Category: Englishlanguage-arts

What Is a Light Year?

10/3/2022

by David M. Schwartz
the amazing, engaging, math exponent

A light year is not a year that has gone on a diet. It is not a year that’s been trimmed to 300 days. It’s not a year spent under high-wattage lamps. A light year isn’t any kind of year.

    A light year is a distance. It is a vast distance; the distance light travels in a year. To appreciate a light year, you have to understand how fast light travels.

    The speed of light is truly mind-boggling: 186,000 miles per . . . second. That’s “per second,” not “per hour.” In one tick-tock second, light travels a distance of 186,000 miles. If it could go in circles, it could travel around the earth more than seven times in just one second! But light travels in straight lines, not in circles. Imagine something traveling that fast in a straight line—not for a second, not for a minute, not for an hour, not for a day, but for an entire year. The distance it goes in that year is called a light year.

    A light year is a convenient unit of measure when distances are enormous. You could talk about the same distances in miles. It's about 5,878,499,810,000 (5 trillion, 878 billion, 499 million, 810 thousand ) of them. But these measurements are so large that they are unwieldy. It's much easier to just name that enormous distance with two simple words: a "light year."

    The star closest to our solar system is Proxima Centauri. Some of the light that leaves Proxima Centauri goes to Earth, cruising along at 186,000 miles per second. At that speed, light takes about 4.2 years to get to Earth from Proxima Centauri So how far away is Proxima Centauri? It is 4.2 light years away.

    To give you an idea of how far that is, imagine going to Proxima Centauri in a spaceship traveling at the speed of the space shuttle — about ten miles per second. (That’s much faster than airplanes can fly.) You would get there in about 70,000 years.

    Our Sun is much closer than Proxima Centauri. It is 93 million miles away. There is another way to refer to the distance from the earth to the Sun. Light leaving the Sun takes about eight minutes to get to Earth, so we say the Sun is eight “light minutes” away. If you traveled at the speed of light, you could get there in eight minutes. Have a nice trip!

© David M. Schwartz, 2014

David Schwartz has been fascinated by big numbers and big distances ever since he was a little boy riding his bicycle, wondering “How long would it take for me to ride to Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away?” He wrote about light years in his math alphabet book G Is for Googol.

David is a member of iNK’s Authors on Call. He can visit in your classroom via interactive video conferencing. Learn more here.

MLA 8 Citation
Schwartz, David M. "What Is a Light Year?" Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 14 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/what-is-a-light-year.

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No Shoes for You!

10/1/2022

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Jim Whiting
The Running Encyclopedia

Bill Mills at the beach

Billy Mills was just a face in the crowd of nearly 30 runners at the 10,000-meter run at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan. His best time was nearly a minute slower than the race favorites.

    Part-Lakota Sioux Indian, Mills was a scrawny kid, who had grown up in poverty and racial bias. Whites regarded him as an Indian. Indians sneered that he was part-white and therefore not one of them.

    His father had encouraged the boy to envision a better life: “You have to look deeper, way below the anger, the hurt, the hate, the jealousy, the self-pity, way down deeper where the dreams lie, son. Find your dream.”

    Mills began finding his dream when he discovered his talent for running. He earned an athletic scholarship to the University of Kansas. Then he qualified for the U.S. Olympic team.

    Still, no one expected anything of him. He asked for shoes from the company that outfitted American runners. Sorry, he was told. We only give shoes to potential medalists. You don’t qualify.

    Mills kept a diary. Six weeks before the 10,000 meter race, he wrote “I’m in great shape….I’m ready for a 28:25 [twenty-eight minutes, twenty-five seconds].” He had never run that fast. Nor had any American. Nor anyone in any previous Olympics.

    The gun sounded. As each of the 25 laps rolled by, more and more runners fell off the pace. At the start of the final lap, Mills was one of three runners still in contention. As they rounded the first turn, Australian Ron Clarke shoved Mills out into the third lane. Mohamed Gammoudi of Tunisia took advantage of the opening and pushed his way between the other two, knocking Mills off balance for a moment. As the runners headed down the final straight, television cameras showed a tight battle between Gammoudi and Clarke. Mills was nowhere to be seen.

