Natural World – Page 89 – Montessori Muddle

Nuclear Winter and MAD

Almost every time I discuss protons, neutrons and the nucleus of an atom, or at least so my students complain, I end up talking about nuclear fission and fusion and nuclear weapons. If the discussion goes on long enough I tend to bring up the cold war and how the fear of mutually assured destruction (MAD) reduced the chance of a hot war. I don’t often get into how the explosions from a nuclear exchange could put so much dust into the upper atmosphere that it blocks the sunlight and create a nuclear winter that would affect life all around the world. A nuclear winter that would have an effect similar to the winter created by the asteroid impact that lead to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The danger of nuclear weapons have not, unfortunately, gone away. There is a facinating article in Scientific American on how even a “small” nuclear war could have global consequences. They have a great quote from Mikhail S. Gorbachev about how,

“Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act.”

The major finding of the research in the article is that even a small nuclear war, such as between India and Pakistan, could lead to a significant global nuclear winter.

I like to take every chance I get to tie natural and social world concepts together. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about teaching in an interdisciplinary Montessori classroom. There is a beautiful and scary story here about how the science of the infinitesimally small has had a fundamental effect on the major geopolitical conflict of the latter half of the 20th century, and continues to affect us today.

Human? nature

To follow up on the previous post on the evolutionary benefits of kindness, this essay by Marc Hauser describes some of the science that indicates that morality is innate. Not religious affiliation, gender, nationality nor political views affect how people respond to moral dilemmas.

“We tend to see actions as worse than omissions of actions.” People tend to believe that deliberately hurting a healthy person to save one or more others is morally repugnant if the others would only be hurt by your inaction.

The evolutionary benefits of kindness

Evolution is often summed up in the phrase, “survival of the fittest”, well sometimes “fittest” can also refer to kindness. Having empathy is evolutionarily beneficial. As individuals, the more we give to others the more respect we gain for ourselves. As a group or a society, when people are able to cooperate they do better than when they cannot. What scientists have recently been uncovering is that empathy and the urge to cooperate are built into our very genes.

This research ties in elegantly with Montessori philosophy. The benefits of kindness and cooperation seem obvious when you think about it, but the fact that we are genetically predisposed to act in this way helps explain why the emphasis on cooperative work works so well in early childhood classrooms.

If you put this research together with the way society is currently evolving, where problems have to be dealt with with teams from different backgrounds, perspectives and disciplines, it really points out the importance of collaborative work in the middle school.

Atomic mass versus atomic weight

Isotopes of hydrogen: hydrogen, duterium and tritium.

I have been told by reliable sources that the difference between atomic mass and atomic weight is that the atomic mass is the mass of a single atom (number of protons plus the number of neutrons), while the atomic weight is the averaged masses of all the different isotopes you would find in a natural sample.

This obviously requires a discussion of isotopes, which may be a topic best left for high school. However there are a number of interesting hooks that could capture the imagination.

One of them is the use of isotopes to trace sources of your diet. Isotopes can tell how much meat a person eats (nitrogen-15) or how much of the carbon in their body comes, ultimately, from corn.

Corn, chemistry and the food you eat

Corn_tassels
It’s absolutely amazing how much the different numbers of neutrons in atoms can tell us about the ourselves and the world. Over 99% of the carbon in the atmosphere is carbon-12, with 6 neutrons and 6 protons, but the rest is made of carbon-12 (6 protons and 7 neutrons) or carbon-14 (6 protons and 8 neutrons).

Carbon-14 is radioactive and is used to date things for archeology and climate change etc. However, when it comes to our diet carbon-13 is a bit more interesting. Some plants, particularly grasses like corn, do photosynthesis a little differently so that they tend to have more of the slightly heavier carbon-13 isotope than the others. As a result, if you take a blood sample, you can tell (roughly) how much of your diet ultimately came from grasses.

Why is this interesting? Because when you eat meat, there is a good chance that the animal you are eating was fed with corn. If you look at the pre-packaged items in the supermarket, you’ll find that high-fructose corn syrup is an important ingredient on many of them.
The documentary King Corn, and the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma find that if you trace the modern industrial food chain much of it starts in the corn fields of the mid-west. We eat, in one way or another, a lot of corn. In fact, blood samples have found over 50% of the carbon in our bodies comes from corn and similar grasses (like sugar cane).

This article describes a number of other interesting applications of isotopes in investigating diet. A more technical description of carbon-13 and diet can be found here.