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STAY CURIOUS!!!

This page is devoted to the daily questions our ladies have asked....See Anna's responses and links below.

LANL Visit Questions:

  • Vivien, Scott

One of the girls asked the following question and I was wondering if you would like to address it: "understanding how a generator that big powers a magnet, like what's the different things it does in order to power"

The generator is very similar to the little generators we played with during the summer camp. It has three magnets that rotate inside a coil of wire. The moving magnets creates electricity in a coil of wire, which in turn powers the magnet.

We need the generator because the power grid can’t deliver as much energy as we need quickly enough. So we gather energy off the power grid slowly for an hour and store it, and then deliver it to the magnet in a second.

We gather that energy by using a motor to slowly spin up the generator. Energy is stored in the rotation of its massive shaft. Then we turn around and deliver that energy in the form of electricity to the magnets in just a second.

Our magnets use only a little bit of energy (the biggest magnets use as much as my house does in a day for each 1 second pulse from 0 to 100 Tesla and back to 0). But the power the magnets use (how fast energy is delivered) is as much as an entire city.

Cassini mission with video links: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/mission/about-the-mission/

Elisa Quintana (NASA): https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/313/elisa-quintana/

Margaret Hamilton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)

Why is nitrogen the dominant gas in our atmosphere? What happened to the other gases from the early atmosphere? http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=143

Why do some planets have rings? Why do none of the inner planets have any? http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=158

Can you freeze air? http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=219

Lots of cool explanations about all sorts of things: https://www.scienceline.ucsb.edu/search.php

Hubert Van Hecke- Mr Science website: http://users.hubwest.com/hubert/mrscience/science1.html

Women Nobel Prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Nobel_laureates

Women in STEM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_STEM_fields

-Question: Although Global warming is happening, why are some areas in the world getting colder?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/01/30/this-is-why-global-warming-is-responsible-for-freezing-temperatures-across-the-usa/#34272b0ed8cf

“When the vortex at the north pole becomes extremely weak, the high pressure zones found in the middle latitudes of Earth (where the westerlies are) can push towards the poles, displacing the cold air. This causes the polar vortex to move farther south. In addition, the jet stream buckles, and deviates towards more populous, southern latitudes. As the cold, dry air from the poles comes in contact with the warm, moist air of the mid-latitudes, you get a dramatic weather change that we conventionally refer to as a cold snap.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/climate-change-colder-winters-global-warming-polar-vortex/

“First, it's important to understand the difference between climate and weather. Climate is defined as the average weather patterns in a region over a long period of time.”

“Scientists believe Earth will experience more extreme, disastrous weather as the effects of climate change play out.”

“As more Arctic air flows into southern regions, North America can expect to see harsher winters. That was the conclusion of a study published in 2017 in the journal Nature Geoscience. It found a link between warmer Arctic temperatures and colder North American winters. A separate study published in March of last year in the journal Nature Communications found the same link but predicted the northeastern portion of the U.S. would be particularly hard hit.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2986#f4

“Warming temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere have enhanced terrestrial productivity. Despite the warming trend, North America has experienced more frequent and more intense cold weather events during winters and springs. These events have been linked to anomalous Arctic warming since 1990, and may affect terrestrial processes. Here we analyse multiple observation data sets and numerical model simulations to evaluate links between Arctic temperatures and primary productivity in North America. We find that positive springtime temperature anomalies in the Arctic have led to negative anomalies in gross primary productivity over most of North America during the last three decades, which amount to a net productivity decline of 0.31 PgC yr−1 across the continent. This decline is mainly explained by two factors: severe cold conditions in northern North America and lower precipitation in the South Central United States. In addition, United States crop-yield data reveal that during years experiencing anomalous warming in the Arctic, yields declined by approximately 1 to 4% on average, with individual states experiencing declines of up to 20%. We conclude that the strengthening of Arctic warming anomalies in the past decades has remotely reduced productivity over North America”

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6172/729

“a rise in global mean temperature will almost certainly lead to an increase in the incidence of record high temperatures. Global warming also leads to increases in atmospheric water vapor, which increases the likelihood of heavier rainfall events that may cause flooding. Rising temperatures over land lead to increased evaporation, which renders crops more susceptible to drought. As the atmosphere and oceans warm, sea water expands and glaciers and ice sheets melt. In response, global sea-level rises, increasing the threat of coastal inundation during storms.”

