So I’ve decided that a funny sort of take on my beat this week is just what people need to relieve some stress. This made me laugh; I hope it makes you laugh too. I threw in the scientific parts to give you your dose of education for the day.
Global warming (insert deep, dramatic, formidable music here) has the scientific world worried (crescendo to a high note that makes your heart want to break and then just leaves you hanging). The ice caps are melting and the sea levels are rising.
NASA is even getting involved in an attempt to understand the changing levels of the oceans which may (more likely than not) be tied to the changing climate temperature.
"In the last century, the total change in sea level was about 8 inches," Seelye Martin, the program manager for NASA's Earth sciences division, said. "Right now, it's headed to more like 12 inches so we're seeing a greater contribution from the ice sheets."
Scientists are attempting to find out information on the melting ice sheets. One of their more recent focuses has been in Greenland.
The Jakobshavn Glacier is melting at a rapid rate; it is responsible for shedding almost 7 percent of Greenland’s ice.
Fast-flowing rivers are surging through tunnels, known as moulins, in the glacier. Scientists want to know where all that water is going (because it has to go somewhere). But tracking water from the glacial melt rivers in ocean water is difficult (obviously; water in water).
Alberto Behar, a robotics expert from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had an idea to drop a probe with a positioning censor and a satellite telephone into one of Jakobshavn’s moulins in hopes of tracking where the water ends up. Scientists have speculated that the water ends up in Baffin Bay – the ice-laden body of water between northeast Canada and Greenland – but they need proof.
The probe was dispatched and never heard from again.
Oops.
No worries; on to Plan B: a brigade of 90 rubber ducks.
Each duck was labeled with an email address and the words "science experiment" and "reward" written in English, Danish and the native Inuit language. Behar then set the toys loose in a moulin.
The general idea is that people, mostly fisherman, will find the ducks and notify NASA where exactly they found the yellow toy. This will help scientists track the water that melts and then flows out of Jakobshavn.
No one has contacted NASA yet about finding a duck. But it is the middle of winter so Baffin Bay is frozen solid. The ducks could merely be stuck in the ice.
Scientists are optimistic about contacts starting next summer when things start to thaw out.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Hubble Space Telescope
Background info. for those who might get confused: This is a Beat Blog. I am taking a journalism class and my news beat topic is outer space and all things pertaining to the things going on “somewhere out there” (little tribute to the “American Tail” movie for you). Enjoy!
These two galaxies, located 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo, distort as their gravitational fields interact. The bigger galaxy is sucking stars, gas and dust from the smaller one.
The blue ring at Saturn’s south pole is streams of charged particles from the sun colliding with the planet’s magnetic field. The aurora, which can last for days, appears blue because of the ultraviolet camera but someone on Saturn would see red lights instead of blue.
On October 30th, the Hubble Space Telescope was up and functioning at a “perfect 10” after being offline since September. Over 50 NASA scientists and engineers must have breathed a deserved sigh of relief; they had been working around the clock trying to get the telescope up and running after the main system crashed and the telescope stopped beaming adequate images back to NASA.
On October 15th, after several days of successful “safe mode” operations, the individuals working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland began calibrating Hubble’s science instruments and a glitch hit. So the risky quest to remotely switch to a backup data formatter began again.
The risk was if Hubble’s formatter system crashed again, it would have no backup system to rely on since it was running off of the backup system at the time. Big bummer considering since its launch in 1990 Hubble has sent hundreds of thousands of images back to Earth.
It impressed mission scientists when Hubble captured this image the day it became fully functional again. The galaxy on the right displays a clumpy, blue ring of intense star formation that was created after the galaxy on the left – nearly undisturbed – passed through it. (Interesting stuff, huh?)
Because of the telescope (which orbits the earth every 97 minutes) scientists have discovered that our universe is 13 to 14 billion years old. Hubble also discovered the existence of dark energy – a mysterious force that accelerates the expansion of the universe. Not to mention all of the different galaxies Hubble has photographed. Holy moley, there are a lot of them!
Look at these photos.
The Cat’s Eye nebula is formed from gas bubbles and high-speed jets from the outer layers of a dying star. There is a theory that the gasses are released at 1,500-year intervals, giving the nebula a layered look.
These two galaxies, located 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo, distort as their gravitational fields interact. The bigger galaxy is sucking stars, gas and dust from the smaller one.
