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Physics and Technology
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| RAFT Activities | ||
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Round and Round with Static Charges 
An easy-to-make, fun to investigate portion cup version of the first electric motor. Power an electric motor with only hand generated charges; no batteries required! |
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| Tips for Talking Science | ||
To understand how things work (or why they don't work), sometimes the best thing to do is take them apart. Talk about the different pieces you discover and try to guess what will happen when you take them out or put them back in. |
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Recommended resources on Physics and Technology
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Image Credit: Yogi, Creative Commons.
We're on a roll ... but we need your help!
The science of rolling objects has a long history and you can contribute by doing a few rolling experiments (races) of your own and sending us the results. Interested? Read on...
Donate Your Time
Einstein@Home
According to Albert Einstein, we live in a universe full of gravitational waves. He suggested that the movements of heavy objects, such as black holes and dense stars, create waves that change space and time. We have a chance to detect these waves, but we need your help to do it!
Einstein@Home uses computer time donated by computer owners all over the world to process data from gravitational wave detectors. Participants in Einstein@Home download software to their computers, which process gravitational wave data when not being used for other computer applications, like word processors or games. Einstein@Home doesn't affect the performance of computers and greatly speeds up this exciting research.
Talking about Science
Talking about the process and nature of science -- be it evolution, physics, or biodiversity -- is not always second nature, so we have enlisted scientist and mom Janet Stemwedel to share her fun and engaging blog with us at Year of Science. In this blog, she masterfully navigates through science conversations with her children, explaining cool science concepts in plain, light and fun ways that readers of all ages will enjoy!
Friday Sprog Blogging: it is rocket science!
When the weather gets nice, a sprog's thoughts turn to rocketry. Photos of the first mission of the bottle-rocket season after the jump.
First, giving credit where credit is due: The rockets were built by our friends the Visiting Mathematicians who, with their sprogs Double Trouble, were picnicking with the Free-Ride family. We just got to share in the fruits of their awesomeness. The Visiting Mathematicians, in turn, credit Make Magazine as the source of the technological know-how. (There's an instructional video, too.)
T-10 minutes: On-site rocket assembly commences. Despite my urging, we did not, in the end, include the watermelon in the rocket payload. Note for future launches: park water fountains are ill-suited to fill bottle rockets.
T-5 minutes: The rocket is mounted on the launch pad. Launch angle set perpendicular to pad after we remembered that the three supporting lines ought to be 120 degrees from each other. Nearby picnickers seem relieved at launch angle.
What propels a bottle rocket, of course, is the release of water that is in the rocket at high pressure. The rocket is filled 30-50% with water. Then, on the launch pad, the rocket must be brought to about 70 psi. This takes a good deal of pumping.
Quite a lot of pumping. This is a good reason to bring a large flight crew for the launch. (Some members of our flight crew were larger than others.)
Seriously, 70 psi requires some muscle!
So, with all that pressure in the rocket, you need a mechanism to keep it from launching until you want it to launch. For this mission, the mechanism involved a release pin held in place by a small ring of PVC pipe. While the initial design put a pull-cord just on the PVC O-ring, a modification added a pull-cord to the circular part of the release pin. This is another good reason to have a large flight crew.
Note for future missions: A wee digital camera is not the best tool for documenting the flight path of a clear bottle rocket, especially when the sound of the launch makes the photographer jump. Witnesses noted the rocket shooting past the top of the tree pictured here.
I managed to snap a shot of the rocket during reentry (it's that whitish blob near the high tree branches on the left side of the frame).
The sprogs judged the mission successful, and their parental units concurred.
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