WHY WON'T THIS THING TURN ON!?

  We all know what circuits are right?   Well for the people who don't, this is for you.  The people who do know, maybe you'll learn something today.  I'm going to start off talking about a complete circuit.  For there to be a complete circuit energy needs to be flowing through that object.  We've all watched TV right?  Well the cord at the end of the TV is where all the electricity is coming from.  The electrons from the outlet are flowing through the cord and into the TV.  Then they go back through the other side of the cord and back into the outlet and its start all over again. 

Have you ever made your own power source? Well you need a battery, two strings of wire, and a bulb.  The battery has a positive and negative side.  You put one end of the wire on the positive and one end of the other wire on the negative.  Then you put both ends of the two wires on the bulb and the bulb should light up!  

                               CLOSED CIRCUIT  OPEN CIRCUIT

You all have switches at home right?  Have you every wondered why the lights turn on and off?  When you flip the switch down the circuit is open so the energy can't flow through and the light can't turn on.  When you flip the switch up the circuit is closed so now energy can flow and the light turns on. 

Next is a short circuit,which is a current flow along a path where usually no electricity flows through.  Short circuits can have very high temperatures because of the high power waste in the circuit.  If you have a high voltage capacitor and its short circuited by a thin wire the wire could really explode.  Just know that some circuits are dangerous and that we all need to be more careful when we use and make things. 



You will get a shock out of this!

Just think if we didn't have electricity.  Think about what you do when you get home, now think about what that would be like without electricity.  We use electricity for TV, our homes, and lots of other things too.  On the weekends I play my game.  Now if we didn't have electricity I wouldn't be able to do that.  Most of us have cell phones and laptops and I use mine all the time.  If we didn't have electricity then we could never charge them.  I would hate having them if you couldn't charge them.           

                                                   STATIC ELECTRICITY
There are two things I'm going to talk about today and that's static and current electricity.  Static electricity are just electrons jumping from one object to another.  Static electricity can transfer from things like a metal doorknob to your finger.  If you have on socks the electrons from the rug rub onto the socks and you start to become negatively charged.  So watch where you walk when you have on socks in you house.   

                              
                                CURRENT ELECTRICITY
Current electricity is just the constant flow of electrons.  Current electricity is everywhere.  When you plug in something in your outlet the electrons are going through the plug into the outlet.  Then they go back through the  plug and into the battery.  So without current electricity the world would be a lot different.    

  CONDUCTOR

Have you ever seen a really tall building and the top of it had a pole? Well that's a conductor and the conductor is made of metal.  The lighting is attracted to the pole and  if there's ever a thunderstorm the lighting shoots towards the pole and the it's sent to the ground safely.  Some houses have conductors but mostly the taller buildings have them.        

  

                                          INSULATOR                                  There's also something called an insulator.  It keeps the electricity from going out of control.  Have you seen jumper cables?  The cables have some rubber on them because when you put them on your car there's a shock that could hurt or be life threatening.  So the rubber is something you should always have when you have jumper cables.  Electricity is everywhere so we should have the most out of what we have now because in the future we might not have it.

       

                     
                                  

ATOMS!

Atoms are everywhere, we just cant see them.  There in our food, our drinks, there even in us!  In about 1802 a guy named John Dalton built a  model called the atomic theory of matter which means that each type of matter is made up of one type of atom.  Then each atom could be put into a group called an element and each atom was identical.  An example of that would be that gold atoms make gold and iron atoms make iron.  Dalton also said that an atom could not be created, made into smaller parts, or destroyed. 

                         

In 1897 a guy named J.J Thomson found the electron.  He used a device he created that had a vacuum tube with two medal plates at each end.  He found that a beam would form between the plates and he called this beam the cathode and the anode.  When you put a magnet near the beam it would cause it to bend and this mean that the particles of the beam were electrically charged.  Thomson discovered that the beam was made of negatively charged particles and they were later called electrons.  If there were the same number of protons and electrons then they would cancel each other out.  If electrons leave then the atom becomes positively charged, but if more electrons come then the atom becomes negatively charged.  When the electrons come or leave the atom becomes and ion because of its either positive or negative charges.  Thomson thought that electrons were stuck throughout a positively charged area.  For example everyone knows what cookie dough is right? Well the electrons are the chocolate chips and the dough is the positively charged area. 

There was one more guy I wanted to talk about.  His name is Ernest Rutherford and he made a device that had a beam and a thin sheet of gold plate.  They shot the beam and most of the particles went through the gold.  He found out that the gold had to be made up of mostly empty space.  When the other parts of the beam didn't go through he changed his theory saying that there had to be some positive particles in the gold.  He called this the nucleus and the particles inside the nucleus were the protons.  The electrons were the other particles spinning around it really fast.  Well of course there's so much more to tell but then I would have to get into the more scientific terms and you would all get bored.  Hope you learned a lot.    


