding of corn. It seems that the gene segment that encodes for high vitamin A content has been identified, so now we can go ahead and grow super-nutritious corn -- not by GMO methods, which have their problems, but by good old fashioned selective breeding. But the selection process can be sped up by simply testing the DNA of all your plants rather than waiting for harvest and trying to assay the vitamin A content itself. I don't think the whole story went over completely, but I am pretty sure everybody got the concept of selective breeding and its effect on agriculture.