Life!?

There are probably many blog entries with that titles out there, about many different things, most of which are probably complaining about the awful day someone had, but this blog entry is not about that. No, this entry was inspired by an astronomy lab that I did on Wednesday, where we discussed the characteristics of life and whether or not certain things were alive or not. Here are some of the characteristics the two other members of my lab group and I came up with, with the help of the professor:

• being born and dying
• growing and developing
• evolving
• responding to stimulus
• consuming nutrients, turning it into energy, and excreting waste
• interacting with its environment
• being made of living cells
• having re-production as a goal
• possessing unique DNA

I would like to do the same sort of exercise as it pertains to one of my favourite substances of all time. It has been called by many names: magic mud, oobleck, non-Newtonian fluid (basically corn starch and water).  I prefer the term "goop" as it is the one that I grew up with.The reason it is one of my favorite substances is because it's a paradox and I love paradoxes. It's basically a metaphor for life. We won't get into that right now, but that is why I decided to use it for this question of what is alive and what isn't.
Goop is created and it can decay, so that is kind of like dying. I suppose it doesn't grow and develop, unless you count the mixing and the decaying. It doesn't evolve, really. It definitely responds to stimulus. The cornstarch may soak up the water and then the water may evaporate but the goop does not turn that into energy which is a key step. I want to say it does interact with it's environment because I feel like it would react differently in different environments that include different stimuli. While it is very likely that the water in goop contains some bacteria, I wouldn't say that goop is made of living cells, since if you somehow removed all of those bacteria, then it would still be goop. I doubt that goop has reproduction as a goal; I've never asked it, but I doubt it. And obviously, goop does not possess it's own unique set of DNA.
In conclusion, as most of you probably hypothesized, goop is not a living thing. I thought this was probably the case, however according these characteristics neither would God be, and if there is a God, then I think it would be a Goop God.

*Gasp!* Maybe it is alive!

Maria Face

Disclaimer #1: I apologize for the brevity of this blog entry; this week, it is unrealistic to expect myself to be able to write more. 
Disclaimer #2: The content of this blog entry is a little bit on the gross side. I apologize for that too.

Dreams of Space

When we are little kids, so many people ask us what we want to be when we grow up. These people assume that we have no knowledge of the economy, the education necessary, or the real working conditions of said employment. Their assumptions are usually correct. For us, the possibilities are endless. 
I would put forth that as young adults and...not as young adults, we still have these inclinations at the back of our minds, even if they may be stifled by worries about school and money.
I will tell you that for me, there are two jobs that it would be amazing to occupy. In a world without these obstacles, perhaps I would be chasing these dreams right now. I am not, however, and mostly likely I never will.

The first of these is contemporary dancer. I love watching So You Think You Can Dance, especially the contemporary performances. The way the dancers use their bodies to express emotion, convey ideas and transmit experiences is beautiful and inspiring. Moving across the stage, they look so free. I would love to be that free.
However, I quit ballet class when I was eight or nine and then I moved and the classes in the city were much to expensive. As the years passed I gravitated toward my other interests,as if the mass of those other passions was greater, and the rotation faster than my love of dancing. Sorry, I had too.
Anyway, the second position that I can only occupy in my dreams in astronaut. As you probably already know, becoming an astronaut takes years and years. First you have to study a lot of science, which is just plain not an option for me and my brain. Then you being your rigorous training. For that you need to be super healthy, which I am not really. The third obstacle to my becoming an astronaut is fear of space. That's right, I have a fear of space. 

Then why on earth (haha, get it?), you might be asking, is she taking an astronomy course and writing a blog about it? Why would she ever want to be an astronaut? Well, ladies and gentlemen, it is because that fear is coupled with an intense fascination. It is still there, however. There's something about the shear vastness of the universe, and how little we know about it. I would be afraid of getting lost in it. Also, that episode of The Magic School Bus where Arnold's head freezes didn't help much; even as a kid I knew there was no way they could have just thawed him out like they did on the show and have him be fine and dandy.
So, since I will never actually go into space, I would like to find out a little bit more about what it would be like if I did.

