During the last month or two, it’s taken every spare nanosecond to keep relatively currently on AstronomyBuff, and even then I came up short for a few posts. As a result, I’ve had to lower the priority of writing on this blog.

Well, no more. Things have settled enough that I can get into a regular blogging groove and pick things up here.

A few bits of news: I’m working at the University of Illinois on The Dark Energy Survey, an effort to try and characterize nature of dark energy. Note that we’re not trying to find it, because we can’t interact with it directly, but we going to try and measure a variety of aspects of the universe to try and determine how MUCH dark energy there is and whether it’s always been this amount throughout the history of the universe.

It’s an incredibly interesting problem, one I am very excited and privileged to be a part of.

I’ll write about this effort mostly on astronomybuff, but I wanted to let HomelyScientist readers what I’ve been up to and to let you know that I’ll be tending to things a little more around here.

Thanks for your patience and lets get started…

If you’re teaching science at home and need excellent curriculum resources, you need to know about The Teaching Company. So far I have ordered three courses from them:

• Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe
• Biology and Human Behavior: The Neurological Origins of Individuality
• Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy

Every single one of these has been excellent and I plan to order many more. They have courses on history, philosophy and a few math courses as well.

For those parents who have a particularly difficult time with teaching science at home, and especially if your kid is precocious in the subject, you won’t regret ordering ANY of the science and math courses.

This company seems to go to great lengths to offer subjects taught by the best teachers at universities from all over the country. I have become addicted to them.

The way I’ve been using the courses at home is we watch one lecture and I pause it whenever I want to make a comment or if there is a question. We then use the discussion questions at the end of each section in the study guide to go further into a topic.

Sometimes I’ll make up some problem sets or little questions of my own for them to write about. At the end of the week, I have them write up a short summary of what they considered the most important concepts.

I can’t recommend these courses enough to anyone, not just homeschoolers, but they are a wonderful resource that should be utilized by them in particular.

Another great resource is SciToys.com.

This website has a lot of pre-made kits that can be purchased to build things like film cannons, Gauss Rifles, simple heat engines and loads of other cool projects.

I often recommend starting at this website whenever a student is considering ideas for a science fair project.

I’ll be blogging in more detail about this site as time goes on as I just placed a huge order with them and I wanna play with my new toys.

Oh, and the kids too… Yeah, they wanna play too, I guess.

Technorati Tags: homeschooling, homeschooling science, teaching company

The National Snow and Ice Data Center here in Boulder has collected data from the 2007 melting season and discovered:

At the end of the melt season, September 2007 sea ice was 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 (Full Press Release).

These guys watch the ice from all over the planet using satellites with microwave radiometers along with meteorological satellites to get an idea of how much ice there is. Then, as the year progresses, measure how much of it is melting or growing.

In the northern hemisphere, as fall begins, the melting season ends and scientists are beginning to take stock of the damage. The results are pretty disturbing. Arctic sea ice melted so much this year that the northwest passage was opened for the first time ever. What’s more, researchers now think that we may have an ice-free arctic ocean in the summer within our lifetimes:

The sea ice cover is in a downward spiral and may have passed the point of no return. As the years go by, we are losing more and more ice in summer, and growing back less and less ice in winter. We may well see an ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer within our lifetimes. The scientists agree that this could occur by 2030. (Full Press Release)

It was also reported in EOS last week that the Greenland melting season set a new record, with a melting index up 153% greater than average. The melting index is just a number, defined as the melting area times the number of days melting occurred.

Image Credit: AGU/EOS

Technorati Tags: Arctic Sea Ice, greenland ice sheet, NSIDC

My name is Tony Darnell and I’m going to be your new blogger. As you may or may not know, Tris has moved on to other opportunities and I’ve offered to carry on this blog.

I’ve been blogging on AstronomyBuff since January, and one of the reasons I decided to blog for b5Media was I really enjoyed this blog. I felt like it was well-written and cared for, and it had a theme I’m very passionate about: doing science at home.

I want to continue what Tris has built, but of course, I’ll bring my own style to it.

I’m not sure what kind of readership this blog has, but I can tell you that I’m looking forward to learning more about you. I hope you’ll get involved and comment or ask questions. I’ll help out by giving you things to comment and ask questions about.

Some things you should know about me:

• I’m a little strange. People either find that endearing or annoying. I hope you’re in the former group, if not, you’re still welcome here.
• As you can see from my picture, I’m 50 feet tall and have a super-human intellect and strength.
• I’m a contrarian, I tend to resist doing things most people are doing.
• I love science, particularly astronomy.
• I ran a non-profit in the early 1990’s that gave science enrichment in the classroom. I’ll be drawing on that experience a lot when writing for this blog.
• I’m homeschooling my son in science this year. One of the main reasons I thought I could write for HomelyScientist was that I plan to chronicle that experience here.
• I know lots about science fairs and being a science fair judge. Again, you’ll read about that stuff here.

