Tuesday, November 20, 2012
BEEs Practice Sites
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Kinetic Artist Tim Fort - The Next Generation of Domino Stacking
Thursday, May 24, 2012
DC zoo hand-raising cubs after rare cheetah birth
The zoo offered a first look at the now healthy cubs Wednesday and hopes to place them on view to the public in the cheetah yard by the end of the summer.
Cheetahs are the fastest animals on land, but scientists said every surviving cub is critical to sustaining the species, which is threatened with extinction in the wild. These cubs are genetically valuable because their mother and father were first-time parents.
When the cubs' mother, 5-year-old Ally, gave birth to the first cub in late April, though, problems quickly developed. Ally abandoned her first cub and left him in the cold on a snowy day. Then her labor stopped, even though she had three more cubs waiting to be born.
Zoo veterinarians performed a "rare and risky" emergency cesarean section and saved one more cub, along with the cheetah mother. Two other cubs died.
"You're always sad that you couldn't save them all," said veterinarian Copper Aitken-Palmer. "But I'm thrilled that we have two, and I'm thrilled that the mom is doing well, too."
There's one male and one female, and they're growing fast. At feeding time, they are eager to get their bottles, clawing and chirping to get milk from their handlers. The cubs are also beginning to transition to solid foods as their teeth come in, dining on moist grocery store cat food to start.
"Because they're cubs, everything is kind of exaggerated," Aitken-Palmer. "So they have really long legs, really poufy hair on their heads. But they're pretty cute."
Zoo veterinarians only knew of two other C-sections performed on a cheetah before they tried it to save this cheetah family. One had been successful, and the cubs died in another case.
"It's very rare and it's very risky," said cheetah biologist Adrienne Crosier. "We were certainly concerned about the welfare of the mother."
When the female cub was born, she had a heartbeat but didn't breathe on her own for several hours. Both cubs and mother were in intensive care for three days.
Because cheetahs are endangered, North American zoos are trying to build a self-sustaining population. It's been estimated there are only 8,000 to 12,000 cheetahs left in the wild, Crosier said.
"Every cub that is born into this population is critical," Crosier said, "and we're only producing a fraction of the cubs that we need every year to become sustainable."
Thursday, May 17, 2012
How Gross is Fast Food???
Ryan Hart, a 14-year-old boy from Michigan, had a rude surprise when he bit into his Arby's roast beef sandwich. "I was like, 'that's got to be a finger,'" he told the Jackson Citizen Patriot. "It was just nasty."
Reportedly, a restaurant employee cut off her finger with a meat slicer while preparing the meal. She left her station to deal with the emergency, and other employees, who were unaware of the injury, continued to complete the order.
"Somebody loses a finger and you keep sending food out the window," said the teen's mom, Jamie Vail. "I can't believe that." She added that following the gruesome discovery, her son was "traumatized," couldn't eat or sleep, and had been prescribed medication Fox News reports.
John Gray, Arby's vice president of corporate communications, provided Yahoo! Shine with a statement saying, "Arby’s wants to reassure customers that we are committed to providing quality food in a safe and healthy environment. We are deeply concerned and apologetic to the guest involved in this unfortunate incident....An isolated and unfortunate accident occurred in a franchisee’s Jackson, Michigan restaurant in which an employee was injured. Upon learning of the incident, the franchisee’s restaurant team shut down food production and thoroughly cleaned and sanitized the restaurant. The franchisee fully cooperated with the Health Department during the investigation, and the restaurant was given the approval to remain open."
This is not the first time human remains have been found in a fast food meal but this case might be the most extreme.
A Dayton Ohio man sued Arby's in 2005 for reportedly serving him a chicken sandwich topped with a piece of human skin.
In a famous 2005 hoax, a Las Vegas woman found a human finger in Wendy's chili but police later discovered she had cooked her husband's colleague's finger (which he had lost in a work accident) and slipped it into the bowl herself.
An Albany-area man allegedly found a bloody bandage in the crust of his Pizza Hut pie in 2011.
Also in 2011, Texan woman found blood on her French fries while eating at a Houston-area Crackle Barrel.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
The largest single-shot photo of Earth ever taken.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Meet meow!!
The Guinness world record for the heaviest cat is 47 pounds, but that Guinness stopped taking entrants, fearing that owners were fattening up their house kitties just to get in the record books.
When Santa Fe shelter workers saw Meow, their question was: How on Earth did this cat get so fat? Was the critter some latent freak of the nuclear tests done in the Roswell desert?
“At first we heard that the old woman had fed it only hot dogs, but that wasn’t true,” Martin told The Times. “We think she was sedentary and sat in front of her TV feeding the cat. He probably just ate everything in sight.”
Would you give Meow a home???
