How do Electrolytes work in our body?

Electrolytes are ions that are electrically charged and can take the form of liquids, gels, or paste. Basically, it's the scientific or medical term for salt. Our body contains massive amounts of salt and we need them. It is important for us to have salt in our bodies so as the maintain a healthy lifestyle. We need them in order to function properly.
The foods we eat and drink contain a lot of mineral salts once consumed they dissolve and form electrolytes in the form of liquids. Like stated before, electrolytes are electrically charged. This helps us a lot because our muscles-- like our heart-- are sent electrical signals from our brain in order to move. Sodium, calcium, chloride, magnesium and potassium are electrolytes and they can be found in our foods. If our body has too little electrolytes, the electrical signals from our brain cannot travel to our muscles, that's why sometimes when exercising, our muscles cramp up. Having a balanced electrolyte level in our body is crucial. All you have to do is remember that you're heart is a muscle too and without it functioning properly, you're dead man.

Other than helping your muscles function properly, electrolytes also help maintain your body's fluid levels. They are controlled by the moving of electrolytes into and out of your body's fluid compartments. Your kidney is an organ that filters your blood for electrolytes and keeps the level's balanced and constant. Your body does a bunch of acts that help balance your water and electrolyte levels. When you sodium (salt) level is too low, your kidneys are signaled to produce more urine (pee, we're gonna say pee from now on because it's cooler) which restores the balance by lowering the amount of water in your blood. When your sodium level gets too high though, your brains sends a signal to you to develop thirst. Once you drink more water, the body wants to keep that water so your brain sends more signals to your kidney to stop you from peeing.

And that's how electrolytes work in your body... :]

What is Lightning? Why does wearing rubber shoes help you in a storm?

Examples of a small-scale static discharge is like that static shock you get when you touch a doorknob. Now image that shock at a larger scale. That shock is lightning. Lighting is static electricity caused by storm clouds. The amount of electric potential in something is the measure of how much energy or volts something can produce in an electric field. Lightning has the electric potential of millions of volts which causes it to unleash large amounts of energy in different forms (heat, light, sound).

During a thunderstorm, lightning can strike the ground at any moment. Rainwater conducts electricity (because it's acidic) and with all the rainwater on the ground it is important to have rubber at the soles of our shoes. Should we have metal soles, the electric charges from the lightning -- which like said before has the electric potential of a million volts-- can travel to ground, through the water, up the soles of our shoes to our bodies. Since we do not want the charges to get to us we wear rubber at the bottom of our shoes because rubber is an electric insulator (they help prevent electric charges to pass through easily). That way we can walk, sing and dance our hearts out in the rain without being the night's special of "fried human on a stick".

Image Source: <Link>

A Life Without Electricity

What would a day in your life be like without electricity?

Well, let's try and see what I use in a day that requires electricity?

• Cellphone (as an alarm to wake me up, a communicating device...etc,.)
• Laptop (used for leisure and for homework, to find out little answers to the little questions that pop up in my head)
• AC (I'm a stay cool person, I don't like to perspire because it's gross-- healthy, but gross)
• Lights (keeping my room bright, it helps me see things for the way they really are...)
• Internet (no comment... )
  

Without my cellphone, I would not be able to wake up when I would like to. My body wants me to sleep-in, so I do. I would have gotten out of bed at 'round 11. The lights in my bathroom would not work so my bathroom would be all dark and I wouldn't be able to look myself in the mirror and see how messed up my hair became when I went to bed. The AC would not be working, so the fans in the vents would not work either. The air in the house would be still and by this time I would get pretty frustrated. My patience has always been low and I can't tolerate "still" and stuffy air. Now I would probably open a window and get even more frustrated as all the dust and bugs from the construction site fly into my house.
Breakfast, the most important meal in a day. I usually skip this meal on school days because my tastes buds don't work unless I'm "alive, awake, alert, and a wee-bit enthusiastic". I take cereal but since there's no electricity, my fridge would not work and the milk would be all curdy. No cereal equals no breakfast equals to me being pissed. I like cold stuff. I need my chilled OJ or milk. I don't like water when it's room temperature. Already 30 minutes into my day without electricity and I'm already irritated.

