This was a very interesting video, it was a very interesting topic when I first saw it I skipped over it but then I realized I really want to know the answer to this question. So I watched the video and something I learned from this is, yes fetuses do pee and poop, I also learned that fetuses start to drink the fluid they are in after two short months, meaning they spend seven months drinking their own pee. Even though that sounds disgusting it really isn’t that bad because the urine is sterile, so it does not contain any bacteria that can hurt the fetus. Whenever the fetus has waste it needs to dispose of like excess Nitrogen, it goes back through the umbilical cord and the mother gets rid of it herself. I also learned that when the mother eats the potential poop products, it doesn't go to the fetus, the sugar and protein go to the fetus so they are getting all of the nutrients they need, but when the fetus does need to poop it goes into its small intestine. It creates this sticky green mass which is completely sterile. That green sticky mass ends up going into the baby’s first diaper. The significance of this video is, this is a very interesting question, and I bet a lot of mothers didn’t know that fetuses poop and pee while in their stomach. I think it's important to learn these things, because we were all once little fetuses and I think that a lot of people didn't know this. A question I have now is, what would happen if the fetuses pee and poop wasn’t sterile? The video I watched is down below. What I learned while watching this video is, that lightning bolts are just fast flowing electrons that are looking for the easiest way possible to get from the sky, to the ground. Metal is what attracts lighting the most, because it provides the electrons an even faster way to get to where they want to go. In the video it said that to avoid a lightning strike wearing an all metal medieval suit would keep you safest. The reason why is because electrons flow through metal very easily, so they hardly sink into the actual surface. If the electrons are flowing over anything metal with something inside, like a can or a box, and even a metal suit with someone inside the electrons wouldn't reach whatever is inside. This type of container is know as a Faraday cage, even cars are a Faraday cage and even though it is said that lightning can't get past rubber tires that isn't true. The lightning wouldn't go through the tires, it would move around it, because the electrons travel through metal the fastest. If you are alone in the middle of the woods during a storm and lightning starts the electrons will look for a shortcut and since people are better conductors than air and the ground. If you're standing up straight the electrons will most likely go through you, if you lay down, then once the electrons reach the floor they will strike you again. The best thing to do is to "crouch low and keep your feet close together" when you are crouched down the distance between your feet isn't ideal for the electrons because they would have to travel out and then back into you which will take too long. If the lightning does go through you it will only go through one leg and back down the other because your feet are the only thing touching the ground. The video reflected on is down below. I learned from this video that people waste A LOT of food. I always knew food waste was a problem but I never knew how much food people really waste. There are so many hungry people in the world and the fact that 1/3 of our grains go in the trash, around 40% of food in the US is thrown away. Out of the food we throw away according to the video there are enough calories to feed 150,000,000 people, that is a ridiculous amount of food waste, and that number really puts it into perspective. This is significant because world hunger is a very big issue, there are even hungry people in the US and the fact that we are throwing so much of our food away is ridiculous. It's very confusing why restaurants and super markets don't give food that's not eaten to homeless people who are starving on the streets or families that are struggling. Another problem is the in America especially the portion sizes are huge, when I go out to eat I always struggle to finish my food, and I know many other people do as well. So why are these restaurants making so much food, that they know is most likely going to be wasted. We are very privileged to be living in America, there are countries where people can't even get clean water and instead of appreciating it all we do is throw it away. A question I have now is how can we really stop this? In the video it says to not make as much food or to not buy too much food, but if food isn’t bought it’ll still end up going into the trash. So how can we really stop this? Down below is the video I reflected on. Looking Back: What Happened? For this experiment I worked with Savreen, Evan, and Mayra and we made plastic milk. We weren't really sure what our end results were supposed to look like, but based on the research we've done I think that it ended up how it was supposed too. It was easy to mold, and it held its shape pretty well, but it was cracking quite a bit. The shape we molded it into was a heart, and I think overall it worked out pretty well. Looking Beyond: What's the Science? Making plastic milk was very easy, all you really need is hot milk and some vinegar and once you get all of the clumps out you can start molding. What's happening on a molecular level is inside milk there are protein molecules named casein. Casein is a monomer, meaning that it is a chemical that can bond to other casein molecules to form a polymer a molecule that consists of more than one molecule. Casein isn't a true plastic polymer, it is a casein plastic. The other ingredient is vinegar, and since vinegar has acid in it when you mix it with the milk, the casein does't like it, so when you're mixing the milk in vinegar together blob form. The blobs are the casein plastic, that you can mold into whatever shape you want. Fun Fact: Casein comes from the Latin word meaning "cheese" so when you're making this product you will see that it looks a lot like feta cheese almost. Looking Inward: Did you get desirable results? I think we did get desirable results because our plastic milk turned out exactly how we wanted it to, it was very easy mold, our heart looked really nice, besides the few cracks, I think the reason we got the results we wanted is because we all worked together to achieve our end goal. We didn't have a lot of time to complete this lab but we ended up finishing it almost perfectly. How I contributed was looking at the project and deciding that it would be cool to do. Savreen, Mayra and I knew that we wanted to do a lab, we just couldn't figure out what lab specifically so I suggested plastic milk and Evan later on joined us. I also helped with the proposal, and during the actual lab we all took turns stirring all of the products together. Looking Outward: Collaboration and Impact During this lab I worked with Savreen, Mayra, and Evan, I think we worked really well together, this was my first time working with Mayra and I will probably work with her again. I've only worked with Evan on a