The blue ring at Saturn’s south pole is streams of charged particles from the sun colliding with the planet’s magnetic field. The aurora, which can last for days, appears blue because of the ultraviolet camera but someone on Saturn would see red lights instead of blue. An Atlantis shuttle mission to Hubble was scheduled on October 10th, but it was postponed because of Hubble’s failed backup formatter. The mission has been rescheduled for early 2009 – probably February if everything continues to go well. One can only hope that the mission will launch then, considering it costs $10 million for each month it is delayed.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Police Ride Along
We were required to go on a Police ride along for my journalism class. I signed up with the initial thought that it would be fun. When I found out the time I would be going – 9 P.M. – I started to get nervous.
To be completely honest, I didn’t want to go. I was scared; not of the thought that I might be experiencing dangerous things, but that the cop would be mean. I didn’t consider police officers as nice people. In my defense, I’d never really talked to a cop while he or she was on duty. Sure, I’d been in the car of someone getting pulled over but I don’t think that telling the officer the reason you were speeding counts as a real conversation. I dreaded the thought of being in a squad car with a scary person that I didn’t know; out doing heaven knows what until who knows what time.
But I went. I drove Jane to the Police Station at 8:50 P.M. parked under a street light (well lit = safe) and got into the squad car of Officer Hagen.
First thing I noticed when I got into the front seat was the gun gently trucked in between the seat and the center console. I hate guns. They scare the pee out of me. Officer Hagen just so happened to be the leader of the SWAT team for Rexburg, Idaho. He had the biggest gun I have ever seen. I know that it isn’t called a “gun.” It has some fancy-schmancy technical name which he did tell me, but out of fear, I promptly forgot it. It had so many handles and do-dads sticking off of it I would have no idea how to even hold the thing. That loaded weapon rested against leg the entire night. I was little freaked out.
As soon as my door was closed and my seat belt on, we took off. Very fast. A person in a nursing home had a seizure and we needed to backup the ambulance. With the sirens blaring we zoomed down the streets of Rexburg. We would screech to a brief and hard halt at the each of the stop signs because the police are required to stop. I didn’t know that; I thought that traffic laws didn’t apply to police cars on a mission.
Anyway, at the nursing home I sat in the car. The paramedics get a little touchy if they have to rip off someone’s clothes to revive them and a random, uninvolved person is just standing there watching. I didn’t want to make anyone mad.
After the nursing home incident Officer Hagen and I started to talk. Surprisingly, it wasn’t awkward at all. He was a really nice guy.
I found out that the K9 unit squad car we were riding in was new – to him anyway. Later in the week he would be going to Kentucky to get a dog. It would be the third dog for the Rexburg Police Department. It would be his first and it would be a drug dog.
I was interested to know how police dogs were treated since their main purpose is to work, not to be a pet. Officer Hagen told me that the dog would stay in a kennel until it was time to go to work. Dogs get excited when they get let out of a cramped space and if the dog associates going to work as something positive, he will always love to go to work and he will work harder as a result. The dog will be let out of the kennel for 20 minutes a day when it isn’t working. I thought this was sad, but I guess that’s the life of a working dog.
Officer Hagen confided in me later – he was embarrassed to tell me actually – that the dog’s name would be Truck. Hagen has a two year old son who “can’t pronounce his T’s right yet.” Think that one through, it will make you laugh.
Hagen told me about his 10 year service in the Police force. Sadly, out of all the places he’s worked, Rexburg has the highest suicide rate. Also, with it being a college town the students sometimes get a little weird. College girls have been known to beat themselves up and violate their virtue with some kind of object in order to make a believable claim that someone raped them. All this will be done in an attempt to get attention or to make a boyfriend, who never proposed, feel badly. Craziness!
College kids also like to park. (Park: to go somewhere in a car and make out…hopefully that’s all they are doing.) It was a pretty slow night in Rexburg, according to Officer Hagen, so we went and found the parkers and interrupted their parking. Funniest thing I have ever done. I’m still laughing about it.
When we got bored of that we pulled people over. Officer Hagen is a pretty nice cop to get pulled over by. He only gave one person a ticket and that is because the person sped up in an effort to get away as soon as the squad car’s lights went on. We had to chase them so they totally deserved a ticket.
Officer Hagen told me stories of things he experienced on the job. Some of them made me laugh, others made me want to cry and some shocked me; all of them made me respect Police Officers more than I had before and realize that they are just normal people like us. (Who would have known?)
We talked to a county officer for a while (you know when the officers pull their cars up close to each other and talk through their windows…I did that. Yeah, you can be jealous) and I learned all about the drama of being a cop and what goes on in the department.
