Despite the fact that methane is a powerful greenhouse gas itself and burning it produces carbon dioxide there is currently quite a bit of research on extracting methane hydrates from the sea floor as an alternative to the traditional fossil fuels because there is just so much of it. Discovery Channel has an interesting video on the topic where they burn some methane hydrate ice.
Methane releases from the arctic and sea-floor could also trigger rapid climate change. Recent discoveries suggest that global warming is warming the arctic so much that the permafrost is melting an releasing a lot of methane into the atmosphere. If the arctic atmosphere continues to warm, more methane will be released, causing more warming …. This positive feedback loop would accelerate global warming. Some scientists worry that warmer ocean waters can melt methane hydrates at the sea floor releasing them into the atmosphere in a similar positive feedback loop.
How do solar cells (photovoltaic cells) work? There are very simple explanations, but you can probably find a video with any level of complexity you might want.
This video from the U.S. Department of Energy is fairly general and makes a nice introduction:
The assimilation of viral sequences into the host genome is a process referred to as endogenization. This occurs when viral DNA integrates into a chromosome of reproductive cells and is subsequently passed from parent to offspring. – University of Texas at Arlington (2010)
Stream of American History at the Corinth Civil War Interpretive center.
The Memphis to Charleston line was the only railroad that linked the East Coast of the Confederacy to the fertile Mississippi River Valley. At a time when the fastest way to move troops, supplies and commerce was by river or rail, the Memphis and Charleston railroad was essential (this was well noted in Robert Black’s “The Railroads of the Confederacy”). Cutting the railroad was an important objective of the Union. Cutting it at Corinth Mississippi would also cut the Mobile and Ohio Railroad line which linked the north and south of the Confederacy. Thus the Battle of Shiloh, where the Union could disembark its armies using the Tennessee River, and soon after, the Battle of Corinth.
The Civil War Interpretive Center in Corinth (this is also a good reference) does a nice job of presenting the details of the battles for the town, and their video presentation, with different images projected on multiple screens in a circular room was quite good (though there was a lot of information and you did not know quite which screen to focus on, so some students had trouble keeping track of it all).
Standing waves: turbulence in the stream of American history.
The most interesting part of the center is the Stream of American History which is a wonderful place to learn about metaphors. The stream starts with a fountain that overflows through 13 notches cut in the rim of the basin into a shallow water course that gradually widens as more states are added to the U.S. In the first reach of the stream there are impediments in the paved stream bed that create turbulence, harbingers of the war to come (they create nice standing waves which is an additional point in their benefit).
The 13th Amendment.
When the stream gets to its main focus, the civil war, large granitic blocks, cut into prisms and labeled with the names of the battles, break the stream into two before it finally merges again as it reaches the reflecting pool.
I threw my students at the Stream without telling them what it was. The only hint I gave was that it was a “large metaphor”. There were enough clues that they could figure it out. They wandered around it individually, with their pencils and notepaper for 15 minutes (I required that they write down their interpretation, then we got them together to pool their thoughts.
The stream is a very nice puzzle, and the National Park Service has a good key (pdf). It was a good way to end our immersion trip, and it gave the students something to think about on the long drive home.
[googleMap name=”Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center” width=”400″ height=”350″ mapzoom=”4″ mousewheel=”false” directions_to=”false”]501 West Linden Street, Corinth, MS[/googleMap]
The mind tend to wander when working at repetitive tasks that don’t require much brain processing. So the brain just switches over to thinking about long-term things. There is even a specific part of the brain, called the “default network” that starts up when we zone-out. That, at least, is what I summarize from looking at some neuroscience research by Malia Mason and others (2007) on wandering minds.
What’s interesting is that the default network tends to be used for “certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future” (Zimmer, 2010). That means introspection. Introspection is the point of Personal World, so it follows that we should want our students’ minds to wander during Personal World.
So how do we design the Personal World time and environment to encourage daydreaming? Repetitive tasks aid mind-wandering, as will anything that is rote that does not require acute cognitive focus. Raking the garden, doodling should be encouraged, in fact, anything that encourages boredom.
I would think also, that reducing the cognitive load would also be beneficial, which might also mean no music. Yet music helps isolate the individual, particularly when they’re using ear buds. Perhaps quiet, “boring” sounds would be best, coming a shared radio so students can’t choose to listen to something else. Of course, if you’re listening to the music on your mp3 player then you tend to tune out the songs anyway so maybe it all falls out in the wash.
Of course this could all be malarkey, based as it is on a single study, so I’ll end with the words of caution that coms at the end of the article:
Although the thoughts the mind produces when wandering are at times useful, such instances do not prove that that the mind wanders because these thoughts are adaptive; on the contrary the mind may wander simply because it can. – Mason et al., 2007.
Focused work. We like to see our students focused on their work and we give them long blocks of time to do so. It is hard, however, for anyone to stay on task for two hours straight. You have to allow for a certain amount of mind wandering and daydreaming. What a lot of neurologic research is uncovering is that zoning-out is an essential part of putting the pieces together and helps with learning.
When we are no longer even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most deeply about the big picture. – Zimmer (2010)