lab once, but we did the rocket motor project together and we along with Savreen got all of our work done when it needed to be. So I knew going into this lab I would work well with him, Savreen and I work together on every lab and once again it was good working with her. We performed good as a group, we followed the instructions nicely, we all contributed and helped each other, nothing really went wrong. I specifically contributed by recommending we do this lab, and I worked a lot on the proposal because I was excited to do this lab. Looking Forward: What Next? If I could do this lab again one thing I would change is having a strainer. Since we didn't have one we poured the milk and vinegar mixture into a paper towel, then I would squeeze it to get all of the liquid out. The globs were then in the paper towel, and we had to do that multiple times to finish off the milk and vinegar. I would work with Savreen, Mayra, and Evan again because I feel like we work really well together, doing this lab was really fun even though it was very simple. We stayed on task and got everything done on time which was great. Takeaway: Summary The first thing we did was go to the store to buy milk since we didn't have any, then we put one cup of milk into a mug and put that into the microwave. We heated the milk in 30 second intervals until it was hot but not boiling. Then we poured that into a bowl, poured 4 teaspoons of vinegar in, then mixed for about a minute. After that you could clearly see the separation of the globs and liquid, so we got the mug we fist used made a paper towel type funnel then poured the liquid in. We tried waiting for the liquid to drain by itself but it didn't, so I squeezed the paper towel so all of the liquid was gone. That process continued until all of the liquid was gone, and after that we got all of the globs from inside the paper towel, and molded that into a heart. *Pictures are on the way*
Looking Back: What Happened? For this lab Savreen, Elyse and I made fake snow, and it was a lot easier than I expected it to be. The fake snow turned out how we wanted it to for the most part, we got a lot of the fluff in with our sodium polyacrylate which made the fake snow a weird consistency. Looking Beyond: What's the Science? Making fake snow is very simple the sodium polyacrylate does all of the work, it is a very absorbent polymer, so when the water was added it soaked it all up and that process is called osmosis. What's happening more specifically is the water molecules are making the sodium polyacrylate stretch to a large size. When the molecules pass through the polyacryclate which is a polymer molecule it makes it inflate almost. When you add salt to the fake snow it will eventually turn back into water with only little bit of salt and polyacrylate in it. Looking Inward: Did you get desirable results? I think the results we got were okay, we knew where to ind the sodium polyacrylate but while we were looking for it we somehow mixed it up with the fluff in the diaper. This made our fake snow turn out not as well as we hoped, the fluff was somewhat absorbent so you could see the difference from that and the ppolyacryalte. I think I performed well during this lab, I contributed a lot when it came to typing the proposal because I was very eager to get this lab done. Also while making the actual fake snow, I helped with mixing our ingredients together and documenting the process. Looking Outward: Collaboration and Impact For this lab I worked with Savreen and Elyse, and I think we worked really well together. We were all partners in our other class so it was really easy to work together because we knew our own skills and each others as well. I contributed a lot to the typing out the proposal, and I also made sure I knew a lot about what we were doing before hand, because I didn't want to get confused during the making of the fake snow. Looking Forward: What Next? If I could do this lab again I would make sure I know how to separate the fluff from the sodium polyacrylate so we can actually make fake snow that works well. I also wouldn't want to rush as much, since there were a lot of people working inside we decided to work outside, and it started raining while we were out there which made us rush. I would for sure work with Savreen and Elyse again, for the last section I want to try working with more people, I think I've started doing that in the last two sections which I want to keep on doing. I think there are a few ways to continue this experiment, the first one being doing it again to get better results, the second one being making hair gel out of sodium polyacrylate. Takeaway: Summary This was a very easy and simple lab, all we had to do was get a diaper and take the sodium polyacrylate out of it and put it in a beaker, then in a separate bowl of water we had water. Slowly we started putting drops of water into the beaker watching the water disappear. Then we poured in the rest of water into the beaker and it was soon all gone, it was really cool to play with and make.
The results we got from our motor test was very underwhelming, a positive is that our motor didn't Cato unlike many others. Since we made an end burner I knew that we would have a longer burn time than most and that is what happened, but our motor reached a very low thrust level. If we were to make a rocket using this motor the rocket wouldn't lift from the ground. Our rocket ended up being a smoke bomb, this is because we chose a 1/4 inch hole for our nozzle throat so not enough pressure was able to reach the core chamber. I think that this was a good learning experience, the best motors in the class were cored, so I think we will use a cored motor for the final rocket. There were a lot of good motors made from our class, Phillipe and Gabe's reached a very high thrust level, so depending on how heavy our rocket is we may or may not use theirs. The very last step for this project was to find the burnout time in seconds, total thrust in grams and etc. If you want to see the results Rocky our motor got click the link below, you will also see the results from everyone in our class.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JJX9vn57riIwUpnRX59UycqPlGIDrLUOeMv6P6u9e_I/edit#gid=0
After we tested our rocket motors we had to figure out our thrust curve, in order to do that we had to get the video that recorded the thrust curve during the ignition. Once we got the video we slowed it down to see how our curve was changing, then we recorded our data and made a graph to show the information. First Week:
11/2 Monday- Make two week plan 11/3 Tuesday- Rocket Motor tests day 1 11/4 Wednesday- Rocket Motor tests day 2 11/5 Thursday- College Day 11/6 Friday- College Day Second Week: 11/9 Monday- Work on thrust curve 11/10 Tuesday- Finish thrust curve if needed and start on lab proposal 11/11 Wednesday- NO SCHOOL Veterans Day 11/12 Thursday- Cookie lab part 1 11/13 Friday- Cookie lab part 2, and update blog This is the motor design that me, Savreen, and Evan decided on. We chose an end burner because we knew a majority of our class were making core burners.
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December 2015
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