Now since I do not have my cellphone, mp3, CD player, laptop, or television I would just have to resort to the ol' paperbacks. I like reading-- in a comfortable environment which would usually be on a beanbag in a room with AC, with random music on (it doesn't really matter, just as long as I don't hear my family's ruckus). My only choice would be to go to the roof, still on the ledge and read. Without music, reading for me is tricky, but I think I can handle the silence on my apartment roof.

I'd read until 1) I'm bored and/ done with the book, 2) I start getting hungry, or 3) I get pissed and irritated of the drilling noises from the construction site. I'd go back to my apartment. I can't go any where else because that would mean to climb 11 floors down the empty, scary staircase (no electricity = no elevator). My whole family would be a wreck. The modern culture has convinced my family (heck, everyone) that we need all these little things that need electricity to live life. Lights, ventilation, entertainment, etc,.. the list goes on and on.

By dinner time, I expect my family to have turned barbaric already-- like those prep guys in Lord of the Flies. If we are still standing it must be a miracle. I'd be reading, my little brother would have playing with his toy trains. My mom would be trying to keep the house clean, my little sister would be in her room drawing or doing some creative %$#%!@, while my dad reads the paper or takes a nap. My older sister (haha) would be walking around complaining about life without electricity since she basically lives on the modern technology and communication to keep her sane.

Bottom line: I, my family, would not be able to live life without electricity. A day is all I can handle. Culture has caused us to believed that "we need entertainment" or "we need cool air" or "we need cars and transportation to get around" and "we need our cell phones because snail mail is too slow". We have evolve into such a planned life and we can't get out of that habit unless we find the meaning of what life is. Electricity is a need in our life. It wasn't supposed to be-- but it is now.

A/N: If there was no electricity, there would no internet, therefore it would have been impossible to complete this homework blog post assignment.

Nitrogen Passport Reflection Questions

1. There are so many choices that a nitrogen atom will go in a nitrogen cycle. Each of us would roll a number each time and it will lead us to different places. There were about three options at each station, when we rolled the die, it would tell us which of those three options to go to. No one (unless in a weird coincidence) would go in the same cycle because we rolled to a different option each time.

2. Cycles are not just "once-you-go-to-one-place-you-can't-go-back". Nitrogen cycles are not all the same. It just shows that all the different situations are connected whether you were animal waste of surface water.

3. Yes, I think that the atmosphere station was pretty popular. This is because evaporating into the air is more "common" for a nitrogen atom because evaporation is pretty quick.

4. Probably the main point of this activity was to show that the nitrogen cycle is all connected. You could be in animal waste then turn up in the atmosphere then somehow back to animal waste. Also I teaches use where nitrogen atoms can turn up.

Benjamin Button TED talk

The Science of Benjamin Button
The film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button features a lot of special effects to create a very genuine idea of who this person is. Their purpose was that they obviously didn't want this person took look so fake so they put in a lot of effort into making sure this character looked truly old; they spent a lot of time in the lighting and the face, making the cheeks and muscles move like they should in real life.
Their hypothesis for this was probably: "If the put in a lot of effort (time, money) into making this look real then will it look truly genuine to everyone?". They managed to put a lot of facial markers into a form or make-up so that the computers and cameras would be able to detect the facial expression of the actor.

It's pretty obvious that their procedure took a long time; 2 years, did they say? All this just for that one hour of the movie that the actor had to look 40 years older. First they had to do a lot of research and find ways to create the face. Then they had to get the equipment and do many tests. After bringing in the actor, they still had to do all the scenes and put it together with the special effects. With all the faces done, they had to settle the lighting so that the face looked like it was still in the scene. When they were all done they had to work with the people for the movie and put it all together so it would be the great film.

Their analysis for was probably to go through the whole movie and to check whether it looks real by showing it to people who haven't seen it before and know what they were doing. Once the testing audience approves that it looks real, then can they show it to the public.