Most people are familiar with the "weightlessness" that astronauts experience, but have you ever really thought hard about all the implications of that weightlessness? First of all, astronauts have to sleep strapped in into their bed, with their beds strapped to walls, so they don't just float around and bump into stuff. It makes eating pretty interesting as well. Those things are kind of amusing but there are also some legitimate health issues that arise without gravity. In space, since the muscles don't need to exert themselves to counteract gravity (by walking, or picking things up, or just moving around), the muscles start to deteriorate. To keep this from being too much of a problem, astronauts have to spend several hours a day exercising. Also, since no weight is being put on the bones, astronauts often suffer from bone loss which can increase risk of breaking or fracturing. Furthermore, lack of gravity means a lot of the blood ends up rising to the head which--as you know if you've ever hung upside down for a while, say watching an episode of Little Bear--can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea. It's not good for you. The rest of your body needs that blood, I'm pretty sure. The up side of all of this though, is that before these effects started to take their toll, one could probably do some pretty amazing contemporary dancing if they weighed nothing.

Those aren't the things that would scare me most about going into space, however. What scares me most is the possibility of there being some kind of accident--something failing to work, something exploding, something detaching. Accidents in space are usually a big deal; the wearing away of insulation around a wire in the Apollo Saturn in 1967 caused the deaths of three astronauts when it sparked and set the craft on fire; in 1971 a valve accidentally opened on the Soyuz 11 mission and the whole crew was asphyxiated; in The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster of 1986, all seven crew members were killed when the spacecraft broke apart over the Atlantic ocean, seconds after taking off.
So, do I think it's worth it to go into space with all of these dangers? Yes, absolutely. I'm just not going to do it.
So, in closing, the moral of this blog post is...follow your dreams, if you've got the guts.

SOURCES

http://www.esa.int/esaKIDSen/SEM6TIWJD1E_LifeinSpace_0.html

http://www.esa.int/esaKIDSen/SEMOD6XDE2E_LifeinSpace_0.html
http://www.esa.int/esaKIDSen/SEMSC6XDE2E_LifeinSpace_0.html
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/space/lectures/lec12.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11#Death_of_crew
http://www.lifeaftercubes.com/2010/08/10/finding-a-hobby-in-korea/cdldancers_018c2l-775510/
http://egotvonline.com/2011/06/03/astronaut-spacewalk-pictures/
http://www.iafastro.net/index.php?id=911
http://www.wreckedexotics.com/articles/011.shtml

Seismology: A Lesson in Curiosity

Back in high school--cause I can talk about high school now, like it's in the past--I had this teacher. He is crazy, terrifying and wonderful in many ways, and I love him and am terrified of him at the same time. He is a good teacher in many ways, to spite how frightening he can be. However, I'm going to tell you a story that has nothing to do with either of those opposing qualities. 
One of the classes I had this guy for was Geographie Planetaire (Global Geography), in the last semester of grade twelve. One afternoon--or morning, I don't remember--we were learning about the layers of the earth. I had adopted a pesky habit the previous school year of constantly questioning supposedly absolute knowledge, which often involved playing devil's advocate, not to mention annoying a lot of people. 

So, suddenly as I sat there listening to him teach, I thought 'Wait a minute!'. My hand shot into the air, and when he eventually turned away from the board where he had been illustrating as he spoke, he answered my hand. I asked him how we could know what was on the inside of the earth. After a few moments of silence, during which he looked at me with a familiar expression of irritation, he uttered dismissively "Well, it's a scientific fact." Then he went back to drawing.


It's a scientific fact.


As mentioned, this blog is an extra credit assignment for a university Astronomy course. This past week we were on the unit pertaining to earth and the moon, and I found out the answer to my question.

The answer is seismology. "Seismology is  is the study of earthquakes and seismic waves that move through and around the earth." according the Michigan Technology University. Basically seismologists measure the seismic waves from earthquakes and things (So, the energy that they give off) when they occur on one part of the planet and then measure them at various other places on the globe. They observe how the waves have been changed or distorted and that can tell them about the density and amount of matter they've had to travel through. It makes sense, doesn't it?

SOURCES

Professor Edward's Lecture on The Earth and the Moon for Solar System Astronomy at Mount Allison University

http://www.geo.mtu.edu/UPSeis/waves.html

We're Doomed. What Now?

Disclaimer: I want to be clear that this post does not look at the arrival of the year 2012 as a possible way that the world could end, because as far as i know there isn't any specific scientific reason why it would happen simply due to that exact date. However if one were operating under that assumption, the thoughts and opinions expressed in this entry would still apply, so please continue reading.

The One We've All Been Waiting For: Is There Life On Other Planets?

