STEAM with Dad

While working on the greenhouse experiment, I put a balloon with carbon dioxide inside the freezer to lower the density to ensure it would stay at the bottom of the jar while doing the experiment. One thing I noticed is that the balloon shrunk. I found this interesting and I decided to investigate more. To understand what happened we need to realize that a gas consists of molecules that are moving in space. The hotter the gas is the faster they move. Conversely the colder it is the slower they move. In my case the gas with CO2 inside the freezer became cooler and the molecules inside the balloon started to move slower which means they don't push as hard against the balloon, so then the ballon shrinks. It turns out that there is a law in physics called Charles's Law that explains the relationship between the temperature and the volume of a gas. The law states that the volume of a fixed amount of gas is directly proportional to its absolute temperature, provided the pressure rema...

During the previous post about the greenhouse effect, we were trying to put CO2 in the jar. This made me curious about the respiratory system. In today's blog post, we are going to cover all the things I learned about it. In the following table, you can see the percentage of gases in the atmosphere and how these percentages change if we re-breathe the same air. As we breathe in, the oxygen depletes and gets transformed into carbon dioxide. So, by breathing in and out using a balloon I managed to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide to do my greenhouse experiment. This is a process that is not healthy and you're not supposed to do it, but a one-shot for the experiment was okay. In fact, this is exactly what happened to astronauts aboard Apollo 13 mission to the Moon in 1970. Notice also how our body totally ignores the nitrogen. I also learned how breathing happens by using a muscle called the diaphragm, which contracts to create more volume inside our chest. This low...

This is the final blog post about geophysics. We are going to venture into the last domain of the planet we haven't explored, the atmosphere. In particular we are going to talk about the greehouse effect and an experiment I have done about it. The greenhouse effect is a natural process by which light from the sun goes through the atmosphere as visible light and it warms the surface of the Earth. When the surface cools down, it emits some of this energy back as infrared. This infrared radiation can bounce on some specific gases in the atmosphere, causing the planet to warm up. These gases include carbon dioxide which is the most well-known gas but there are other more potent ones like methane and nitrous oxide. It is important to note that without the greenhouse effect Earth's average temperature would drop from a comfortable 15°C (59°F) down to a freezing -18°C (-0.4°F) , making the planet uninhabitable for most living things. Surprisingly, carbon dioxide only represents a ver...

So far we have done a few blog posts about geophysics, but all of them are based on land phenomena. The next two blog posts will focus on the two elements of geophysics: oceans and atmosphere. In particular, in this blog post, we will be focusing on the oceans. Today we will talk about the ocean currents in our blog post. Ocean currents are streams of water in the ocean that flow in a definite direction. They can be up to 200 kilometers wide, and they are driven by two different things: different density of water, which is responsible for moving them between surface and deep water, and also by the winds in the ocean, which make them move laterally.  When these two effects combine, what we end up with is a phenomenon called circulation. Currents in the northern hemisphere circulate clockwise, and currents in the southern hemisphere circulate anticlockwise as you can see in the previous picture. The speed of circulation is faster in the surface and slower in the deep but ge...

As I promised last blog post, I will be showing you how to make a 3 axis accelerometer. Three axis are better than one because it makes it easier to distinguish when the P and S waves arrive which helps measure the epicenter.   Here's what you will need: a Micro:bit, a USB cable, and a computer. The code in the image below is reading the acceleration for the x, y and z axis and redirecting the readings to the USB so that it can be graphed. You might have noticed  the "+1023" to the value of the 'z' axis. If we don't do this, it will always be reading "-1023" due to the force of gravity. In this video I will show you the seismometer in action. I decided to test it in school to see if, when all the kids in my class jumped at the same time we could cause an earthquake. Even though all twenty eight kids jumped at once, the earthquake was very minor and barely noticeable on the diagram. Due to the lack of seismic activity in Australia I have decided not t...

So, moving on to earthquakes, this maps shows Australia’s past earthquake activity. As you can see in Queensland there is very little seismic activity compared to areas like  and Victoria New South Wales. But in general we have very little compared to other countries, like Japan or New Zealand as these sit on the ring of fire. How do we know where earthquakes ocur apart from seeing the damage like in this photo? In case you did not notice the rails were originaly straight. The simple answer to that is seismic stations. In this photo you can see all the seismic stations in Australia. As you can see, they all have two or three letter acronyms. Now let's take a peek inside of a seismic station to see what it looks like. In the image below you can see it is nothing too fancy, just a sensor, a solar panel for power and the data recording and transmiting equipment. In the next post I will show you how to build a D.I.Y one at home for only 300 billion dollars ... just joking only twenty f...

