Category Archives: Uncategorized

Parasitic Plants – how plants borrow useful genes from other plants…

Observe the fur colour of the baby foxes.

How is the fur colour of the baby foxes the same as the parent foxes?  

How is the fur colour of the baby foxes different?  

What type of simple pattern of inheritance does this represent (dominance, recessive, incomplete or codominance)?

Notes:

DNA to RNA to mRNA to tRNA

 

Learn more about how to determine the maximum payload on a rocket:

Learn more about how rockets are launched – Link to National Geographic
How do rockets work?
Rockets don’t work by “pushing against the air,” since they also function in the vacuum of space. Instead, rockets take advantage of momentum, or how much power a moving object has.

If no outside forces act on a group of objects, the group’s combined momentum must stay constant over time. Imagine yourself standing on a skateboard with a basketball in your hands. If you throw the basketball in one direction, you and the skateboard will roll in the opposite direction to conserve momentum. The faster you throw the ball, the faster you roll backward.

Rockets work by expelling hot exhaust that acts in the same way as the basketball. The exhaust’s gas molecules don’t weigh much individually, but they exit the rocket’s nozzle very fast, giving them a lot of momentum. As a result, the rocket moves in the opposite direction of the exhaust with the same total oomph.

Student Tutorial Part 3 – Learn the rocket equation

Learn more about the unique protocols around using moon rocks for science research…

(How does this relate to tools of the astronomer?)

Have a Happy Summer Vacation:

60 Starlinked satellites launched by Space X and photographed by Marco Langbrock.

Link to Marco Langbrocks Vimeo webpage

Link to Marco Langbrocks webpage

Link to Video of the launch of the 60 satellites

last week, SpaceX launched 60 satellites into space atop its Falcon 9 rocket. Less than a day later, astronomers captured their amazing trail of lights as they crossed the sky.

The 60 satellites launched by Space X are part of a project called Starlink.  These new satellites will be part of a 12,000 satellite network whose goal is to provide much-improved internet access to every part of the world.

Marco Langbroek, an archeologist and spy satellite consultant based in the Netherlands, was stunned when he managed to record the satellites’ path using a low-light surveillance camera on May 24, 22 hours after their launch.

Astronomers are concerned about light pollution caused by the satellites.

How to see the satellites:
The satellites were at roughly 440 kilometres in altitude — slightly higher than the International Space Station. Over the coming days, as they orbit, they will rise to 550 kilometres.

There’s still a chance you could spot them, too. The keys are dark skies, patience and binoculars.

How to see them

First, you need to understand about visual magnitude. Astronomers have come up with a way of measuring the brightness of objects in the night sky.

The brightness of celestial objects is on a scale that goes from the very brightest — the sun — to the dimmest. And the lower the number (negative values), the brighter the object.

As you can see by the chart above, the visual magnitude limitation for the human eye is an object with a magnitude of +6, and that’s in dark-sky locations, away from the pollution of city lights. Within a city, that drops to +3.

The brightness of the Starlink satellites over Toronto, for example, range from roughly +6 to +3, right on the visual limit in light-polluted skies.

So, if you want to see the satellites — which will have spread out a bit more by now — get to a dark-sky location, away from city lights. They won’t be as bright as in Langbroek’s video, since he captured them with a low-light camera.

Learn more about neutron stars

LIGO – Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory