Buoy Blog Post

           Buoys are all over the world. If you do not know what buoys are, they are little things in the water which help boatman determine where there is shallow water, so they avoid that area. Or, where the water is too deep and dangerous to stop at. There is a site which tells you exactly where every single one of the buoys are located. This is the link.
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/

   As we can see on the site, the most buoys are located in the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, To be more specific around America.  They are probably there because America is one of the most populated continents, so there are a lot of boats. Also, the depth in the oceans change rapidly.

   There are a lot of them near Great Britain. However, they are mostly oil buoys.

Tsunami warning System

       Tsunamis are a bad happening. Many people get killed in it and it is always a great loss. If you don't know what a tsunami is, it is a large wave which is caused by an underwater earthquake. It is caused because the shock that the water gets forms a large wave. They mostly occur in the countries which border the oceans, especially the Pacific Ocean. The two major tsunamis which happened lately are the one in Japan that happened last year and Katrina, a 2004 earthquake and tsunami which happened in Thailand. Both took out at least 200 people. It is a horrible situation and there is a low chance of surviving  if you are in one.


         Many houses are destroyed. Not only houses, everything is. That costs a lot of money, so the whole country falls into the crisis trying to collect all the money needed to rebuild the place.

          Now, you might be wandering how do you know if a tsunami is coming. There are a couple of ways. The main way is if you are close to a shore, and an earthquake happens, it is very likely for a tsunami to happen. Of course, an alarm goes on as well. Another way to predict that an earthquake is happening is if you are a the beach and you notice the water pulling back, you should consider running for your life. But how do you know if you are underwater? There is a way. If you see that the land underneath you starts shaking, or you feel it, there might be a tidal wave happening above you.



         Most of these warning systems are helpful, but in some cases they are not so accurate. For example, I mentioned that you can notice the water withdrawing, which means that there is going to be a tsunami most likely, But, there is one problem, you do not know how fast you need to run, or in other words, you don't know how much time is going to pass until the wave arrives.
               




   

          

Video of the week: Garrett McNamara's Record Breaking Wave Ride

   By: Meera Dolasia on Dogo News
Updated on 15/05/2012
http://www.dogonews.com/2012/5/14/video-of-the-week-garrett-mcnamaras-record-breaking-wave-ride


   It was a calm November morning in Nazare located in Portugal. A man named Garrett McNamara, who is a surfer was thinking shall he go to surf that day or not. His decision made a mark in the whole world. He decided to go, and together with that, he set a new world record. He surfed the highest wave. The wave was approximately 90 feet tall. Amazing. Well, for it to be more amazing, the whole thing was caught on tape. The video is now on YouTube. The video is only 25 seconds long, but it has the whole thing down.
      When I read this article for the first time, I taught this cannot be true, but then I saw the video and started to believe. But, when I didn't believe, it is not that I taught the media was exaggeration, but that the whole thing is made up. I cannot picture myself standing in front of a 90 feet tall wave. Surfing on one, I will never imagine, even now when I read this article. Congratulations to this man.
Here is the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dyBzYCEyUlE

Water waves lab

        In science class we did a lab and we explored a simulator to investigate how do water waves travel and the effects of it.
 What have I learned from the simulator is that the higher the frequency or the speed of the drop, the wave is shorter and the wavelength is shorter.You can then guess that the lower the amplitude, the higher the wave is and the wavelength is longer.
         When the amplitude or the size of the wave is lower, the waves are smaller. That small that they disappear in a certain level of amplitude. This means that the wavelength is 0. When the amplitude is higher the waves were, of course, higher much higher. The wavelength was again, obviously bigger.
          To conclude, the waves are mostly affected by the frequency and the amplitude of  the water. If the drops were smaller than the waves are smaller. The bigger the drops, the higher the waves are. For the frequency, when it is higher, the waves are bigger. When the frequency is lower, the waves are smaller.



Here is the link to the simulation: http://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/wave-interference

Space Exploration, Is it Worth the Cost?

  Have you ever heard about space exploration. Would you like to do one? Well, I admit it is interesting. But, is it worth the cost? It is quite expensive to equip everything needed for going up in space. And when you come up, the missions and to stay on the International Space Station, you need a lot of money. To look on the bright side, after all, this all pays of. By  exploring space, we find new stuff hidden in it. And when the astronauts come back to Earth, they tell the others about their foundations and slowly everybody finds out. In return, these people get money. What you spend, you earn as a reward.
      Three options to do and save more money is to let people go to moons and planets, doing research on Earth. The third option we could do is send machines, or robots with installed cameras on them, so we can follow them on TV.
         In sending people to space missions the goods are that we, on Earth have many details about what the people saw. The bad is that it costs a lot of money. When it comes to doing research on Earth, the good is that it costs the least of the three ways I mentioned but the bad is that when we do it, we don't get so much information and resources than actually going there. The last option which I suggested was that we send machines and robots up to space. The good is that it cannot get affected by the gases and material up there, where we can die if we do something wrong. The bad is that we, who are standing on Earth and watching the snapshot, don't get so much information, because the camera cannot record everything and again, it cannot bring any evidence back to Earth.
If I am a part of the congress, my top 5 choices for what to spend most money on would look like this:
1: Food and Drink- Because they are most important for life.
2: Medicine- We need to make sure our citizens are healthy.
3: Education- Everybody needs to know at least something.
4: Transportation- We need transportation to travel, but they pollute, so that's why it is not higher on the list, We could survive with bikes and electricity-efficient vehicles.
5:  Architecture- We want to make sure to keep up with our architecture.

  Probably, on this list Space Exploration would go either under number 7 or 8. I would be able to have a world without that.

Mars Forms Triangle with Moon and star tonight

   By: Joe Roa
On: Discovery News

  If you were outside yesterday evening, you would have seen a triangle formed by the moon, the star Regulus and believe it or not, Mars. A month ago, Mars came to it's closest distance from Earth, 62.6 million miles (100.7 million kilometers). After that, Mars was getting further from us.
    Yesterday, Mars was 70.7 million miles from Earth ( 113.8 million km). Still, it will be shining brightly. In the chart of the brightest stars in space,Moon, Venus, Jupiter and and stars Sirius and Canopus. If you look closer, you will see that the planet is more orange-yellowish than red.
     The star, Regulus is the first magnitude star in the constellation of Leo, the Lion. it is the 21st in the ranking of the star brightness. It is only one-sixth the brightness of Mars.
 The star and Mars are separated by 5 degrees, and the moon is 10 degrees beneath the star and Mars. To measure the size of the triangle, it is equal to one fist.
   Mars is currently in a backward motion. It is traveling toward the west. The consequence of this is that it is getting closer to the Regulus, the star. This will end in less than two weeks though. It's retrograde path will come to an end and continues traveling toward the East. If you look at the sky at 10:30 pm, you will see Mars at it's highest point. It will be more than 60 degrees above the southern horizon.
    Mars was not the only thing worth searching for. Venus passed the western skies on the same night. This is the order of the triangle at 9:00 pm.

   
  I think this is amazing happening, but I am sad that I missed it. It would be a great adventure to see something like this.  It was a clear night, so you could have seen the triangle