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From Mark Shaffer:
Ql: How can we stop wasting so much energy?
A 1: There are many things we can do to conserve energy. These include turning off lights, radios and televisions in rooms that aren't in use, replacing light bulbs with bulbs that are more energy efficient or that have lower wattage (lower wattage bulbs are less bright), turning the heat down in the winter, and when possible, opening windows and using fans instead of air conditioning in the summer. We can also improve the insulation in our homes so as to reduce heat loss in the winter, and keep heat outside (and cold air conditioned air inside) in the summer. Another way we can conserve energy is to walk, bicycle, car pool or take public transportation when traveling (both in-town and out-of--town), and by driving cars that can go a long way on a little bit of gas (when we have to drive).

     Since energy is used to produce the things we use, there are other ways people can save energy that aren't as obvious. First off, we can buy fewer things. We can also re-use or recycle paper, glass jars and bottles, and cans. In some cities we can even recycle plastic. Recycling helps because it takes less energy to recycle these materials than it does to produce them from raw materials. For example, it takes a lot less energy to recycle aluminum pop cans than it takes to mine aluminum ore from the earth, transport the ore to our country, and produce new aluminum; either way, though, you still have to make new cans. Some things, like returnable glass bottles, are washed and reused. This saves a lot of energy that would otherwise be used to make new glass and then new bottles each time. Re-using and recycling also helps to reduce the problems we have with pollution and the problems we are having because we are running out of places to bury our garbage. We can also help conserve energy by "recycling" our clothes and toys by giving them to someone else who can use them instead of throwing' Hem away since it takes energy to make these things, too.

From Michael Hoffman:
Q2: How fast does a heart beat?
A2:That depends on whose heart it is, and what they are doing.

     A human baby's heart generally beats about 120 times a minute. A healthy human adult's heart beats about 70 times a minute when she or he is resting. Some athletes have very strong hearts that beat only 45 to 50 times a minute when they are resting.

     There are lots of things that can influence the rate at which a person's heart beats. One factor is age. Usually, children's hearts beat faster than adult's hearts. Additionally, when a person is exercising or is frightened, their heart beats faster - sometimes as fast as 180 times a minute. Some medicines can also increase or decrease the rate at which someone's heart beats.

     Heart rates also vary between animals. The hearts of some very slow moving clams may beat less than once a minute. The heart of a hibernating fish may beat only 2 to 3 times a minute, but when that fish is active its heart will beat about 100 times a minute. Elephants and horses generally have heart rates of 25 to 40 beats per minute. Mice have a normal heart rate of about 175 times a minute, but their hearts can beat as fast as 600 times a minute when they are frightened.

     You may want to try an experiment. First, find your pulse. You do this by placing your finger on one of the blue veins in your wrist, or by feeling around on your neck until you find an artery. Count how many times you can feel your heart beat in a minute. You might need to ask someone to help you time a minute. Then walk or run very fast (maybe you should do this outside), and when you stop running, find your pulse and measure your heart rate again. Is it faster or slower than it was before you exercised?

From Jimmy Lightfoot:
Q3: What is higher than the stars?
A3: That depends; which way is - up? Since the earth is round, "high" for people in the USA or other Northern Hemisphere countries is "low" for people in Mozambique or Australia. And what is high for them is low for us. We think that when you ask what is higher than the stars, you are asking what is further away from earth than the stars.

     All the stars we can see at night are in our galaxy (the Milky Way galaxy). A galaxy is a very large group of stars, planets, gases, and other things that move through space together. There are many other galaxies which are further away from earth than the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. We can see some of these galaxies from earth without a telescope; they look like a blur of light in the sky. This sort of answers your question; there are galaxies beyond the stars. But because we believe that these galaxies are made up of stars, planets, and other things, like our own galaxy, this question is really difficult. We don't know how big the universe is, or if the stars go on forever. This is another way of saying that we don't know if there is anything beyond the stars. There are galaxies, and presumably stars, as far out in space as anyone has been able to see even with the most powerful telescope.

Mrs. Scuideri's class at Park school asked
the following questions:

Q4: How does the air go into plastic poppies? (We are grateful for the visual aid the class provided. Plastic poppies are the bubbles on sheets of plastic packing material. These bubbles are fun to "pop".)
A4: How does the air get inside a bottle when you screw the top on it? Put it under water and take the cover off and see. How does the air get into a plastic egg used for stockings? Put it under water and open it up to see how much air comes out. If you glue a plastic covering on a counter or table top, you'll have to squeeze the air out if you want to have it lie flat. Air is all around everywhere, even when we can't feel it moving. So when two plastic sheets with dimples in them are stuck together by heat treatment, the air in each dimple is already there.

     When Marie Genevieve Sere asked a group of eleven year old children in France how to get a container full of air, one child said "she would go to the playground and run holding the container facing the wind." (Driver, R. et al, Children's Ideas in Science, p. 107)

Q5: Why won't a frozen egg yolk turn into liquid again?
A: Egg yolk has a lot of protein in it and so does the egg white. Protein is one of the things plants and animals make that is a very complicated kind of thing, that is sensitive to severe temperature changes. Even somewhat complicated things like water or candle wax, harden when they get cold and then melt again when they are warmed. Protein is much more complicated. You can cook an egg, and it hardens, which is the opposite of what water and wax do, and nobody is surprised that cooling it off doesn't uncook it, and make it soft. So freezing an egg may harden the yolk or turn it into a rubbery substance, depending on how slowly and how much it is frozen, and it may not return to its normal raw state when it is warmed again.
Proteins have four different levels of structure and some of the levels change markedly in some proteins when the temperature is changed drastically. Imagine a long string of hundreds of beads of about 20 different shapes or colors, or a chain of different kinds of l inks you might wear around your neck. You might twist this primary chain so it kinks up into a tight spiral coil. That's secondary structure. If you could keep that tight coil and wrap that into another larger coil, that would be tertiary structure. Proteins often have a fourth kind of structure, when several of those larger coils get hooked together. Changing the environment beyond what is usually encountered in life makes some of the higher level structure change into a different form without changing the lower level structure. Remarkably, some proteins can rearrange their higher level structure when conditions return to normal, but most of them can't.
When protein is digested, however, the basic (primary) structure is changed, like unhooking the beads or links of the primary necklace chain. Then the plant or animal digesting it can reassemble the links into a new order making a new kind of protein that matches its needs. Sometimes we need links (called amino acids) from different sources. For example, complementary proteins from grains and from beans may provide all the different kinds of links to make the animal type proteins we need for muscle growth.

Q6: What is the oldest tree?
A6:  Some trees that are now alive which are  very old are redwood and sequoia trees living in the western
 part of the  US. One of the sequoia trees in Sequoia National Park, in California, named " General Sherman, " i s considered to be the oldest living thing. It is estimated to be  about 4,000 years old.  The oldest trees live on the West Coast. In other parts of the country, trees are much younger. Some oak  trees in the eastern part of the US have lived more than 300 years. We don't know how to find the oldest individual  tree in Illinois, but there are only two kinds of trees listed in Forest Trees of Illinois as having
 diameters up to 8 feet: bald cypress and sycamore. Since trees grow another layer of wood every  year, we could infer that  they probably live longer than other kinds of trees in Illinois. But General Sherman is over 30 feet in diameter near the ground, so it's got to be a lot older than any Illinois tree.

Another way of thinking about this question is that some trees, like the gingko, metasequoias, tree ferns, Norfolk Island pines, and cycads, have been living on earth since the age of the dinosaurs. But no individual of these trees has been alive that long.

Jill had this to add to our answer:

"Hello, I'm an Australian teacher studying at the University of Illinois. I have been reading through some of the questions you posted in FrEdMail, and I would like to tell you about Australia and the oldest trees found on that faraway continent.
"We have a species of very old trees called the 'Huon Pine'. Many of these old trees are still growing and are found right down in the southern most state of Australia, which is called Tasmania. (You may have heard of the Tasmanian Devil, which is a small but very ferocious animal also found in Tasmania.) These large trees are very old - many of the ones still surviving are estimated to be between 2500 - 3000 years old. They grow along river banks and need a lot of rain (about 100" each year) and cold weather to help them grow. They grow very slowly - about one foot in diameter every 500 years!
"Not only are these trees special to Australia because they are our oldest trees, but they also played an important role in our country's history. Two hundred and one years ago the first white men and women came from England to settle in Australia. Most of these people were prisoners. England had too many prisoners cluttering up their jails so they sent them to Australia. (These prisoners were called convicts.) After about twenty years, the worst convicts were sent to a small island on the rough, southwest coast of Tasmania (then called Van Diemen's Land). Each day the convicts were sent up the nearby rivers to cut down the big old Huon pine trees which were then used to make new boats. The trees have a special resin in them which lets them last for hundreds of years without rotting even if left in water. This is why the timber was so good for boat building.

"Today most of the Huon Pine have been cut down to make way for big dams in the area, but the few trees that remain are well looked after and stand to remind us of the hart beginnings of our great country.
"I hope you have found this information interesting. I am happy to answer any other questions you may have about Australia."

   Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch did not hesitate to speak of animal behavior in human terms: the "show off 'motorcyclist' courtship" of a male goose "in love," the "engagement" of a pair of geese who have bonded but not mated, the "displacement" of a "threatening" look into pulling grass by a timid Herring Gull during courtship, or the "nectar location dance" of the honey bees. Scientists attribute what they already know to what they see, as long as it fits.

   I was intrigued when a question came in, "Why don't the geese fly with the same number of geese on each side of the "v"? Human pilots, flying in formation, tend to make symmetrical patterns, why not geese? soft-ball teams, basketball teams, need to be equal in number. Why not geese?
On TV, I once saw a flock of geese flying with an ultralight airplane, piloted by a man they regarded as their parent. The geese were all following, spread out in a line on the left side of the plane. It seemed that when the plane took off, they were all on the left side. Perhaps, when a flock of geese take flight, the leader just happens to be more to one side of the flock or the other, or sometimes in the middle. So far, I haven't found a better answer, but I like the question because, like Konrad Lorenz and his co-founders of ethology, it links human behavior with geese, and I intend to keep studying it.

   I looked up a reference to an article by Robert T. Bakker of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, entitled, "Dinosaur Renaissance" in Scientific American for April, 1975. There I found some unusual and interesting ideas about dinosaurs: "All dinosaur species that have been investigated show fully endothermic [warm
coded] bone, some with a blood-vessel density higher than that in livin mammals." (p.71) "Birds inherited their high metabolic rate and most probably their feathered insulation from dinosaurs..."(p.72) "Quadrupedal dinosaurs evolved a chameleon-type scapula, and they must have had long strides and running speeds comparable to those of big savanna mammals today [elephants, giraffes, lions?]....at the end of the Cretaceous, it was the dinosaurs that suffered a catastrophe; the mammals and birds, perhaps because they were so much smaller, found places for themselves in the changing landscape and survived."(p.77) "Peter Galton of the University of Bridgeport and I [Bakker] have suggested ... putting the birds into the Dinosauria....And for those of us who are fond of dinosaurs the new class)fiction has
a particularly happy implication: The dinosaurs are not extinct. The colorful and successful diversity of the living birds is a continuing expression of basic dinosaur biology." (p.78)

Q1. Why is one part of the V-formation of a bird flock always longer than the other?

A1. Here is a picture drawn by ethologist Konrad Lorenz (see Jack's Journal) of a perfectly symmetrical V-formation of a flock he knew intimately. He had given a name to each bird and knew their life histories.

 

This is a good question. I suspect that most bird V-formations are not symmetrical. I certainly found some photos of such "check marks" in Lorenz' books. So we can't say that Lorenz drew a perfect V just because we call it a V-formation. He knew better. Here's a "check-mark" formation of geese.

Here are some other formations of geese.

 
The next illustration is a map of two geese migrations in the US. We see here that the Giant Canada Goose does not migrate as far as some, like the Atlantic Canada Geese, for the wintering area overlaps the summer breeding area throughout Illinois. That means that Giant Canada Geese who winter in Texas or Louisiana may breed in Illinois, while those who winter in Illinois may breed in Wisconsin, Michigan, or even Canada.

Map17 Giant and Atlantic Canada Geese. Stippling indicates breeding areas and solid black wintering grounds of Atlantic Canada Geese vertical hatching indicates breeding and horizontal hatching wintering area of Giant Canada Geese. .Source: Palmer 1976)

screens, and looking at the people I am talking with; and one part is for reading signs along the road while driving. The rays were the same with all parts of my glasses. Somehow, by out-of-focus-eyes were acting a little like prisms and splitting the colors of the sun's rays--I don't know how. But what was making the rays?
The next morning, while driving East on Green Street, I saw just one big ray coming straight down from the sun and then curving to the left until it reached the axle of the windshield wiper blade. Why was that? It seemed that the bright ray going down from the sun was bouncing off the curved streaks the wiper blade had made on the windshield, but, because the windshield itself was curved, the bright ray was not straight. I'll have to study this some more.

March 17, St. Patrick's Day
Was it a special show just for St. Patrick's Day? This morning, driving to the University along Green St., my wife and I saw the Rays of Buddah, but they were coming down from the sun, and it lasted just for a few seconds. The sun was shining down through between broken clouds, making a fan shaped inverted crown of bright rays, spreading out before us.
After checking the FrEdMail on the computer (There were no new messages.), I started reading Jearl Walker's chapter 5 in The Flying Circus of Physics WITH ANSWERS. This chapter is called, "She comes in many colors," and deals with all kinds of optical phenomena, especially outdoor observations. On p. 139, there is a drawing that shows what car headlights look like seen through a window screen and not through a screen. To me the strange thing is that each drawing shows six large pointed rays 60 degrees apart, and the one without a screen shows about 36 rays, very small and irregular-- evenly divided between the large ones. Did Walker believe that rays of bright lights are visible?
Jearl Walker's question asks what causes the difference, for the rays that are seen through the screen are broken into short light and dark sections. The answer in the back of the book does not mention what causes the rays when you are not looking through a screen. Why are there six large ones and about 36 smaller ones, for example? But mainly, why are there any?
This is the exciting part of science to me, hen a common assumption is ignored, and I can work on it. For example, I just noticed on the opposite page, p. 13 8, a drawing of a light bulb with 18 pointed rays of different lengths.

Saturday, March 18, 1989 Driving East on Green St., about 9 pm, having just washed the car, the windshield was extra clean, and there were no rays showing from the street lights, neon signs, or lights of on-coming cars. I had just cleaned my glasses, too. They weren't producing any rays. But, wait! Just for a second, there were rays on every light. Oh, I discovered, it's when I blinked! We can't help blinking when we look at the sun.
If I blinked a lot, or held my eyelids in a half-blinked position, there were gorgeous rays coming from all the lights in front of me. Especially bright was a vertical ray coming down from each light ahead. I wondered if the wave of moisture (tears) being pushed across my eyes by my eyelids when I blinked was what was creating the rays.

Monday morning, March 20, 1989
There are still many questions. I thought I would go to the library and look in the several books that Jearl Walker lists. While I was looking up references, I encountered, on p. 137 of Walker's book, a question about why there are points on a star or a headlight, and whether there can be any number of points. The answer given to that is that straight edges in the pupils of our eyes or the diaphragm of a camera cause an even number of points. (What does that say about the five-pointed stars on our flag? What does that say about why my glasses stop sometimes stop the rays?) Then I found another question, on p. 135. (I often read books backwards when I'm thinking through a problem.) It was about colored rings around the street lights, store lights, the sun, and the moon, called coronas.
The answer given to that is that, if your finger can blot out the light and not blot out the colored rings, the halos are in the air. But, if the rings disappear when you cover the light, they are in your eye. There are very tiny objects, small enough to cause diffraction of light, like radial fibers in the lens, or mucus particles on the corneal surface that diffract light. They must work something like straight, fine grooves that have been made in a flat piece of glass or plastic, as close together as possible. I have a couple of these finely ruled "gratings," I got from a science supply house, which produce as beautiful spectra as a prism does.
I'll think over these answers, in case I see any more rays, points, or spectra around any lights. Maybe tomorrow, it won't be raining, and I'll feel more like going to the library.

March 21, 1989
Last night, about 9:30, I came home from a meeting, too tired to notice the rays of street lights, but I did notice a rainbow colored halo around the moon when I was about to open my front door. I stopped and covered the moon with my thumb and the halo was still showing. So I knew it wasn't in my eye or my glasses. It had to be a mist or tiny ice crystals in the air between me and the moon. This morning, coming to work (yes, along Green St., as usual), I blinked some big points on the bright sun, and held them briefly by holding my eyes half shut--not long enough to count them, though. But immediately, the green afterimages, with purple fringes, appeared in my eyes--my retina was telling me, "Ouch!" I saw two after-image green spots wherever I looked, so I didn't try looking at the sun again. Fortunately, those spots disappeared by the time I got to the Champaign Post Office.
My library search produced two interesting pictures here reproduced from Minnaert' book, Light and Color in the Open Air (Dover, 1954).

 
FIG. 132. Diffraction of light by small scratches on windowpanes.

 
Fig. 129. A small halo observed in the immediate neighborhood of the eye.

Chelydridae (Mud Turtle)	Dermochelidae (Leatherback turtle)
Testudinidae (Giant Tortise)	Chelidae (Snake-necked turtle)