#lets just say the sixth graders had it worse in this version

[tstain-is-an-idiot]

CU, except I swapped the genders and changed some minor story details

So basically it's a more magical girl-ish version of the story instead of a normal superhero one (she still is, but just more... magical, I guess?)

[liliannorman]

Student scientists want to help all of us survive a warmer world

This has been a year full of the unexpected. COVID-19 has forced people indoors, closed schools and killed more than 220,000 Americans. Besides the pandemic, there have been hurricanes, wildfires, protests and more. Behind some of these upheavals, though, is an unfolding event that shows no sign of stopping: climate change.

Climate change is contributing to many of the disasters that have been changing lives around the world. Here we meet students who have been using science to help people better understand and deal with the effects of our changing climate.

Their research helped place them among 30 finalists at the 10th Broadcom MASTERS. MASTERS stands for Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering for Rising Stars. It’s a research program open to middle-school investigators. Society for Science & the Public (which publishes Science News for Students) created the event. Broadcom Foundation, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., sponsors it.

Some of the kids developed systems to help keep people safe as climate change makes life more unpredictable. Others developed ways to save precious resources, such as water and oil. And one student applied lessons from a study done in a cereal bowl to model melting glaciers.

Fighting fire and flood with science

Like many Californians, Ryan Honary, 12, has personal experience with wildfires. A student at Pegasus School in Huntington, he was with his father at an Arizona tennis tournament when he saw wildfires raging across his home state on TV. “The hills that were burning looked just like the hills behind my house,” Ryan recalls. “I called my mom and asked if she was okay.” Once he knew that she was, he asked his dad why wildfires got out of control so often. “We’re planning to send people to Mars but we can’t detect wildfires,” Ryan says.

That’s when Ryan decided to create a way to detect wildfires early — before they get out of control. He linked together a series of Raspberry Pi computers. Some of these tiny units were fitted to detect smoke, fire and humidity (how much water is in the air). Their sensors relayed data wirelessly to another Raspberry Pi. This slightly bigger computer served as a mini meteorological station. He estimates that each sensor would cost around $20, and the mini stations would cost $60 each.

Ryan Honary shows off his wildfire detectorH. Honary

Ryan brought his entire system to a park and tested it by holding the flame from a lighter in front of each sensor. When these sensed a fire, they informed the detector. It then alerted an app that Ryan built for his phone. While creating that app, Ryan talked with Mohammed Kachuee. He’s a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kachuee helped Ryan use machine learning to train his app with data from the large 2018 Camp Fire. The app took lessons from how this fire had traveled over time. Using those data, the app “learned” to predict how flames at future events might spread.

Someday, Ryan hopes his sensors might be deployed throughout his state. “Five of the worst fires in California just happened in the last three months,” he notes. “So it’s pretty obvious that global warming and climate change is just making the fire problems worse.”

Stronger hurricanes are another symptom of a warming climate. Heavy rain and storms can produce sudden floods that appear and disappear locally within minutes. One such flash flood provided a memorable experience for Ishan Ahluwalia, 14.

Ishan Ashluwalia had a tire roll on a wet treadmill to create a warning system for when a car might slip. A. Ahluwalia

It was a rainy day in Portland, Ore. “My family was driving on a highway,” recalls the now ninth grader at Jesuit High School in the city. “We were driving at the speed limit.” But a sudden sheet of water on the road made the car swerve. It was hydroplaning. This occurs when water builds up beneath a tire, he explains. With no friction, the tire slips “and the car slips as well.” This can lead to accidents.

Ishan was surprised that there was no system in a car to sense when tires were about to slide. So he went to his garage and put a small tire on a treadmill. He hooked the wheel up to a computer with an accelerometer inside. As the treadmill moved and the wheel rolled, he ran water down the belt to make synthetic rain. The computer then measured the friction between the wheel and the belt as differing amounts of rain fell.

Then, like Ryan, Ishan used machine learning. “In middle school, my science teachers really helped me get the project off the ground,” he says. But the next step was to talk to an engineer who works at nearby Oregon Health and Science University. With that engineer’s guidance, Ishan trained the system he built to associate different types of weather with how much water was on the road. It could then link those water levels with a car’s ability to maneuver.

If installed in a car, Ishan says, this system might offer a notice in green, yellow or red to warn people when they faced a risk of losing control of steering or braking. It also could help people drive more safely as heavy rains and flooding become more common.

Saving water and stopping snails

Just as it’s possible to have way too much rain, it’s also possible to have far too little. Pauline Estrada’s home, in Fresno, Calif., is in one such drought-prone region. The eighth grader at Granite Ridge Intermediate School saw nearby farmers watering their fields. In dry regions like hers, no drop would be wasted. So she sought a way to help growers predict when their plants truly needed water. Right now, Pauline says, farmers measure soil moisture to see if their plants are thirsty. But, she notes, that doesn’t show if the plant itself is suffering.

Pauline Estrada made this rover seen in a farm field. Her so-called Infra-Rover scans plants to determine if they need water. P. Estrada

Luckily, this 13-year-old had a rover lying around. She had built the robot vehicle from a kit. The teen also built an infrared camera. It makes images at light wavelengths the human eye can’t see. Infrared light often is used to map heat. A hotter plant is a drier plant, Pauline explains. When a plant has enough water, she says, “it lets water go through its leaves.” This cools the air on the surface of the leaf. But if the plant is dry, it will hold in water, and the leaf surface will be hotter.

Pauline attached the camera to her rover and drove it around pepper plants that she grew in pots. Sure enough, her roving camera could spot when these plants needed water. Then, with the help of Dave Goorahoo, a plant scientist at Fresno State University, she ran her rover around pepper plants in a farm field.

Her Infra-Rover currently scans only one plant at a time. Pauline hopes to scale up her system to observe many at once. She also plans to work on a system to predict when hot plants will need water — before they get parched. “It’s important to not waste water during climate change,” she says. Water them when they need it, she says, not before.

Explainer: CO2 and other greenhouse gases

Once those crops are grown, they’ll need to be shipped to hungry people the world over. Many will travel on huge cargo ships powered by large amounts of fossil fuels. In fact, cargo ships account for three percent of all carbon dioxide emitted into the air each year.

Those ships would burn less fuel if they encountered less friction at sea, known as drag, reasoned Charlotte Michaluk. The 14-year-old is now a ninth grader at Hopewell Valley Central High School in Pennington, N.J. A scuba diver since sixth grade, Charlotte knew that one source of drag was stuff growing on the hulls of ships. Barnacles, snails and other organisms contribute to this biofouling. Their lumpy bodies increase drag, making ships work harder and burn more fuel.

Charlotte runs water down a ramp to determine how much drag it creates. She hopes that better materials will help ships use fewer climate-warming fuels to sail the seas. C. Michaluk

Charlotte opted to design a new, more slippery coating for a ship’s hull so that fewer creatures would be able to hitch a ride. She tested different materials in the aquatic version of a wind tunnel. Charlotte loves woodworking and crafting. “My family knows where I’ve been in the house based on my trail of crafting materials,” she says. She designed a ramp that she could coat with different materials. Then she measured the force of the water flowing off different metal and plastic coatings to calculate their drag.

One material proved really good at reducing drag. Called PDMS, it’s a type of silicone — a material made of chains of silicon and oxygen atoms. Charlotte also tested some surfaces that had been based on mako shark skins. The sharklike drag-limiting scales, known as denticles, worked well at cutting the ramp’s drag.

But would they also prevent other creatures from latching on? To find out, Charlotte went hunting for small bladder snails in local streams. She put the snails in her water tunnel and observed how well they were able to cling to different surfaces. PDMS and the fake mako skin prevented snails from sticking.

“Biofouling is a really big problem,” she says. Affected ships will consume more fossil fuels. And that, she explains, “contributes to global warming.” She hopes her discoveries might someday help ships slip more easily through the water — and save fuel.

Eyes on ice

It might seem like a kid from Hawaii wouldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about glaciers. But Rylan Colbert, 13, sure does. It started when this eighth grader at Waiakea Intermediate School in Hilo first saw news of an experiment on how dams might collapse. Those tests had studied how piles of rice cereal collapsed in milk.

The cereal was puffed rice. But Rylan was soon thinking about ice. “I think I had shaved ice [a popular treat in Hawaii] the day before and I was thinking about it,” he says. “And that led me to thinking about glaciers” and how their collapse might affect polar regions.

Rylan decided to study if shaved ice would collapse into water as the rice cereal had in the study he had read about. For a little guidance, he emailed Itai Einav. He’s a coauthor of the rice cereal study at the University of Sydney in Australia. Einav emailed back and became “kind of my mentor,” Rylan says.

Rylan Colbert next to his tiny shaved ice “glacier.” To model a cold environment, he kept his science project in the refrigerator. S. Colbert

Using a refrigerator in his father’s lab at the University of Hawaii, Ryan filled beakers with a layer of gravel. Then he added a layer of shaved ice to serve as his model glacier. “The density of the shaved ice was about the density of freshly fallen show,” he says. That’s really important, he says; it simulates how glaciers develop. “That’s the start of the process.”

