Be the Scientist this February 27th

10:30 AM	Chinese Lanterns Make a lantern to celebrate the Chinese New Year and the return of light on the first full moon of the lunar year!  Join us at our Make-it and Take-it station for some hands-on fun.  Read more...
1:00 PM	Magic or Science? This show will leave you flabbergasted, stunned and amazed!  Learn about the scientific method by figuring out the magic tricks of our resident magician.  Make observations and hypotheses to determine if what you see is...magic or science?  Read more...
1:30 PM	Abacuses Build your own calculator!  The abacus is an ancient Chinese mathematical tool dating back to the 2nd century.  Join us at our Make-it and Take-it station for some hands-on fun.  Read more...

February Newsletter for the PreSchool Family Network

How do the surroundings support our children
to be all that they can be; the space, arrangement,
colors, smells, sounds, how things
affect children, the importance of rhythm in daily
lives, toys and so on.

click here to read the complete newsletter

Incandescence vs. Luminescece

Light is a form of energy. The two common ways for creating light are: incandescence and luminescence.

Incandescence is the emission of light due to the high temperature of an object. A bon-fire, as well as  light bulbs with filaments produce light because of high temperature.

Luminescence is the emission of light at normal or cooler temperatures. This light is created when some  energy source causes an electron of an atom to be "excited" resulting in it jumping to a higher energy level; then the electron releases energy in the form of light and returns to its normal position -"ground state". The energy that excites the electron is generally greater than is the energy of the released light. The  glowing rock in the photo fluoresce under black light, which is a source of ultraviolet A. Fluorescence is a form of luminescence in which the material gives off light as long as the energy source that excites the electrons continues to be supplied. When the black light is turned off, the rocks no longer glow.

For more information, see   TYPES OF LUMINESCENCE

Magic or Science?

This show will leave you flabbergasted, stunned and amazed! Learn about the scientific method by figuring out the magic tricks of our resident magician. Make observations and hypotheses to determine if what you see is...magic or science?"

Saturday, Feb 27 at 1pm

Event Info

New Exhibit Grand Opening

Join us Saturday, Feb 20th from 10am to 4pm for the grand opening of our new exhibit,
Connect with China! 

St. Mary's School and ScienceWorks offer southern Oregon a glimpse into Chinese art, culture, science, and language through the state-of-the-art Connect with China exhibit.  This exciting experience mirrors the world renowned interactive Exploratorium exhibition housed at the Hanban Headquarters in Beijing.

The exhibit includes seven hands-on displays, along with artifacts from the Southern Oregon Historical Society and St. Mary's Confucious Classroom, all in combination to truly bring China to southern Oregon.

• become a cast member in the virtual Beijing opera house
• hear the sounds of traditional Chinese musical instruments
• learn to draw Chinese characters
• explore ancient Chinese thinkers, science, and technology

Connect with China will be on display from Feb 20th to May 5th.

Click here for complete exhibit details.

Grand Opening Festivities:

10am - Ribbon cutting ceremony with the Ashland Chamber of Commerce

10am-1pm - Paper Cutting demonstration and activity with Li and Yin Huang at our Make-it Take-it station in the Main Hall

10:30am-1pm - Make your own abacus, sundial and Chinese lantern in the Discovery Lab

11am - "Confucian Practice in Chinese Life and Art", a presentation on the relationship between Confucious and the development of Chinese characters by Robert Ross.  The presentation includes a calligraphy demonstration by Michiko Wisdom and a Tai Chi demonstration by Richard Cole.  In the SciTheater.

1pm - Traditional Chinese dance and instrument performance by Jacolyn and Acacia Ricks

1:30-4pm - Make your own abacus, sundial and Chinese lantern in the Discovery Lab

2-4pm - Face painting with Jen Davis at our Make-it Take-it station in the Main Hall

Don't miss out on this once in a life-time experience!

Video Presentation - From Pole to Pole

Thursday, February 18, 2010
This is the first episode from the BBC's series Planet Earth.  This program, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, explores areas of the earth still untouched by population spread. The program features beautiful pictures and animals of many kinds in a high quality modern production - it uses...  Read more... 

Wind Power

Wind power is the conversion of wind energy into a useful form of energy, such as using wind turbines to make electricity, wind mills for mechanical power, wind pumps for pumping water or drainage, or sails to propel ships.

At the end of 2009, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered generators was 157.9 gigawatts (GW)., which is about 1.5% of worldwide electricity usage; and is growing rapidly, having doubled in the three years between 2005 and 2008. Several countries have achieved relatively high levels of wind power penetration (with large governmental subsidies), such as 19% of stationary electricity production in Denmark, 13% inSpain and Portugal, and 7% in Germany and the Republic of Ireland in 2008. As of May 2009, eighty countries around the world are using wind power on a commercial basis.

Large-scale wind farms are connected to the electric power transmission network; smaller facilities are used to provide electricity to isolated locations. Utility companies increasingly buy back surplus electricity produced by small domestic turbines. Wind energy as a power source is attractive as an alternative to fossil fuels, because it is plentiful, renewable, widely distributed, clean, and produces no greenhouse gas emissions. However, the construction of wind farms is not universally welcomed because of their visual impact and other effects on the environment.

Wind power is non-dispatchable, meaning that for economic operation, all of the available output must be taken when it is available. Other resources, such ashydropower, and standard load management techniques must be used to match supply with demand. The intermittency of wind seldom creates problems when using wind power to supply a low proportion of total demand.