Who is Gideon Sundback?
Guaranteed To Make You Think!!
- Use the numbers 20, 10, -4, -2, and -1, and the signs +, -, x, and / to obtain the HIGHEST and the LOWEST numbers possible. All numbers and operations MUST be used once for each problem, and the answers MUST be integers!
- Find four consecutive ODD integers whose sum is -80 (you must show me your equation too).
- A standard deck of cards contains 52 cards - four groups (2 black suits and 2 red suits) of 13 cards. Each suit contains an ace, king, queen, jack, and the numbers 10 thorugh 2. Assuming the deck has been shuffled - find the porbability of drawing the following cards (express your answer in simplest form)
- A red card
- A king
- A queen or a jack
- An even number
- The 7 of hearts
- A prime number
- Palindromes are numbers, words, phrases, or sentences that are read the same from left to right as from right to left. For example: (words) RADAR, BOB, DAD, (phrase) A MAN A PLAN A CANAL PANAMA, (sentence) MADAM I'M ADAM, (numbers) 22, 303, 1991.
- Find two palindromes whose sum is a palindrome.
- Find two palindromes whose difference is a palindrome.
- Do you think it is always true that if the sum of two palindromes is a palindrome, their difference is also a palindrome? Explain!
- Create a phrase or sentence that is a palindrome.
- Secret codes & ciphers - a cipher is a secert system of writing in which every letter is replaced by a symbol. Can you decipher the following cipher???
- 20-23-15 9-19 20-8-5 15-14-12-25 5-22-5-14 16-18-9-13-5
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Cat-sized African rats survive in Florida
Friday, March 23, 2012
Frozen Planet
Streaming video by Ustream
Watch penguins zoom through the water at speeds of 24 mph - live via penguin cam.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Learn a new word!
What's YOUR Dream??
Monster Titanoboa Snake Invades New York
New York commuters arriving at Grand Central Station will soon be greeted by a monstrous sight: a 48-foot-long, 2,500-pound titanoboa snake.
The good news: It's not alive. Anymore. But the full-scale replica of the reptile -- which will make its first appearance at the commuter hub on March 22 -- is intended, as Smithsonian spokesperson Randall Kremer happily admitted, to "scare the daylights out of people" -- actually has a higher calling: to "communicate science to a lot of people." The scientifically scary-accurate model will go a long way toward that: If this snake slithered by you, it would be waist-high and measure the length of a school bus. Think of it as the T-rex of snakes.
This newly discovered species, known as titanoboa (yes, the words "titan" and "boa" are in there), which lived 65 million years ago, is about to have its close-up. The New York City appearance is promoting an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History in D.C. opening on March 30, which ties in to a TV special on the Smithsonian Channel called, what else, "Titanoboa: Monster Snake." The two-hour program airs April 1.
Remains of the titanoboa were first discovered in a Colombian coal mine in 2005. One of the researchers specializing in the Paleocene era, the time after the death of the dinosaurs, was Jonathan Bloch. A vertebrate paleontologist from University of Florida's Museum of Natural History, the scientist led multiple expeditions, along with Carlos Jaramillo of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The team collected remains from the mine, which resulted in the find. Together with ancient-snake expert Jason Head of the University of Nebraska, they named the world's largest snake Titanoboa.
Bloch admitted that when the team was first collecting the skeletons of Titanoboa, he didn't immediately understand what he had found until he returned to the lab. With the help of his students, he was able to identify the fossils as snakes, just much, much bigger than the ones of today. He described the enormous vertebrae as "sort of like if you saw a mouse skull the size of rhino skull."
The predator, which is related to a boa constrictor but actually behaved like an anaconda, lived in water and fed on fish, other titanoboas, and crocodiles (very, very large crocodiles).
If this sounds like Hollywood's next blockbuster, Bloch noted that this time around, truth is actually bigger than fiction: The predator from the movie "Anaconda," for one, is not as big as titanoboa. "This is really an example where reality and the past have exceeded the imaginations of Hollywood"
Watch the short video clip below and then tell us- what do you think of Titanoboa?? Why do you think it disappeared 65 million years ago?? Do you plan on watching the TV special?? I know that I do :)
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
ELO Comments Wanted
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Creative Writing with a Scientific Flair
Friday, January 13, 2012
Everybody Has A Question - What's Yours??
Wintery Friends
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
The Color of Health
Nature has given us a “rule of thumb”. Many of the very chemicals that make foods good for us are the ones that give them color, turning blueberries blue, spinach green and carrots deep orange. For optimum health, scientists say, “eat a rainbow of colors”. “Your plate should look like a box of Crayola crayons”.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Happy Chinese New Year!!
