Double Rainbow Explained

You may know the famous double rainbow video from Tosh.0

The video below gives a short summary of what science can tell us about what is going on with a double rainbow

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/41294-earth-giant-double-rainbow-explained-video.htm

Check out this site for great info on rainbows and other atmospheric phenomenon

Free-Falling

The video illustrates the fundamentals of gravity.

Physical objects attract each other with a force proportional to the mass.

Free-fall is a result of the gravitational force between the earth (or in this case the moon) and the object falling (in this case the hammer and the feather).

Because the force between these two objects in proportional to mass, the acceleration is the same for all falling bodies.

Why on earth does a feather fall slower than a hammer? Air resistance

The moon has essentially no atmosphere (a vacuum) so there is no air resistance and we see how falling bodies fall at the same rate despite their mass

The moons gravity is ~16.7% that of earths

(~1.63m/s^2 on moon~ 9.81m/s^2 on earth)

This is due to the fact that the moon is much lass massive than the earth

The decreased gravity allows us to see the free fall in slow motion compared with what would see on earth.

The first scientist to figure this out was Galeileo Galilei, who also greatly improved the design of the telescope, and helped prove Copernicus's theory of Heliocentrism

Snowflake Close up

Here is a set of microscopic images of snowflakes. The first one looks like some amalgamation of greek architecture and a coral reef. Be sure to pay attention to the scale shown in the bottom right of the images. A micrometer (μm) is 1.0 times 10^-6 of a meter, or one millionth of a meter, or one thousandth of a millimeter.

Force of Nature

This LINK has a great visual interface to explore volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. We are talking about volcanoes in Earth Science right now so please check out the volcano page and make your own volcano.

The Known Universe

Mt St Helens Video

Violent Hawaii

Do you love Hawaii? The sandy beaches, the coral reefs, the volcanoes? Why not get a job researching this beautiful and fierce island chain. Here is a video that we will be watching in Earth Science that gives a great overview of some of the research that goes on in our 50th state.

I can't seem to embed it so I will just post the link

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/violent-hawaii/video-full-episode/1422/

A Guide to Snowflakes

Check out this wonderful website all about the intricacies of snowflakes. He gives an overview of some the fascinating crystal structures that can form based on water saturation of the air and temperature. Check out the pages linked on the left header, especially Snowflake Physics which includes a delightfully scientific comment on the claim that no two snowflakes are alike.

Plate Tectonics Video

I found an video that gives a succinct description of our current understanding of the awesome forces that shaped the early earth and how those forces have created our oceanic and continental crusts, that ride like battles ships on the plastic asthenosphere.