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2012GL051000

“two hypothesized mechanisms by which Arctic amplification – enhanced Arctic warming relative to that in mid‐latitudes – may cause more persistent weather patterns in mid‐latitudes that can lead to extreme weather. One effect is a reduced poleward gradient in 1000‐500 hPa thicknesses, which weakens the zonal upper‐level flow. According to Rossby wave theory, a weaker flow slows the eastward wave progression and tends to follow a higher amplitude trajectory, resulting in slower moving circulation systems. More prolonged weather conditions enhance the probability for extreme weather due to drought, flooding, cold spells, and heat waves. The second effect is a northward elongation of ridge peaks in 500 hPa waves, which amplifies the flow trajectory and further exacerbates the increased probability of slow‐moving weather patterns. While Arctic amplification during autumn and winter is largely driven by sea‐ice loss and the subsequent transfer of additional energy from the ocean into the high‐latitude atmosphere, the increasing tendency for high‐amplitude patterns in summer is consistent with enhanced warming over high‐latitude land caused by earlier snow melt and drying of the soil.”

“We find that a warmer Arctic atmosphere contributes to dilated geopotential heights locally accompanied by lower heights across mid-latitudes and an equatorward-shifted jet stream. This allows Arctic airmasses to expand farther south while increasing the likelihood of heavy snowfalls. We find a distinction between early winter, when Arctic warming tends to affect only the lower troposphere, and mid-winter to late-winter when polar cap geopotential height anomalies is evident throughout the troposphere and lower stratosphere. When the entire Arctic atmospheric column is affected, the probability of severe winter weather in mid-latitudes increases, as observed during the era of AA in late winter. Colder Arctic conditions elicit the opposite response. These findings suggest that the continuation of rapid Arctic warming and melting contribute to more frequent episodes of severe winter across the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude continents.”

Dan Reisenfeld answered some of your questions:

1) Q: do tsunamis and earthquakes happen in space?” I am taking it to mean do they happen on other planets or moons. Of the planets and moons in our solar system, Earth is the only one with tsunamis, at least in recent geologic times. Other planets have been measured to have small seismic activity, in particular Mars definitely has “Marsquakes”, although much smaller than on Earth. In fact there is a mission on Mars right now called InSight, whose function is to look for Marsquakes. A moon of Jupiter, Io, has active volcanoes (the only other place in the solar system to have them besides Earth), and so likely there are quakes on Io, too. Venus could also have quakes, but we’ve never had instruments on Venus to measure them. It is about the same size as the Earth and could very well have platectonics, like on Earth, which would give rise to quakes.

2)Q: What gives the planets their colors? A: The reason depends on the planet.

  • Mercury and the Earth’s Moon (I know, not a planet, but kinda prominent in our sky) are grayish because they have no atmosphere and have surfaces covered with grayish rock, sand and dust made up mostly of silica and calcium which are whitish/grey in color.
  • Venus is yellow because its atmosphere has lots of sulfur in it (which is yellow).
  • The Earth is blue-green, because well, oceans and plants.
  • Mars is “red” (really orange) because the rocks on its surface have a lot of iron oxide (literally rust) in them. If you look at the Sahara desert from space, it too looks reddish because of all the iron in the Earth’s crust. So if the Earth were bare of water and plants, it would look a lot like Mars.
  • The outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are all gas giants with atmospheres made up mostly of hydrogen. The colors, though, come from the trace particles in their atmospheres. There are lots of ammonia, phosphorous and methane crystals in their atmosphere that reflect different colors depending on their concentrations and temperatures. Since the outer planets are at different distances from the Sun, the colors are different for the different planets because their temperatures are so different.
  • How do planets get those colors? http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1088

Here are a couple of videos that review the topics we worked on today:

Electricty and Magnetism

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFAOXdXZ5TM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru032Mfsfig

How does electricity work? http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=255

How did electricity start: http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=400

How does the atomic structure influence the PH?

https://study.com/academy/lesson/how-acid-base-structure-affect-ph-pk-values.html

“Acids exist in an equilibrium with their conjugate base. The strength of the acid (pKa) depends on the stability of the base. When the proton leaves the acid, it leaves behind its electrons. Those are super negative and there is a big negative charge on the conjugate base.

You know that if there is a concentrated negative charge, the base is not very stable. However, if the charge can be spread out, then the base is more stable, which means we have a stronger acid.“

“the stronger acid has a more stable base. One thing that influences base stability is the size of the ion. A larger ion can accommodate a negative charge better. Imagine that the charge has more 'room' to spread out.

Luckily, we can use periodic trends to predict the size of the ion. This means we can predict the more stable base and therefore, the stronger acid. Ion size increases as we go from top to bottom of a column on the periodic table. (Ion size also increases from right to left, but that does not influence base stability due to electronegativity, which we'll talk about in a moment). “