Starfish Ages

Link to the information page!

This blog is a class response blog from when I was told that in order to tell a starfish's age you looked at its "rings". Although I know this was a joke, I've decided to investigate how you actually tell a sea star's age. You can tell the age based on diet, growth rate, reproductive system and how many arms it has. When it is in the younger stages of life, the sea star might not have as many arms as it would when it gets older. For example, when the starfish is under six months old, it may have three or four arms. However, as it ages, it might gain more. Also, as it gets older, like most animals, the sea star becomes more sexually mature. The diet also matures from it's original feeding habits of algae and eggs, to coral, and then into more adult foods. But in the later years of it's life, reproduction lessens and the growth rate falls dramatically. More to the point, that is the actual way to tell a sea star's age.

Frozen Mars robot

The article

In May of 2008 NASA sent Mars lander Phoenix to gather information on the red planet. However, they are not sure if Phoenix survived the Martian winter, and are hoping to receive evidence that it has thawed and back up and running. Some of Phoenix's successes include that it has:

- Seen snow falling on Mars
-"tasted" Martian water dug up from the ground

and perhaps one of the most exciting is that it may have seen liquid water as salty drops on its own leg. NASA will also ping Phoenix to see if they will receive a response. Also, the Spirit rover is stuck on Mars, and after 6 years of activity, might be on the verge of death. The upcoming Mars project, the Curiosity rover, is incessantly encountering technical issues. There is also a large chance that Phoenix will not rise again. But according to Chad Edwards, who works on the rovers, "We owe it to the lander, for all the good science it did, to give it a shot." I agree with Edwards, and I hope all will be worked out with the different rovers.

Chemical Educator

A chemical educator is interviewed 8D

http://omegapride.podomatic.com/player/web/2009-12-15T11_46_43-08_00

Noticing Changes in Matter (class responce)

Recently in class we completed a lab on changes in matter. We took a sugar cube and wrote down our observations using all of our senses, including taste! After we wrote down the observations we looked at the sugar cube under a microscope. It looked like a bunch of snowflakes gathered up in a cube. Then we crushed the sugar cube until it was a powder. Afterwords we looked at the powder under the microscope, and it looked like crystals. We mixed the powder into a glass of water, and the sugar disolved inside the water. I thought this lab was a lot of fun, especially when I got to lick the sugar cube.

Spam, Viruses and Smartphones- Oh my!

Original Article

The noun definition of spam verbatim is a disruptive, esp. commercial message posted on a computer network or sent as e-mail. Well, it isn't just computers getting these annoying little qwirks anymore. As said in the deffinition, spam is sent through e-mail, and these new smartphones, such as the Blackberry, iPhone, and others all have e-mail. So, if you can send a virus or send spam to a computer through e-mail, why not a phone? This is exactly what hackers everywhere are thinking in their evil-doing minds. Smartphones are becomming more and more popular, thus there are more smartphones to hack then there are computers. In fact, more than 139 million smartphones were sold worldwide, which a 13.9 percent increase from 2007. Experts say that the attacks became more popular when the smartphones began to go from just simply e-mail checking and calling to paying bills, doing taxes, facebook, twitter, and more. So those of you with smartphones: Don't click any suspicious links, because you arn't the 1,000,000,000th visitor, and the only prize you're about to get is a nice virus. And who wants that?

Tiny T-Rex Discovered in China

About 150 million years ago, a creature unknown to human kind until this moment in time walked prehistoric China. It was a little T-Rex, called the Raptorex, although it is thought to have existed 60 million years before the Tyrant Lizard King. An adult Raptorex was about 9 feet tall and weighed about 150 pounds. The Raptorex weighed about almost 100 times less then a T-rex, is about 1/100th of a size. The discovery of this new dinosaur was completely unexpected, and scientists are still in shock at the Raptorex. I feel that this is in amazing discovery, and I hope that we can find more discoveries like it soon







By Azadeh Ansari
CNN

October Sky

I recently watched the movie October Sky in school. I brief outlook of the movie can be found here. There were many connections to science in this movie, such as it had to do with Astronomy, which plays a big role in the science community. In fact, the main character, Homer Hickam, became an astronaut trainer at NASA(National Aeronautics and Space Administration). It had math connections as well, which were highlighted when Homer figured out that they(his friends and himself), could not have started a fire that they were accused of.


What I thought: I guess it was OK. It wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but then again, the best movie I've ever seen was Dark Knight, and nothing can beat that. Not even the ever-annoying "twilight". But anyway, October Sky was a little boring. It's not a movie I would want to watch again, but overall, it was all right.