                Suddenly the television announcer screamed “Look at Mills! Look at Mills!” Mills bounded back into the picture, passing Clarke and then Gammoudi almost as if they were standing still. He maintained his pace to the finish line, five yards ahead of Gammoudi and ten in front of Clarke. His time of 28 minutes, 24.4 seconds was virtually identical to what he had visualized. He remains the only American to win the 10,000 meters at the Olympics.

Mills crossing the finish line in the 1964 Olympics.

Watch Mills run the final lap

Jim Whiting is a walking encyclopedia. He has written more than 180 (count 'em!) books on many subjects. You can learn more about him here.

MLA 8 Citation
Whiting, Jim. "No Shoes for You." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 21 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/no-shoes-for-you.

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Getting Your Head 3-D Printed

10/1/2022

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Roxie Munro
Visual Thinker

So do I stick my head into that glass-enclosed rectangular box? Will it fry my brain? Or will the damage show up in 20 years? Will my head come out looking like those primitive shrunken heads that repelled and fascinated me as a child?

    I’ve volunteered to have my head 3-D printed, and am checking out the equipment at the State University of New York. As it turns out—great relief—I don’t have to stick my head into the box after all; that’s where the “printing” occurs, not the scanning.

    The professor tells me to just sit upright and stay super still on a chair for a little over a minute, while his assistant uses a hand-held scanner—making several passes of the sides and top of my head and neck from about 30 inches away.

    In a couple minutes, the glass box starts to make noise and comes alive. The “printing” begins. For the color of my little sculpted head, I’m given a choice of red or white. Red seems a bit creepy, so I go for white. The plastic substance is long and cord-like, about 1/8 inch in diameter, and wrapped around a big spool at the back of the printer. One thin white layer after the other is laid down. It builds up, and slowly a tiny replica of my head begins to take shape. Half an hour, and it’s done.

    Sure enough, this looks like a miniature Roxie, about 2 inches high, with a flat back where it lay down on the printer, although the machine appeared to have quit just before it reached the tip of my nose, which is kind of cut off.

       So what can be done with this new kind of printing? Well, it is already being used in dentistry for making crowns. Jewelry can be created from metals, even gold. You can actually make plastic guns using this method. Unfortunately (or should I say fortunately), they don’t work very well—the plastic gets distorted rapidly from the heat and action of shooting a bullet.

    But maybe the most fun is making food. Nursing homes in Germany are taking pureed food and making it into appetizing shapes. NASA is researching making 3-D pizza in space. Instead of white plastic maybe I should have asked for chocolate—and turned myself into a delicious dessert.

3-D printer

Print being built up in thin white layers

Roxie getting scanned

Mini-me.

Roxie and her mini-me.

Using works from the National Gallery of Art by Vincent Van Gogh, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, and others, Roxie Munro has created an innovative introduction to art. As an artist contemplates her next painting, she introduces genres and subjects, showcasing reproductions of great works. The sweeping painting she creates cleverly incorporates all 37 pieces she has considered.

Children can have fun finding the masterpieces in her painting and learn more about the artists in the notes in the back matter.
Read a review here.

MLA 8 Citation
Munro, Roxie. "Getting Your Head 3-D Printed." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 20 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/getting-your-head-3-d-printed.

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Keeping in Touch

9/23/2022

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Dorothy Hinshaw Patent
Nature's Animal Ambassador

How often do you check your cell phone or email each day? Use Twitter or Facebook? Can you stand not to “stay in touch” for even one day? We’re used to being able to hear from people anywhere in the world at any time, with just a few taps on a keyboard or telephone pad.

Through most of human history people could only communicate when they were within shouting distance. When alphabets came along, our ancestors could create messages on stone or wood and later on parchment (made from animal skin), or paper, made from wood pulp. Then, of course, the message had to get from one person to another by way of a messenger. When public mail came along, it made that process much easier and more reliable.

That’s where things stood for a long time. Imagine being a soldier in 1804 joining explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their epic trek across the west to the Pacific Coast. This was territory almost totally unknown at the time to European Americans.

You’ve left behind your family and all your friends. Now you have no way of finding out what happened to those dear to you. Did your father or mother die? Did a sister get married? How many babies were born? Your loved ones get to be a bit luckier, since in the spring of 1805, the keel boat that carried the expedition to Indian villages for the winter is sent back down the Missouri River with a small crew, and you get a chance to write notes to your loved ones, reassuring them that you are okay.