Let us get the junk out of the way first, shall we? Crop circles: easily fabricated. U.F.O sightings: U.F.O doesn't mean space ship, it means Unidentified Fly Object, meaning an object that is in the sky, and that you can't be sure what it exactly it is. It's just not enough for me. Alien abductions: -insert list of hallucinogenic drugs and appropriate disorders here-.
Next, I'm going to briefly discuss my general theory about the existence of life on other planets, which does not include any research, but does however, include common sense and a lot of thought. The universe is... enormous. More so than we can possibly conceive of. I can't see how we  could be the only planet in the entire universe with any form of live. I feel as though the assumption that we are the only life forms in the universe would be the equivalent to the Europeans, knowing that the world was roughly as large as it is and still maintaining--without many excursions outside of Europe--that they were the only people on the planet.

Now for some actual evidence. It just so happens that there has been some further discovery in this area by NASA as of late. 54 of the 1,200 planets recently discovered orbiting distant stars are both relatively the same size as earth and are "habitable zones from their suns", which of course means they aren't so close that life forms would burn to death, nor so far away that they would freeze. I think that's the biggest (and most reliable) evidence I found about extraterrestrial life existing in general, but there are many other smaller pieces of evidence that I came a cross, mostly on this website. Upon reading a few of the articles I decided they were too controversial to spend a lot of time on here. Especially since I'm not super educated on this stuff  and I'm also very gullible, so I don't trust my own judgement on the legitimacy of such things, but feel free to check it out and draw your own conclusions.
As for those out there who live in fear of Aliens taking over our planet, here is some more of my general theorizing: Even the controversial evidence that I glanced at mostly involved microbes, bacteria, plant life and other things like that. Plus, even if there were beings out there of the same level or more intelligence than average humans, I actually paranoia about an Alien take over is probably based off of the same (figurative) geocentric view of the universe. If there are such societies out there among the stars, what makes us think they would be spending all there time, energy, and alien currency figuring out the technology and planning that would be necessarily for that? Don't they have their own alien world issues to worry about? This is even more unlikely when we consider how much we've damaged our planet and used up it's natural resources. We should probably stop flattering ourselves and quit worrying so much about it.

SOURCES

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8337518/Life-on-other-planets-latest-discovery-comes-after-string-of-recent-signs-of-extraterrestrials.html 

Black Holes

Now, the subject for this week's blog is fairly straight forward compared to my previous entries. Along with my original mandate, there are also a few questions about astronomy that have just been nagging at me for years, so every once in a while I might differ from my usual more exploratory approach and just go straight for the answer. This, my friends, is one of those times.

Black holes. Does anyone really know what they are? As a kid I remember hearing two things about back holes: One was that if you got too close to one, you would split apart into a million pieces, and the other was that if yo got sucked into one you would be spit back out, having aged like 90 years. We never really talked about them when we touched on black holes in astronomy in elementary school, and I always assumed that this was due to the fact that the administration had deemed them much too menacing to introduce into our curriculum. I mean just listen to the sound of it in your head: BLLAAACK HOOOLE! It just gives you shivers, doesn't it? Especially for those of us with trypophobia (don't look it up). Well, I'm a big girl now, and I want to know the scoop.
So, here's the scoop: "We're talking about something that is so dense, it is made out of pure gravity," says Justice Jones, my best friend in the whole wide world, to summarize his explanation of black holes. He speculated that the first theory I had heard about black holes as a child was legitimate, since the pull of the gravity of a black hole on the atoms of one's body would be greater than that of the atoms on each other, thus drawing them all separately into the center of the black hole. Now, you're probably thinking 'Come one, this girls BFF is not a scholarly source for scientific information'. Well, I will have you know that A: He practically is, and B: I did do some actual research. 

So, a star that is at least 10 to 15 times larger than the sun goes supernova, it leaves behind a huge mess of dust and gas and things. If there isn't any forces outside this former star, opposing the gravitational pull of that stuff, then it all just collapses in on itself...and it just keeps collapsing until it has zero volume and infinite density. I'm not kidding. I got this from the NASA site and everything. So, the gravity of this thing is so strong that even light can't escape it. That's why it is called a black hole. 
Are you any less scared of black holes now? Yeah, me neither.
But don't worry! You actually have to be pretty close to a black hole to get sucked into it. Specifically, you'd have to cross into the Shwarzchild radius. Say, for example, that our sun was a black hole, we would have to be 3km away from it to get sucked in, and the nearest black hole is many, many light years away. Relax.
Will the universe eventually get entirely consumed by black holes? In this unscientific, uneducated bloggers humble and un-researched opinion: Yes. And then we'll have another big bang and then it happen all over again, and so on, and so forth.
So, that's the story on black holes.

SOURCES

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l2/black_holes.html

http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/black_holes/home.html

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/blackhole.html
http://scinewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/simulated-black-holes.html