Hey guys today I am going to tell you about plate tectonics and volcanoes. The idea to learn more about this came because at school we covered the topic of natural disasters. The most important thing you need to know about tectonic plates is how they move; the magma that is in contact with the core heats up causing it to be less dense and rise and then it cools down and goes back down. Think of it like a conveyor belt. This phenomenon is called convection. Now let's move on to volcanoes. A volcano is essentially an opening, or vent, in the Earth's crust through which magma, seeps out to the surface which makes a mountain as the magma solidifies. The type of volcano I will talk about today is called a subdutcion volcano which is basically when one plate slips under another turning into magma causing pressure to acumulate and magma to seep through the cracks. But happens when the magma can just seep throughthe cracks well then pressure builds up and up and up until it all blows u...

My inspiration for this blog post came when I went to my local planetarium and one of the staff showed me the planetarium telescope and projected the sun on to a blank piece of paper and he showed me the sun spots. So I thought I could do the same thing with my telescope. But what are sunspots anyway? They are   temporary, dark areas on the Sun's visible surface that are cooler than its surroundings due to intense magnetic fields inhibiting the flow of heat from the Sun's interior. But let me tell you, observing them has its challenges:   WARNING: NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN WITH YOUR TELESCOPE!!! The first challenge, since you can not look at the sun directly is, correctly orienting it to point at the sun. The solution I have thought of to solve this problem is when your telescope is pointing at the sun is that you should only see the circumference of the front part of the telescope on the wall like in this picture. . My second tip, since you can not look at the sun directly i...

Hello today I present to you  a video I made for a science assessment from my school it is to inform kids about the states of matter. I hope it will help you or teach you something you didn't now. Without further a do I leave you with this video and  hope you like it.    Thanks for watching!!!

Learning about lenses , refraction and optics in general has now enabled me to make my own telescope. I wanted to build one because I have always loved space and astronomy. Another day I must tell you about a hobby of mine, launching water rockets.  There are two main types of telescopes: refractors (made out of lenses) and reflectors (use mirrors too). Galileo Galilei made one of the first refractor telescopes and Isaac Newton made the first reflector. The one I built is a refractor, which is a bit cheaper to build.  How it works In this diagram you can see that the telescope has two lenses: The first is called the "objective". The function of the objective is to create an image with the light comes from the celestial body. The light rays come in parallel because the object is very far away. This means the image forms in the focal point. The image is inverted though. The second lens is called the "eyepiece" and it typically has a much smaller focal length. The eye...

Today I am going to tell you what lenses are, how they work and many more things. Let's dive in! A lens is an optical device with at least one curved surface to focus or disperse light beams by means of refraction.  Some of you may be wondering why I am talking about lenses. Well, it is because of how common they are, for example lenses are used in microscopes, telescopes, cameras, and even your Granma's reading glasses. So, now that you know what lenses are I can teach you how they work.  In the previous blog post we saw the light moving from air to water. The surface between the two media was flat but the surface of the lens is curved. We can use Snell's law if we think of a curve as  a big series of tiny flat lines one after the other.  For example in my diagram below I have drawn a plano-convex lens and three light rays. First, they go through the flat face of the lens. Snell's law predicts that they will go straight through because the sine of 0 degrees is 0 The...

In the previous blog post I talked briefly about Snell's law, however, I couldn't cover this topic due to the fact that I did not know the maths required. Guess what! I know them now. Well, at least at a basic level. Let's get into it. The thing I needed to learn was the "sine" of an angle. The cool thing is that in a right-angle triangle, like the one below, if you take one side of the right-angle ("a" below) and divide it by the opposite side of the right-angle ("h" below) then you get same number no matter what size the triangle is.  As you can see a1/h1 is 0.708 and so is a2/h2 almost perfectly. This number is called the sine of the angle O1. By the way "h" is called the hypotenuse ... who came up with that name! I have learnt how to work with a table of sines to calculate the sine of an angle. I use this one from NASA . So, now we can understand Snell's law. It predicts how much the light will bend when it changes media based...