Science teacher

March 14, 2019January 8, 2022

On fruit batteries

https://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/experiments/fruit-power-battery/

” But, you can actually use chemical energy stored in a lemon and two metals to make a current and light up a small LED. It’s true and we’ll show you exactly how it’s done.”

Steve Spangler Science

Et tu, Steve?

There are many ways to get to the free energy available in a fruit.

The simplest is to eat it. You have a few billions years worth of living behind you, and animals are pretty good at using the energy found in the chemical bonds of foodstuff to recombine phosphate and adenosine diphoshate, giving your cells an abundant supply of their basic energy currency, ATP.

You could dry it out until it’s kindling then light it on fire.

You could mix it with yeast and let it ferment. The yeast will reward you with a wine that will warm you up. If that’s not enough you could distill the wine, concentrating the ethanol enough to make a flammable liquid that can be used for heating your home or powering your car.

Lots of free energy here held in fruits from last fall’s garden

You cannot, however, get free energy from a fruit to power a battery. This is bad science. The fruit simply acts as a bridge for the electrons of one metal to travel to the other, different metal.

There’s a reason you do not find most metals in a pure state in nature. If you want iron, you dig up iron ore, then smelt it. That, of course, requires free energy. When you connect copper and zinc together with some sort of liquid bridge. (Acids work, so does salt water–the salty vinegar dripping from your chips would work great.)

Fruits have tremendous stores of free energy, and animals, fungi, and bacteria take advantage of this–you want to eat the fruit before it rots, but rotting is just another organism beating you to the rich deliciousness of fruit.

If you want its energy, eat it, don’t waste it jamming metals into it. If you want to show that fruit can serve as connection bridge in a battery, because it’s cool and gets kids interested in science, go for it!

Just don’t tell them that the fruit is powering the battery.

March 6, 2019January 8, 2022

Vibrations

Waves on the inner harbor of Honfleur (taken by Leslie)

I have been mostly deaf all of my life, so I pay more attention to sound waves than may be healthy.

For the same reason, I pay way too much attention to light waves as I stare at people’s lips as they talk.

I talk with the universal accent of the congenitally deaf, and a big piece of my learning how to talk was touching the throat of my mother as she taught me the various sounds people make when speaking English.

I learned most of them, but I’m still struggling with “r”. Grrrr….

Waves allow us to know what’s going on with the things not actually touching us. (Well, sound waves are mechanical, so I guess one could argue that the air particles need to touch our ear drum, but the particles are not the wave.)

We do not observe waves directly–we see what our brains allow us to see, forms and sounds that keep our breathing bodies from quickly becoming carcasses.

Still, as I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow glinting in the optimistic light of a March sun, my eye converting waves of light that only I have seen, I realize how little any of us can know, and how much of the universe casually exists outside our senses, our imagination.

So I write about it, to no one in particular, for no particular reason.

March 2, 2019January 8, 2022

Let it bee….

Bee on a dandelion….the cherry blossoms are still a month away

If you have never stuck your nose completely into a cherry blossom, a blossom that burst open only a few hours ago, you cannot know the intensity of joy possible by bees, or by us.

We cannot know what bees know, but if I had to choose between words and the inexplicable joy felt when I buried my face in a fresh patch of cherry blossoms, well, I’m throwing away my keyboard and running away with the bees.

After giving myself to the first cherry tree blossom of spring, I saw a young child, no more than 8, pick up her even younger sister, about 2–she carried her to the cherry tree, to sniff the flowers. She may have seen me do the same thing.

The father, smoking a cigarette, barked at her: “There may be bees in those flowers–get away!”

She slinked away, now fearful of bees and cherry blossoms. Just as well, I suppose–a child in love with flowers and bugs is going to have her heart broken when she earns what is expected of her later.

Crocus breaking through the frozen ground

Not all things are possible, but these things are:

You can eat bread, real bread, made from flour you ground with your own hands.
You can drink honey wine, made by the yeast you put in a carboy mixed with fruit and honey.
You can watch the tide fall, then rise again.
You can see Orion tonight if the sky is clear.
You can eat pesto made from basil grown in a classroom, fed by light from the sun and the breath of you and your students.
You can bury your face in early spring cherry blossoms.
You can rake clams, take their lives, and eat them, no matter what sins you have committed.

What do you tell an 8 year old child holding her very young sister whose just been told by her father that bees are to be feared?

Do you tell her of the honey bee waggle dance? That bees will find her tree, and tell other bees, and that they will all be so intoxicated with the smell of the cherry blossom that she will not be noticed?

Or do you let her Dad stand silently against the tree, puffing on his cigarette, tend to his own children, his own myths, his own ignorance?

Monarch on my finger, late autumn at Two Mile Beach

My Dad is dead. He loved bees.
My Mom is dead. She loved bees.
My sister is dead. She loved bees.
I will someday be dead. I love bees.

Maybe it’s the bees that are killing us. Maybe it’s not. But if it is, I’d still love the bees.

Spine of a dead and decaying horseshoe crab. My reminder.

Occasionally I will stumble upon an exhausted bee, dying on a flower. Too tired to move, but still alive enough to thrust her tongue into the nectar. I leave those bees well enough alone. Should I be gasping my last breaths with my nose buried in a blossom, I trust the bees will return the favor.

The last sound I heard my mother make was laughter–she died two days later, while I held her hand.

The last few hours of my Dad’s life, he laughed. I heard it, and I held his hand as he died.

I did not hold my sister’s hand–she was killed by an errant Christian missionary who left her broken on the edge of a Michigan highway–but I bet she laughed a few minutes before she died. I know she sang. She always sang. Always.

Like a bee humming she sang, sang, sang.

Mostly from an older post–but I needed it today.