SMASH Day Reflection

For this SMASH day, we did another mission scenario. This time, we were on a submarine under the water. We were trying to find out what the "treasure" was. The problem was that the treasure was in a box and our periscope was too small for us to see into the box. So, we had to make another longer periscope using cardboard and mirrors. Mrs. Smith gave us a piece of card board, some paper, tape, and four mirrors.
Our group modified our periscope twice. First we had the angles right, but we couldn't see clearly into the box. So we changed our design just as spy time started. We folded the tope part of the box so that it will be holding the mirror deeper into the box. In the end, we could see the items in the box without using angles but only one mirror.
Each of us gave ideas and listened to each other. I think that we communicated very well but we had so many ideas that we had to rush.

I would advise others to talk to their team carefully and to plan it out first, that way you won't have to rush in the end. Also, don't think so deep because our team didn't even need to set angles in the end. Plus it makes it hard to see the items when you're looking through two mirrors.

Blog #2: An Effective Communicator

An effective communicator in my life is one of my friends Jean- and also Ariel. When explaining things I do not understand, both of them can easily explain it without using difficult words. I think they really possess this trait because they have the ability to communicate with me, even though English is their second language. They are also very good listeners because they understand pretty fast when others explain to them, too.
One example of them being effective communicator was one of the first SMASH days we had with Mrs. Smith's class. Both Ariel and Jean were in my group and we have to communicate to build something. Only Jean knew what the original piece looked like and only she could talk to Ariel without showing her the item. Ariel could not see the item but using the information Jean told her, she had to tell me (I was all the way across the room) and describe how the object looked like so that I could build a replica of it. This proves we shared effective communication as our replica was the exact same thing as the original object...

What science skills did you use during the SMASH Day activity? How do these science skills help us be better scientists?

What science skills did you use during the SMASH Day activity? How do these science skills help us be better scientists?

Thinking outside the box. When we couldn't find a sturdy way to have the "tower" stand, we decided to use the scissors because Mrs. Smith didn't say that we couldn't use the scissors as part of the "tower" and it was under the list of supplies we could use. The scissors was a great idea and it actually held all 50 grams when we were testing it (but now when we actually did it because our group did it more gently than Mrs. Smith).
Thinking outside the box can help us be better scientist because sometimes we make the experiment more complicated than it is and we totally miss every little thing. When we think outside the box and consider every view, we could make the "tower" stand up.

Which is more dense -- A stack of 20 NT coins or a stack of 5 NT coins

A stack of 20 NT coins would be denser than a stack of 5 NT coins. This is because to find the density of an object, you have the mass divided by the volume. The mass of the 20 NT coin stack would be more than the mass of the 5 NT coin stack. The volume would be different too because there are more coins in the 20 NT stack than the 5 NT stack. Thus, the data in the density formula would be different and the stack of 20 NT would be more dense because it has more coins than the other stack.

Why Did We Spend 3 days Answering the Wrong Question?

Why did we spend 3 days trying to figure out what mass, volume, and matter is when the question is "Can matter disappear?". This is because matter is made up of mass and volume; weight and space being taken up. To find the answer to this question, we have to first find out what matter is made of and can that stuff disappear. When matter disappears, that would have to mean that the weight that was there on the Earth is gone and the space that was being taken up is empty.
See, if we study about what really is matter, then can we fully understand and answer the question of Can Matter Disappear?

Is Air Matter?

Air is matter. I think that takes up space is matter. Why do you ask? If you blow air into a balloon, it inflates. This is because air is pushing the rubber of the balloon to expand and to create space for itself.
Air contains, carbon dioxide, oxygen, dust, and all those junk we have in the air now in the 21th century. Dust is actually dead skins cells and bacteria and a lot of other stuff, dust can make dustbunnies. Dust bunnies, lots of dust stuck together. This creates a mass and it takes up space. Carbon dioxide and oxygen and other stuff in the air is made of elements in the Periodic Table. They contain atoms and they take up space. Just because we can't see them or weigh them, doesn't mean their not matter. After all- they do matter.