Before I knew it, it was 12:30 A.M. I asked Officer Hagen to take me home even though we were still chatting away and having fun. I learned a lot from my Police Ride along. I’m not scared of cops anymore and that is a pretty big deal for me.
To be completely honest, I didn’t want to go. I was scared; not of the thought that I might be experiencing dangerous things, but that the cop would be mean. I didn’t consider police officers as nice people. In my defense, I’d never really talked to a cop while he or she was on duty. Sure, I’d been in the car of someone getting pulled over but I don’t think that telling the officer the reason you were speeding counts as a real conversation. I dreaded the thought of being in a squad car with a scary person that I didn’t know; out doing heaven knows what until who knows what time.
But I went. I drove Jane to the Police Station at 8:50 P.M. parked under a street light (well lit = safe) and got into the squad car of Officer Hagen.
First thing I noticed when I got into the front seat was the gun gently trucked in between the seat and the center console. I hate guns. They scare the pee out of me. Officer Hagen just so happened to be the leader of the SWAT team for Rexburg, Idaho. He had the biggest gun I have ever seen. I know that it isn’t called a “gun.” It has some fancy-schmancy technical name which he did tell me, but out of fear, I promptly forgot it. It had so many handles and do-dads sticking off of it I would have no idea how to even hold the thing. That loaded weapon rested against leg the entire night. I was little freaked out.
As soon as my door was closed and my seat belt on, we took off. Very fast. A person in a nursing home had a seizure and we needed to backup the ambulance. With the sirens blaring we zoomed down the streets of Rexburg. We would screech to a brief and hard halt at the each of the stop signs because the police are required to stop. I didn’t know that; I thought that traffic laws didn’t apply to police cars on a mission.
Anyway, at the nursing home I sat in the car. The paramedics get a little touchy if they have to rip off someone’s clothes to revive them and a random, uninvolved person is just standing there watching. I didn’t want to make anyone mad.
After the nursing home incident Officer Hagen and I started to talk. Surprisingly, it wasn’t awkward at all. He was a really nice guy.
I found out that the K9 unit squad car we were riding in was new – to him anyway. Later in the week he would be going to Kentucky to get a dog. It would be the third dog for the Rexburg Police Department. It would be his first and it would be a drug dog.
I was interested to know how police dogs were treated since their main purpose is to work, not to be a pet. Officer Hagen told me that the dog would stay in a kennel until it was time to go to work. Dogs get excited when they get let out of a cramped space and if the dog associates going to work as something positive, he will always love to go to work and he will work harder as a result. The dog will be let out of the kennel for 20 minutes a day when it isn’t working. I thought this was sad, but I guess that’s the life of a working dog.
Officer Hagen confided in me later – he was embarrassed to tell me actually – that the dog’s name would be Truck. Hagen has a two year old son who “can’t pronounce his T’s right yet.” Think that one through, it will make you laugh.
Hagen told me about his 10 year service in the Police force. Sadly, out of all the places he’s worked, Rexburg has the highest suicide rate. Also, with it being a college town the students sometimes get a little weird. College girls have been known to beat themselves up and violate their virtue with some kind of object in order to make a believable claim that someone raped them. All this will be done in an attempt to get attention or to make a boyfriend, who never proposed, feel badly. Craziness!
College kids also like to park. (Park: to go somewhere in a car and make out…hopefully that’s all they are doing.) It was a pretty slow night in Rexburg, according to Officer Hagen, so we went and found the parkers and interrupted their parking. Funniest thing I have ever done. I’m still laughing about it.
When we got bored of that we pulled people over. Officer Hagen is a pretty nice cop to get pulled over by. He only gave one person a ticket and that is because the person sped up in an effort to get away as soon as the squad car’s lights went on. We had to chase them so they totally deserved a ticket.
Officer Hagen told me stories of things he experienced on the job. Some of them made me laugh, others made me want to cry and some shocked me; all of them made me respect Police Officers more than I had before and realize that they are just normal people like us. (Who would have known?)
We talked to a county officer for a while (you know when the officers pull their cars up close to each other and talk through their windows…I did that. Yeah, you can be jealous) and I learned all about the drama of being a cop and what goes on in the department.
Before I knew it, it was 12:30 A.M. I asked Officer Hagen to take me home even though we were still chatting away and having fun. I learned a lot from my Police Ride along. I’m not scared of cops anymore and that is a pretty big deal for me.
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