The Year 2012 is the 4709th Chinese year. The Chinese believe that the first king of China was the Yellow King (he was not the first emperor of China). The Yellow King became king in 2697 B.C., therefore China will enter the 4709th year on January 23, 2012. Also, the Chinese Year uses the cycle of 60 Stem-Branch counting systems and the Black Water Dragon is the 28th Stem-Branch in the cycle. Since (60 *78) + 29 = 4709, therefore 2012 is the Water Dragon year, which is the 4709th Chinese Year.
Learn more by clicking on the middle box and each word box in the E-quilt below.
Football Fun 2012
Thursday, March 11, 2010
A One in a Zillion Kind of Mutation
The "under-dressed" penguin was photographed by Andrew Evans (of National Geographic) on the island of South Georgia near Antarctica.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
A New Species - Under The Sea
Thursday, November 12, 2009
A Thanksgiving Trivia Quiz
And don't forget to answer the Thanksgiving survey question found at the right!
What is your favorite thing to do on Thanksgiving - do you eat turkey all day, watch football, visit relatives, get ready for the "Black Friday" sales???? Share with us how you spend your day.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
MSA The Easy Way
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
T-rex Was a Wimp??
Experts believe that the skull - which measures over 6-feet - contains the largest dinosaur jaw ever found in England, or the world, and that it means pliosaurs were powerful enough to rip a small car in half. “This is one of the largest, if not the largest, pliosaur skull found anywhere in the world,” said Dr. David Martill of Portsmouth University, “and contains features that have not been seen before. It could be a species new to science.” The pliosaurs were marine reptiles with a head similar to a crocodile and large, paddle-like fins. These predators lived throughout the Jurassic period. Their fossils dwarf those of the 40-foot long T-rex of the Cretaceous era.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime find,” said Richard Edmonds, earth science manager for the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site.
GIANT Spider - Creepy!!!
A live specimen has yet to be discovered, prompting many scientists to believe that either these spiders are endangered or that they dwell far up in treetops.
With a body length of 1.5 inches and a leg span of 4 to 5 inches, the female N. komaci is the largest web-producing spider in existence.
Female Nephila evolved to a large size not only to carry more eggs, but to overcome a predator of those eggs as well. Some female Nephila spiders can even snag birds, bats and lizards, the report stated. Males, on the other hand, have never evolved past a modest size.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
M.E.S.S. October 27th - Qualifying Words
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
M.E.S.S. October 20th - Test Taking Skills
Friday, October 9, 2009
NASA's Moon Bombing - Crashing in a Crater, Looking for Ice
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The Bar Code is 57 Today!
Granted to American inventors Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver three years after it was filed, patent number 2,612,994 was for a pattern of concentric circles, rather than the set of straight lines used today.
The first trial of the bar code was in 1966, and in 1970 the familiar Universal Product Code (UPC) design, still used around the world, was agreed on as an industry standard.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Celebrate World Space Week - October 4-10, 2009
World Space Week is the largest public space event in the world, with celebrations in more than 50 nations. To learn more about World Space Week, search for events in your area and find educational materials related to the event, visit http://www.worldspaceweek.org/index.html
The Great Worldwide Star Count - This international event encourages everyone to go outside, look skywards after dark, count the stars they see in certain constellations and report what they see online. Check it out - http://www.windows.ucar.edu/citizen_science/starcount/
Friday, October 2, 2009
The O.R.E.O. Project
•Place one cookie on the table and then add one cookie at a time to the stack. (Yes you MUST use the whole cookie as it is when you take it from the bag!)
•Do NOT adjust the cookie after you have placed it on the stack and have moved your hand away.
•Cookies need to be freestanding and NOT leaning against any kind of support.
•A tumble has occurred once 1 or more cookies have tumbled from the stack.
How many cookies are in your stack?? Can you beat our record of 35? Tell us the number of cookies in your BEST stack. What strategies/suggestions can you share to get even more cookies in the stack??
Be sure to take part in the 2 OREO surveys found at the right - your opinion counts!!
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Who Will Host the 2016 Olympic Games?
The stakes are huge for all four cities — Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Madrid — and for the International Olympic Committee. It faces the choice of sending the games to uncharted territory in South America, appealing to those committee members who believe the Olympics should touch all corners of the globe, or opting in tough economic times for more familiar and perhaps more lucrative ground in Europe, the United States and Asia.
The winner gets the international prestige of staging the world's biggest sports extravaganza and billions of dollars in potential investment.
Years of preparations and lobbying by the four candidates will come down to 30 minutes of voting by the IOC's members, when they will eliminate the city with the fewest votes in successive rounds of secret balloting until one city receives a majority.
Which city is your choice for hosting the 2016 Games?? Take part in the 2016 Olympic City Choice poll found at the right! See if you are in agreement with the International Olympic Committee!