A lot can happen during a 2½ year span like the one endured by members of the expedition! Finally, in September of 1806, you and your colleagues return to the St. Louis area and find out that most people assumed you were all dead. Now you must figure out as quickly as possible how to reconnect with family and friends. It won’t be easy, since they don’t know you are alive, and you don’t know where they are after so long. How can you even locate everyone you care about?

Think about it: If you didn’t have email or a phone of any kind, whose messages would you miss the most? And who would you most wish you could tell about these events in your life?

The Lewis and Clark Expedition followed the Missouri River through miles and miles of vast prairie like this one, full of amazing wild animals like these bison.

This postage stamp honors the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And, no, they could not have used a stamp on a letter to send news home. The first US postage stamps weren't issued until 1847.

Dorothy has written about how the horse changed the lives of the Plains Indians and everything that followed.

Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom,a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.

MLA 8 Citation
Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw. "Keeping in Touch." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 4 Oct. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/keeping-in-touch.

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Flying into the Eye of a Storm

9/20/2022

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Vicki Cobb

The Master Chef of Kids’ Hands-On Science

Dr. Hugh Willoughby, of Florida International University, was one of the first meteorologists to ever fly into the eye of a hurricane.  Now the job is done by the Hurricane Hunters—a team of pilots, navigators and meteorologists who fly into these dangerous storms to help keep us safe.  Here’s what I learned when I interviewed Hugh Willoughby:

What is a hurricane eye?

Hurricanes are circular storms so the wind blows around in a circle. The eye is the center of a hurricane.  If a circular storm doesn’t have an eye, it is not a hurricane—it’s a tropical storm.  The eye is surrounded by a ring of clouds called the eyewall. Within the eye, there is a calm area that is cloudless all the way up to space.   The winds are strongest just at the inner edge of the eyewall, which is composed of violent thunderstorms with strong updrafts and downdrafts.   The hurricane pinwheels out from the eyewall as spiral bands of wind and rain, which stretch for miles.  When a hurricane’s eye passes over land, the storm suddenly stops and the sun comes out.  But the relief is short-lived as the other side of the storm soon slams into the area.

How do Hurricane Hunters help us?

Hurricane Hunters fly into the eye of hurricanes that are heading towards our shores to help predict where the storm will make landfall.  On every mission they must find the center of the storm at least twice and at most four times over a period of several hours because the change in position of the center of the eye tells us the direction the storm is moving and how fast it is moving. They also drop packages called dropsondes that contain measuring instruments for air pressure, humidity, and wind speed at the eyewall.  These measurements tell us the destructive power of the storm or its “category.” During a hurricane season (from June 1 to November 30) the Hurricane Hunters and their fleet of ten airplanes can get data on three storms, twice a day.  So flying into a hurricane’s eye is pretty routine for them.

Is it dangerous?

The planes can easily handle changes in air pressure and wind speeds that create “bumps” and it can be pretty bumpy going through the eyewall.   But, in more than sixty years there have been only four accidents. All on board agree that the view of the eyewall from inside the eye is worth it! The plane has transported them inside nature’s most magnificent amphitheater.
(c) Vicki Cobb 2014

Harvey and Irma have alerted everyone to the dangers of a hurricane. We can predict the course of a hurricane by flying into a hurricane and repeatedly measuring wind speed, humidity, air pressure, and temperature. Here's a video that will give you a taste of what it looks like as you approach an eye wall. It is filmed from a plane penetrating Hurricane Katrina.

When you hear about a Category "3" hurricane, or any other category number, the Saffir-Simpson Scale tells you just what that number means.

Look at the amazing number of instruments contained in a Dropsonde.

Vicki Cobb's latest book, How Could We Harness a Hurricane? shows how the scientific understanding of air, water and energy come together to form hurricanes. It includes lots of hands-on activities that you can do. Engineers look at science and try and figure out ways the steer a hurricane away from populated areas or weaken them. There are lots of questions in the book and some of them don't have answers, yet.

MLA 8 Citation
Cobb, Vicki. "Flying into the Eye of a Storm." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 18 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ flying-into-the-eye-of-a-storm.

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What Is a Light Year?

No Shoes for You!

Getting Your Head 3-D Printed

Keeping in Touch

Flying into the Eye of a Storm

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