EPA’s Enviromapper

epa-enviromapper — Enviromapper via the EPA. Image links to the map for St. Albans, MO, but you can find information for anywhere in the U.S..

The EPA’s Enviromapper website is great way to identify sources of hazardous materials and other types of pollution in your area, which might be a good way of stirring up student interest in the topic.

Not only can you map the broad category of pollution – air, water, radiation etc – but you can also find specific information about the different types of pollution or potential pollution the EPA has information about. I found a nearby site with sulfuric acid, for example.

And, if you want to slog through a lot of closely written reports, you can find a lot more details about any site you come across. Some of this information might also be useful – who knows?

Bird Poop: Force at Impact

In response to a question asked on the Car Talk radio program, Rhett Allain does the math to find out if falling bird poop can crack a windshield.

The answer: maybe. There are just a lot of assumptions that have to be made. Is falling bird poop spherical? What’s its density? How does the bird poop deform on impact? What is the compressive strength of automobile glass?

This is however an excellent real-life application of back-of-the-envelope physics and algebra. It required calculating:

the volume of the poop – extrapolated from the diameter of the residue on the windshield;
the terminal velocity of the poop – the velocity where gravity’s force is exactly counterbalanced by wind resistance so the poop is at its maximum speed;
the force of impact – calculated using the work done as the poop splatters;
and the pressure imparted by that force.

bird-poop — Brace for impact. Image by Marjie Kennedy.

Energy in the Nucleus of the Atom

binding-energy2 — If you pull apart an atom, the individual parts will weigh more than the atom you started with. The extra mass is the binding energy, which is released when the nucleus of atoms break apart (nuclear fission).

If you pull apart the nucleus of an atom, you’ll find that the mass of its parts is greater than the mass of the original nucleus. That extra mass is where nuclear energy comes from; it’s called the binding energy.

How so?

alpha-particle — An alpha particle is the nucleus of a helium atom.

Take a helium atom for example. Its nucleus typically has two protons and two neutrons*, which in nuclear physics is usually called an alpha particle (α).

While we usually say that the mass of a proton is 1 atomic mass unit (u), its actually a little heavier. The mass of a proton is 1.00728 atomic mass units (u), while neutrons weigh 1.00866 u.

binding-energy — The alpha particle (helium nucleus) has less mass than sum of the masses of the individual particles that make it up.

The combined mass of the two protons and two neutrons in the helium nucleus is 0.03035 atomic mass units more than the mass of a helium nucleus made up of the very same particles.

Why?

The one equation that everyone remembers from Einstein (perhaps from all the t-shirts) is:

$! E = mc^2$

Energy (E) is equal to mass (m) times some constant (c is the speed of light) squared. What it means is that mass is energy, and vice-versa.

When the four nucleons combine, the extra mass is transformed into the energy that holds them together in the nucleus of the atom. The mass can be directly converted to energy, the binding energy of the atom.

How much energy is released?

Somewhere around 10,000 times more energy is released from a single nuclear reaction compared to a single chemical reaction (like the combustion of TNT).

issue5fusion3_large — Binding energy per neuleon for the naturally occuring elements. (image from Science in School).

Footnotes

* Helium with two neutrons would be written $^4_2{He}$ , where the bottom number is the number of protons and the upper number is the atomic mass, which is the sum of the number of protons and the number of neutrons.

Phosphorus: What is it good for?

So other than digging in Morocco, where do we get more phosphorus? Here’s a hint: the symbol for phosphorus on the periodic table… is “P.”

— Horwich (2011): The end of phosphorus on APM’s Marketplace.

Marketplace’s Jeff Horwich has an excellent article on the uses of the element phosphorus, where it comes from, why it’s getting scarce, and where we might get more.

The answers to these questions are:

It’s a key element in DNA, so the major use is fertilizer,
most of it comes from Morocco these days,
since Morocco supplies about 85% of the world supply, they’re developing a bit of a monopoly and the price is going up,
the main alternative sources are manure and urine that have lots of phosphorous. In fact, burning sewage leaves behind a phosphorous rich ash.

