Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
We covered the Millennium Development Goals in Environmental Science this past quarter. However, the big outstanding question was how close have we come to meeting any of the goals. Health Intelligence hosts an excellent, interactive map for tracking progress on the Millennium Development Goals.
Klaus Lackner from Columbia University describes one type of artificial carbon sequestration technology, and explains why it’s necessary.
To figure out if the climate is actually warming we need to extract from the global temperature curve all the wiggles caused by other things, like volcanic eruptions and El Nino/La Nina events. The resulting trend is quite striking.
I’m teaching pre-Calculus using a graphical approach, and my students’ latest project is to model the trends in the rising carbon dioxide record in a similar way. They’re matching curves (exponential, parabolic, sinusoidal) to the data and subtracting them till they get down to the background noise.
We talked today about the smog in Beijing.
[A]t the time of the image, the air quality index (AQI) in Beijing was 341. An AQI above 300 is considered hazardous to all humans, not just those with heart or lung ailments. AQI below 50 is considered good. On January 12, the peak of the current air crisis, AQI was 775 the U.S Embassy Beijing Air Quality Monitor—off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scale—and PM2.5 was 886 micrograms per cubic meter.
–Carlowicz (2013): via NASA Earth Observatory
The pollution in Beijing seems to be a result of automobiles and construction, and not factories as you might think. One of my Chinese students (A.S.) pointed out that the Chinese government had moved a whole lot of factories out of Beijing about 10 years ago in preparation for the Olympics. Curiously, the factories were relocated to poorer areas as the cities have become wealthier; something we’ve seen at a global scale as well.
The relocation of factories out of Beijing is part of a mass migration of Chinese industry in recent years from wealthier cities, which have become environmentally conscious, to less-developed ones.
–Cha (2008): Relocation of Beijing factories only moved the problem in the Washington Post via the Seattle Times.
The salamanders themselves don’t do photosynthesis, but they host symbiotic algae that do.
Spotted salamanders, too, are in a long-term relationship with photosynthetic algae. In 1888, biologist Henry Orr reported that their eggs often contain single-celled green algae called Oophila amblystomatis. The salamanders lay the eggs in pools of water, and the algae colonise them within hours.
By the 1940s, biologists strongly suspected it was a symbiotic relationship, beneficial to both the salamander embryos and the algae. The embryos release waste material, which the algae feed on. In turn the algae photosynthesise and release oxygen, which the embryos take in. Embryos that have more algae are more likely to survive and develop faster than embryos with few or none.
Then in 2011 the story gained an additional twist. A close examination of the eggs revealed that some of the algae were living within the embryos themselves, and in some cases were actually inside embryonic cells. That suggested the embryos weren’t just taking oxygen from the algae: they might be taking glucose too. In other words, the algae were acting as internal power stations, generating fuel for the salamanders.
–Marshall (2013): Zoologger: The first solar-powered vertebrate in New Scientist based on Graham et al. (2012).
A student (N.C.) sent me this neat video based on the If the World Were a Village website. I plan to show it to my environmental science class because we’ve been talking about human population recently.
Charles Darwin and colleagues attempted to vegetate the barren, volcanic Ascension Island with plants from botanical gardens around the world. Essentially, it was an experiment in transforming. And it worked. Howard Falcon-Lang has the details at the BBC.
This curious video advocates for a new type of nuclear reactor (that runs on thorium) over traditional uranium reactors and chemical fuels. In doing so it gives a useful, but quick, explanation of how energy is produced from these sources.