          





               

POWER

What is power? We all think power is like grown ups telling us what to do and lights and stuff like that.  We also think power is like Superman, Batman, and Spiderman.  Well not this kind of power.  Power is how quickly work is done.  Power, work, and force are all in the same category.  Force is measured in newtons, work is measured in joules, and power is just work divided by the time.  The way you write the formula for power is P=W/T.  To find how much power you used you have to know how much work you did and how long it took you to do it.  If you were lifting something that had a mass of 10 kilograms and you lifted it 10 meters in 5 seconds then you did a lot of power.  The faster you do work the more power you have done.  So if you lifted something that was 5 kilograms, 5 meters in front of you and you did it in 5 seconds then you didn't do that much work.       

The trip to Florida

The trip to Florida was good.  We saw the shuttle but we couldn't see it launch because they kept changing the days.  We left Monday night at around 9:40. For the first few hours on the bus we all talked and watched a movie.  At about 12:00am we all fell asleep and it was cold on the bus.  When we got to the retreat we had to sit on the bus for a few minutes so the teacher could check us in.  Everyone was tired because when we got there it was 6:00 in the morning.  We got to our rooms, put our bags down, and then we got back on the bus and went to the Kennedy Space Center.  We first went on the tour and saw the shuttle from a far distance. You had to squint your eyes to see it.  We also saw this big machine that moves the shuttle up and down.  It weighed 6 million pounds! When we got off the bus we watched a movie talking about the launch and how it happens.  When the movie was over we went through the exhibit and there was this thing that showed us what happens to the shuttle and what they need to do to it. We saw all this cool stuff and when we all went to the Imax movie everyone fell asleep and didn't really see anything even some of the teachers fell asleep.  After that was over we went on this simulator and before you go in you have to watch a move and it tells you all you need to no about the shuttle.  When you get on the guy that talked to you about how all stuff works tells you how the simulator works and what you need to know.  It goes up, down, back, and forward and also when you get in to space your gravity turns off and you open the top hatch and see the earth.  Then when you get off you walk down the hallway and theirs all these boards you can read to lean more about the shuttle.  No one had time to look at them because of all the other people that were walking behind us.  Once that was done we went to the gift shop and everything there was so expensive.  The chess board that I wanted was $40 and that was the only thing that I really wanted.  Me and Fatima were standing in line for 2 hours and I told her that we stood in line for to long not to get the chess set.  When we left the store everyone was waiting and then someone told us that they postponed the shuttle launch until the next day.  We were all mad that we had to wait another day to watch it.  The next day they postponed it until Thursday and that's the day that we were leaving.  We were gonna stay and watch but when we woke up the next day they postponed it again until Friday and there was no way that we could watch it.  After that we went to the beach and I didn't like water so Fatima and Celine said that Poseidon was mad at me cause I said that.  He got my shoes wet and that mad me hate water even more.  We stayed at the beach for a while and then went back on the bus and back to the motel.  The next day we left and we were all still kind of mad that we didn't see the shuttle launch.  The drive didn't seem that long the way back but of course I fell asleep listing to music.  Then we stoped at McDonald's and kind of had a second breakfast.  We all ate on the bus and then went back to heading home.  Once it was like 3 or 4 we stoped at Wendy's for lunch.  We ate again and then stoped one more time to go to the restroom.  That was our last stop until we got back to the school.  I got my stuff and left because my parents were already there so I just went right home.

Energy Energy and more Energy

What is energy? Anyone know? Anyone at all?  Well energy is something like work.(you remember that blog right)  Energy is the ability to do work but not work it self.  The two things you need to know about energy is potential and kinetic energy.  Potential energy is like when if someone is about to throw a ball and they are going to put all there strength into throwing it.  So Potential energy is something or someone that is about to do something to that object.  Next is kinetic energy,this is when a person or thing has done some kind of work to that object.  An example of kinetic energy is if someone throws a ball, the ball has lost its potential energy because the person let the ball go.  The ball now has kinetic energy because of its motion.  

Which do you think has the most potential energy, a glass on the floor, a glass on top of the frig, or a glass on a coffee table?  The answer is the glass on top of the frig because the higher the object is the more potential energy it could have.  The higher object does have more kinetic energy then the lower glasses.  

NO JUSTIN BIEBER

Justin Bieber started maybe like one or two years ago.  Usher was his mentor and I think that Justin just needs to go away and go to school like every other sixteen year old boy.  All these girls are in love with him and he just makes all these new songs.  He was on some show and the guy asked him if he thinks Germany would be good in basketball.  He said he didn't know what that was.  So the guy shows him the card and he still doesn't know what Germany is.  I think that if he wasn't doing all this singing and had went to school like everyone else, he would know what Germany is. 



He was singing on stage one time and someone threw something at him and it took him like 2 minutes to react.  See what not going to school does to you.  My guess is people would just keep liking him until something happens.  Something always happens and the media turns it around and makes them seem like there the bad guy.  I'm surprised that he hasn't already been disliked but I'm not surprised if Germany doesn't like him anymore.  If Justin Beiber was gone off the face of the planet right now then there would be riots and chaos everywhere, but if people wait and he gets older then they would stop liking him.  Me personally I don't like him but I'm probably one out of like 20 people on earth who hate or strongly dislike him.