Marketplace tells the story in much more detail.

Math in Real Life

Take what you find interesting and turn it into something challenging, something provocative for someone else.
–Dan Meyer (2011): [anyqs] Hurricane Irene Edition

I’m looking for a good reference for project-based math. Where students face the real-life problems, and learn math as they try to solve them, yet covers the entire curriculum in a complete way.

What I’m considering right now is to swap in some of the real-life questions for some of the sections in the text that consist of rather pedantic word problems, things like: the sum of two numbers is three times less than the square root of the second plus the reciprocal of the first.

Instead, I’d rather do problems like determining the height of a tsunami, which can be treated in different ways depending on which math class you’re teaching, and tie into the science classes (like Physics) as well.

Dan Meyer is a proponent of the project based approach, and he has a lot of interesting problems on his blog.

Creativity, Depression and Anger

[A]nger … triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially higher levels of creativity. … [However] creative performance should decline over time more for angry than for sad people.

— Bass et al (2011): Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured

Here are a couple of studies on the interaction between negative emotions and creativity whose implications require some very careful consideration. We want to encourage creativity, but how and at what cost to the student?

Social rejection was associated with greater artistic creativity

— Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity

Anger

Anger, it appears, leads to more unstructured thinking, thinking that is more flexible and able to make new connections among different categories of information. However, anger’s creativity boost does not last that long – strong emotions take a toll – and people soon revert back to a more normal baseline.

These results come from an initial study, and there are a lot of unanswered questions. In particular, I wonder just how much anger is useful for this beneficial outcome. I find it hard to believe that too much anger is terrible useful. And, I’m also curious about the negative consequences in terms of group interactions. Brett Ford points out that some studies have found that anger is useful in negotiation, but only when that negotiation is confrontational. Another study found that angry leaders were better at motivating groups of less agreeable people. Conversely, more agreeable people responded better to less angry leaders.

In a scenario study, participants with lower levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to an angry leader, whereas participants with higher levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to a neutral leader.

— Kleef et al. (2010): On Angry Leaders and Agreeable Followers
How Leaders’ Emotions and Followers’ Personalities Shape Motivation and Team Performance

It seems that the ability to project anger may be a useful skill to have in one’s toolbox, given the variety of people we will have to deal with in life.

Depression and Creativity

Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes point out that highly creative people tend to introversion, emotional sensitivity and, at the extreme, depression and other mood disorders. Unfortunately:

[M]ood disorders are 8 to 10 times more prevalent in writers and artists than in the general population (Jamison, 1993).

— Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity

On top of the general mood, strong, more transient, activating moods, like anger and happiness, also affect a person’s ability to be creative. Both positive and negative activating moods (the hedonic tone) enhance creativity, but in different ways:

negative activating moods, like anger and fear, increase perseverance;
positive activating moods, like happiness and elatedness, increase mental flexibility.

Curiously enough, although creativity is associated with a baseline of sadness and depression, these two are not among the activating moods that can spur the creativity of the moment.

A Matter of Control

The implications of these studies are complex. I certainly need to think about them a lot more, but it would seem reasonable, or perhaps responsible, to encourage students to carefully monitor their moods and to help them better understand themselves and their behavior. Ultimately, it is probably better if we are able to control how we use our emotions, rather than the other way around.

The pre-frontal lobe, which is responsible for formal thinking, is the part of the brain that can put the brakes on impulsive emotional behavior. It can also, to a degree, modulate how emotions are expressed. As adolescents’ pre-frontal cortex develop, they should be better able to control and use their emotions to their benefit. But to do so, they need to be aware of their emotions and the power of their emotions, which would suggest training in emotional awareness and control.

I’m not aware of any programs or curricula that delve all the way into how to use your emotions proactively, but I’d like to see something that particularly discusses how to use the different activating moods.