A bit about my writing style. I tend to write how I talk, which sometimes includes bad words. I’ve not bothered to censor myself on AstronomyBuff because I wanted that blog to accurately reflect my personality. I tend to write more towards entertaining than informing, although I realize that you need information, so I work hard to meld the two.

Since I think this blog was intended more for the home and family audience, I will make every attempt to keep it clean here. No bad words, and no long rants unless it’s also kept civil. This may change though as I get to learn more about you and get feedback on what you’re finding useful and what you’d like to get from this blog.

I’ll close this post by offering that you PLEASE feel free to interact and let me know what you want. If you don’t tell me then I’m gonna do what I want, and it may not be what YOU want. So chime in!

Alrighty then, let’s do some science, shall we?

Technorati Tags: homeschooling, homeschooling science, science blogging

“Hello?”

<Tentatively crack open door and press my face between the door and the frame>

“Hello? Is anyone home? I’m Tony, the new blogger, I’m just gonna put my stuff in this corner, OK?”

<Open door all the way and walk in>

This is so strange.

I mean it, this is weird. Logging into and then posting on someone else’s blog that has been cared for and written on for years…

Well, the only thing I can tell you is that I feel like I’m wearing a pair of pants that I knew someone just died in.

Tris is fine, of course, that’s just a figure of speech, he went on to other, presumably greener pastures, but I can’t help but feel strange writing THIS post on THIS blog.

It’s like I’ve just moved into a house and I can see where the previous tenants put their couch from the indentations in the carpet. The picture hangers are still on the walls and, oh yeah, there’s still a roll of toilet paper on the holder by the toilet.

Strange.

I’m gonna need a minute, I’ll be right back…

Read the tips and try putting at these a couple in practice this week.

According to local legend in Atlantic Canada, a giant whale in ancient times made such a splash with his mighty tail that the water in the Bay of Fundy sloshes back and forth to this day.

Getting power from that giant splash could be only a couple of years away, as the Nova Scotia government appointed Offshore Energy Environmental Research group just completed a round of six community forums on tidal power in the bay.

Nova Scotia Power has already partnered with Ireland’s OpenHydro Group to provide in-stream underwater turbines and expects to have a 1 megawatt demonstration unit in the water in 2009. Source: Nova Scotia looks at tidal power | Inside Greentech

Honestly I hope this gets off the ground.  It’s a simple thing that could help reduce the need for fossil-fuel powered generation and pressure to fire up more nuclear power plants.

Yeah not good.  Okay to tackle the safety, storage and transport issues we have the hydrogen pellet:

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, has come up with a new formula for hydrogen pellets that looks like it holds a lot of energy, per gram.

The PNNL pellet is made out of ammonia borane, or AB, compressed into small pellets. A milliliter of AB weighs about 0.75 grams and can hold up to 1.8 liters of hydrogen. Researchers speculated that a fuel system powered by AB pellets will occupy less space and be lighter in weight than systems using pressurized hydrogen gas. That’s one of the pellets (and not a half-dissolved Jawbreaker) in the photo. Source: Another formula for hydrogen fuel pellets | Tech news blog – CNET News.com

This looks promising, but they have to work on getting the hydrogen back out easily, effectively, and cheaply.  Now on the generation side:

Those mad scientists at Purdue University seem to think they have something big on their hands, with them now claiming that they’re “perfecting” a new hydrogen-generating technology that they first announced earlier this year. According to the researchers, the technology could represent a “pollution-free energy source” for a whole range of applications, with it effectively generating “hydrogen on demand.” To do that, the researchers added water to an alloy of aluminum and gallium, which attracts oxygen from the water, letting hydrogen loose in the process. Source: Engadget

Again anything to reduce the amount of energy require to liberate a quantity of hydrogen is a good thing.  Again, more work needed.

See the pattern here?  There are no easy answers.  There are no quick fixes.  It is going to take, time, money, and brains to get us to a place where we aren’t so dependant on fossil fuels.  At least now I think we have the collective will to help make it all happen.

Does this douse all similar projects?  Is tidal power like holding back the tide with a paper cup?  No, of course not.  Really this seems to be a pretty logical and feasible project.  For all those concerned, the props as seen on the right, spin too slowly to harm ocean life.

from Engadget