While discussing polar exploration, I mentioned the story of Amundsen and Scott’s race for the south pole. The fascinating blog, Letters of Note, has Scott’s last letter, written bit by bit, on the ice, to his wife back home. It starts, “To: my widow.”
Photograph of Scott's (far left) expedition at the South Pole, on 17 January 1912, the day after they discovered Amundsen had reached the pole first. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)
P.S. Letters of Note is a great resource for examples of great letter writing.
One of my students is working on a personal project on ice dogs and how they aid polar exploration today and in the past. Amazingly, dogs are still used in expeditions that spend the winter on the ice, as shown in the video from the Tara expedition of 2006 (hat tip to Ryan):
NPR’s Planet Money has a nice story on why gold is used for money. They take the entire periodic table of elements and eliminate the ones that don’t work because they’re too reactive, a gas, too common, or too toxic. You’re left with five precious metals, rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold, but only one of them has a low enough melting temperature so that it can be worked easily and is not ridiculously rare.
Also, Tony Clayton has a wonderful webpage on Metals Used in Coins and Medals. It has some fascinating details about the history of these metals and their alloys in coinage. For example, “In Old English the Latin word aes was rendered as brass, thus the use of the word brass to mean money still found today, especially in Northern England. “
Last year, for an IRP, one of my students did the experiment measuring the speed of light (and the wavelength of the waves) using marshmellows in a microwave. The video above (via Gizmodo) shows the pattern of the microwaves using some neon lights embedded in plastic. The video below, from MythBusters, shows superheated water in action; something I demo every time I make tea-water in the microwave.
Tips and links range from how to start a writing bible, to the correct writing posture. I’m partial to tip on how to turn your computer into a typewriter, although it’s something that’s never worked for me:
The free Q10 program will convert your distracting computer into an old-fashioned typewriter–focused by real typing sounds and disconnected from the Internet.
-Boog (2010) in GalleyCat
Discover Magazine has a great article summarizing the evidence for life on Mars. It’s long because it goes into a lot of detail examines quite a variety of possibilities, but it ties quite nicely in with the questions we are asking about what is life and where it can be found.
The article also mentions a study titled, “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems” produced by the National Research Council for NASA. It can be found for free online, with an associated podcast that much more accessible to middle schoolers. The report is extremely open to the possibility that extra-terrestrial life exists, and could exist even without water and might even be silicon based.
The Tibetian Plateau. Image from the satellite Landsat 5 via the Eros Image Gallery.
For the geography nerds, but perhaps also for those with an appreciation of the natural beauty of the world. The US Geological Survey has a series of satellite pictures chosen just for their sheer beauty.
The Landsat satellites that take these pictures usually photograph in more than just the human-visible color spectrum. For many geologic and environmental purposes, different infra-red wavelengths are often better for seeing details on the Earth’s surface. The USGS has a nice primer on the Landsat program. Many of the color images posted here were reconstructed from different color bands.
The resulting images can be exceptionally beautiful and somewhat surreal. I like that there is an abstract surface beauty, divorced from the content, meaning and understanding that a closer analysis of the images yields to the eye of the trained observer: delicate swirls of algae might be signs of eutrophication to a biologist; dendritic deltas tell the geologist about sediment load, offshore currents and mass balance.
Phytoplankton bloom around the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea is reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Image from Landsat 7.
