The Inauguration of Barack Obama

On Tuesday, January 20, 2009, President-elect Barack Obama was sworn into office as the first African-American president. I found two articles about Barack Obama' Inauguration speech and what it was like to be there on that day. The first article talks about how this Inauguration is supposedly the most green one in the history of the United States but is not really what it seems. 

As I said above, the first article I found talks about how this Inauguration is supposed to be the greenest in the history of the United States but is actually one of the most CO2 producing Inauguration. This is because of all the cars and private jets flying down to Washington for this historical event. The article states that "the millions of people coming to the inauguration will generate a half-billion pounds of carbon dioxide — 260 million pounds from the 600 private jets that will come to Washington, and another 260 million pounds from personal vehicles." It also says "the pollution amounts to more than 575 million pounds of CO2, which would take the average U.S. household 57,598 years to produce." Now that's a lot of CO2 produced. If this is supposed to be the greenest inauguration in history shouldn't there be no CO2 produced?

The second article I found talks about how Obama's Inauguration was the second most watched out of all the other presidents. The one with the most people tuned in on their televisions was Ronald Reagan' with 41.8 million people tuned in. Obama had 37.8 million people watching his Inauguration. The article states that "viewers for Obama's inauguration is 27% higher than that of Bill Clinton's in 1993 and 30% more than George Bush's in 2001. Right under Obama's inauguration rating is that of Jimmy Carter in 1977 with 34.1 million viewers, followed by Richard Nixon in 1973 with 33 million. Meanwhile, the least watched inauguration would be George W. Bush's second one in 2005 that withdrew only 15.5 million." I think that second place is an amazing achievement.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,480470,00.html

http://www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00021428.html

Hydrogen in the making!

Hydrogen? What is hydrogen? What are its uses? Well I'll tell you all about that. Hydrogen is in fact one of the simplest elements known to man! With hydrogen we can power cars instead of using gas. Already, cars have been shown to be able to run on hydrogen and some have been created! With hydrogen there will be no pollution and since we can now make more of it we will never run out. The scientists at Penn State University have found a way to make hydrogen. I have learned from the article that when aluminum clusters are synthesized, they can generate hydrogen on demand without the need to store it! That means that whenever you need hydrogen it can be made in just an instant but with the right equipment of course. This would help in global warming and pollution. There is one problem here though. Hydrogen explosions are extremely dangerous and if a car crashed with another the explosion can be disastrous! This is why hydrogen cars are not being put on sale yet.

My sources are: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090122141230.htm

The Melting of the Artic!

As we all know in recent years the Artic has been suffering because of global warming. Global warming is causing the ice to melt in the Artic. The heat from global warming is caused by greenhouse gases that come out of  power plants and other man made gas emitters around the world. Others think it is caused by natural occurences. In fact, the Artic has been heating up much faster then the rest of the world! Why should we care about what happens to the Artic? Well the reason is because the Artic distributes heat around the world because of ocean currents. Since the Artic is melting the water around it is becoming less salty and dense which weakens the distribution of heat. If this were to happen some areas on the Earth may get colder even though it is called Global Warming.

http://green.yahoo.com/global-warming/ed-28/the-arctic-losing-its-cool.html

Symbiotic Relationships

For a while now we have been learning about symbiotic relationships within the Omega unit! Symbiotic relationships is the relationship two close organisms have with each other. Some examples are the oxpecker (a kind of bird) and the rhinoceros. Oxpeckers land on rhinos and eat ticks and other parasites that live on their skin. The oxpeckers get food and the beasts get pest control. In class we had to do a project about symbiotic relationships. We had to take a picture of a symbiotic relationship. I did mine on head lice on a humans. That is a parasitic relationship because the human gets harmed. I had a fun time taking the picture and I hope to do a project like this one again.

Supermassive black hole says sayonara

A supermassive black hole was removed from its galaxy by a burst of gravitational radiation. Researchers state that black holes around this size and bigger can actually be ejected from their own galaxy where they were created.  Some evidence suggests that not only every large galaxy houses a supermassive black hole at its core, but that a galaxy’s center of stars grows in lockstep with the mass of the black hole. I think this is very interesting because it would improve our understandings of galactic formations. I also did not know that it was possible for a galaxy to eject something from itself. I thought this because of the large amount of gravity within a galaxy which keeps everything within itself intact and inside its perimeter. This event has one problem with it. The scientists also found a strange third emission line, which leaves a big question mark on their work. I found out that an emission lines are photons reemitted in a narrow frequency range from gas that are not in their original photon source. "The strange third emission line is also narrow but bluer in color than the other narrow line." I also found this interesting because the two colors show that they may be looking at the position of two separate quasars that have similar but not identical distances. What that means is that if this is true then the thought of a recoiling black hole would not be correct. It would be devastating if the recoiling black hole was incorrect because this event would help us understand a lot of things.

I got this information from:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/download/id/31611/name/Kicked_to_the_curb

NASA Spacecraft Ready To Explore Outer Solar System

Yesterday, NASA launched its first spacecraft to image and map the dynamic interactions taking place where the hot solar wind slams into the cold expanse of space. It will start its two-year mission at Kwajalein Atoll which is a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The spacecraft is called IBEX which stands for Interstellar Boundary Explorer. The spacecraft will conduct high-altitude orbits above Earth to investigate and take pictures of processes taking place at the farthest reaches of the solar system. Known as the interstellar boundary, this area marks where the solar system meets interstellar space. The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into Earth's orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous," said David J. McComas, IBEXs principal investigator. Other spacecraft have continued the exploration of the interstellar boundary region. Recently, a pair of NASA sun-focused satellites detected a higher-energy version of the particles IBEX will observe in the heliosphere. The heliosphere is an region that contains the solar wind. It stretches from the sun to a distance several times the orbit of Pluto. "What makes the IBEX mission unique is that it has an extra kick during launch. An extra solid-state motor pushes the spacecraft further out of low-Earth orbit where the Pegasus launch vehicle leaves it" stated Willis Jenkins, IBEX program executive at NASA Headquarters. The IBEX mission is the next in NASA's series of low-cost, rapidly developed Small Explorers spacecraft. The mission was developed by Southwest Research Institute with national and international partner participation. IBEX is poised to thoroughly map this interstellar boundary region of the solar system. The pictures will let scientists understand the global interaction between our sun and the galaxy for the very first time.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/ExploringTheOuterSolarSystem.html

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/280780main_LandDLg.jpg

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