Solar Energy

Solar energy, radiant light and heat from the sun, has been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of ever-evolving technologies. Solar radiation, along with secondary solar-powered resources such as wind and wave power, hydroelectricity and biomass, account for most of the available renewable energy on earth. Only a minuscule fraction of the available solar energy is used.

Solar powered electrical generation relies on heat engines and photovoltaics. Solar energy's uses are limited only by human ingenuity. A partial list of solar applications includes space heating and cooling through solar architecture, potable water via distillation and disinfection, daylighting,solar hot water, solar cooking, and high temperature process heat for industrial purposes.To harvest the solar energy, the most common way is to use solar panels.

Solar technologies are broadly characterized as either passive solar or active solar depending on the way they capture, convert and distribute solar energy. Active solar techniques include the use of photovoltaic panels and solar thermal collectors to harness the energy. Passive solar techniques include orienting a building to the Sun, selecting materials with favorable thermal mass or light dispersing properties, and designing spaces that naturally circulate air.

Color Matters

Color plays a vitally important role in the world in which we live. Color can sway thinking, change actions, and cause reactions. It can irritate or soothe your eyes, raise your blood pressure or suppress your appetite.

When used in the right ways, color can save on energy consumption. When used in the wrong ways, color can contribute to global pollution.

As a powerful form of communication, color is irreplaceable. Red means "stop" and green means "go." Traffic lights send this universal message. Likewise, the colors used for a product, web site, business card, or logo cause powerful reactions. 

Visit: http://www.colormatters.com/

Quark Soup Physicists create conditions not seen since the big bang.

While the Large Hadron Collider gets all the attention (it never hurts a physics experiment's street cred when rumors spread that it might create a mini black hole and swallow up the Earth), a lesser-known particle collider has been quietly making soup—quark soup. For the field of experimental particle physics, in which progress has been at a near-standstill since the glory days of the 1970s (yes, the top quark was discovered in an experiment at Fermilab in 1995, but really, everyone knew this last of the six quarksexisted), this counts as the most notable achievement in years: a discovery that doesn't merely confirm what theory has long held, but points the way to new revelations about the creation and evolution of the universe.

more at: http://www.newsweek.com/id/233667

Island of Hope

A pod of dolphins play in the bay as we hop off a small motorboat into knee-deep water. Back home, it is Thanksgiving, cold and gray, but here in Fiji, the air is windless and steamy. This country of tropical islands speckles the Pacific Ocean near the equator, several hours by plane from Australia and New Zealand.

After a 16-hour journey from Minneapolis and several days out at sea, I wade with shaking legs toward a sandy beach. Dozens of people in floral shirts sing and play guitars under a handmade sign that reads: "Welcome to Kiobo." Our boat traveled through the night to get us to this remote village. We are its first official tour group, and the villagers have spent weeks preparing for our visit.

A shy teenager named Lena greets me with a necklace made of flowers. She hands me a coconut with its top cut off so I can drink the juice. As my own family feasts on turkey and stuffing 5,500 miles away, I squint against the hazy sun and notice all the things that Kiobo (pronounced Kee-OHM-bo) doesn't have.

Winter Olympic medals made from recycled e-waste

When Olympic champions are crowned at this year's winter games in Vancouver, these elite athletes will be taking home more than just gold, silver or bronze medals—they will be playing a role in Canada's efforts toreduce electronic waste. That's because each medal was made with a tiny bit of the more than 140,000 tons of e-waste that otherwise would have been sent to Canadian landfills.

The more than 1,000 medals to be awarded at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, which kick off today, amount to 2.05 kilograms of gold, 1,950 kilograms of silver (Olympic gold medals are about 92.5 per cent silver, plated with six grams of gold) and 903 kilograms of copper. A little more than 1.5 percent of each gold medal was made with metals harvested from cathode ray tube glass, computer parts, circuit boards and other trashed tech. Each copper medal contains just over one percent e-waste, while the silver medals contain only small traces of recycled electronics.

This is the first time that recycled materials have been added to Olympic medals, which historically have been made from mined mineral deposits refined for commercial use. Each Olympic medal is 100 millimeters in diameter, about six millimeters thick and weighs between 500 and 576 grams, depending upon the medal.

Teck Resources, the Vancouver-based company that extracted the metals used to make the medals, noted in a press release that it used a number of different recovery processes. The company shredded computers, monitors, printers and glass and then separated out steel, aluminum, copper, glass and other usable substances. The leftover shredded components were fed into a furnace operating at a temperature of 1,200 degrees Celsius in order to remove the metals that could not be recovered simply by shredding the electronic devices.

Impossible Colors: See Hues that can't exist

Engineers often load a structure with weight until it collapses or shake it until it flies apart. Like engineers, many scientists also have a secret love for destructive testing—the more catastrophic the failure, the better. Human vision researchers avoid irreversible failures (and lawsuits) but find reversible failures fascinating and instructive—and sometimes even important, as with the devastating spatial disorientations and visual blackouts that military pilots can experience. At the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the two of us explore the most catastrophic visual failures we can arrange. We create conditions in which people see images flowing like hot wax and fragmenting like a shattered mosaic. Here, we tell the story of the two most intriguing perceptual breakdowns we have studied: forbidden colors and biased geometric hallucinations.

Have you ever seen the color bluish yellow? We do not mean green. Some greens may appear bluish and others may appear yellow-tinged, but no green (or any other color) ever appears both bluish and yellowish at the same moment. And have you ever seen reddish green? We do not mean the muddy brown that might come from mixing paints, or the yellow that comes from combining red and green light, or the texture of a pointillist's field of red and green dots. We mean a single color that looks reddish and greenish at the same time, in the same place.