He set a microscope on its side in the fridge to monitor exactly what happened. “To simulate global warming, I pumped water under the shaved ice and it compacted,” Rylan notes. He tested water pumped in at -1° Celsius (30° Fahrenheit) and then again at 8 °C (46 °F). That warmer water simulated a warming ocean.

Ice with warmer water below it compacted seven percent faster than ice atop very cold water, Rylan showed. He hopes his research might help people understand how glaciers form (or don’t), as the world warms.

Doing more scientific research around climate change is key, he believes. Eventually, he says, “it’ll hit home with somebody and they’ll say, ‘Hey, let’s stop this.’”

Pauline hopes that more research also will prompt more action. “We should take all measures to prevent [climate change] as much as possible,” she says. “At the rate it’s going, it’s going to destroy the planet.”

Student scientists want to help all of us survive a warmer world published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

[battybat-boss]

Do Bullies Always Win?

Trump's bullying worked with Canada, has half-worked with Iran and North Korea, but has had nothing but malign impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The news that Canada has caved on trade has me depressed. The glee with which Donald Trump has announced his latest “victory” is galling. Sure, he didn't force Mexico and Canada to do everything he wanted in the replacement for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But he certainly can claim a public-relations coup. And his supporters in Congress are milking the moment for all it's worth.

“While many in Washington claimed it could not be done, President Trump worked tirelessly to bring Canada to the table and negotiate a new trade deal that is better for American workers and consumers,” said Republican Representative Steve Scalise.

Yes, yes, I know: The arc of the moral universe is long and it bends toward justice. The problem is, how long is the arc and how big is the universe? In the shorter term, such as the span of a human lifetime, injustice seems more likely the norm.

I would like to believe that Trump's game of chicken on foreign trade is simply not going to work. But what if it does? What if China blinks? What if the European Union buckles? The game of trade is not simply won by those who can negotiate the longest or write the most detailed treaties. It's often won by those who use crude displays of power.

Geopolitics is not a game for the faint of heart. It's the perfect playground for bullies.

Bullies were on the ascendant even before America's top tyrant won the presidency in 2016. Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Daniel Ortega: These leaders all believe that their might makes right.

But Trump brings it to another level. Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua and the Philippines all have rich histories of strong men imposing their wills on resistant populations. The United States lacks that tradition. The rule of law is supposed to keep the bullies in check.

Now Trump is bringing into government a whole club of likeminded pugilists. John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are running foreign policy. The god-awful Jeff Sessions is rewriting the rules of law. And now Trump wants to stuff the Supreme Court with frat boys like Brett Kavanaugh, someone who has never known the difference between right and wrong and, in his most recent testimony, tried to bully Congress into confirming his nomination simply because he's, well, entitled to it. Ruthlessness got him this far in his career - why shouldn't he stick with this tactic?

It reminds me of my first day in middle school, when an older boy picked me out of the crowd of incoming sixth graders to punch my arm, a display of power that he enjoyed so much that he turned it into a daily ritual. But the current situation is much worse than that. It's like going to school and discovering that not only is that gang of jerks that hates you still controlling the hallways during breaks. Not only are they still extorting lunch money from the weak at lunch. Not only that, but they've taken over the classrooms and the administration, they decide who gets into what courses and what colleges, and they want to make your entire day a living hell.

Bullying Tactics

Bullies are often, though not always, scared of a real fight. They pick on the weak and the easily intimidated. They talk big. Donald Trump has always talked big. And he seems never to shy away from a fight. But those are verbal battles - in the press or in the courtroom. As for actual fighting, he notoriously avoided the Vietnam War, not for moral reasons but because of supposed bone spurs in his heels.

Like most chickenhawks, Trump talks big about blowing up other countries and taking out their leaders. So far, however, he has only attacked some usual suspects - a few targets in Syria, a widespread bombing campaign in one of the poorest countries on earth (Afghanistan), and a continuation of the US drone program.

True, Trump might be gearing up for a war with Iran. He's being pushed in that direction by people inside his administration (like Bolton and Pompeo) as well as neocon hawks like Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (who recently called Trump a “Twitter tiger”).

But I suspect that Trump wants simply to bully Iran into submission. He has hit the country with the sanctions that the previous administration had removed as a result of the nuclear deal. Already, Iran's oil exports have dropped steeply by 870,000 barrels a day since April. The Trump administration has threatened to penalize any country that imports Iranian oil with secondary sanctions. As a result, South Korea and Japan have already stopped their orders. Meanwhile, US oil exports have gone up, in part to fill the gap.

Of course, not everyone has gone along with Trump. China in particular will continue to purchase Iranian products. And Europeans are openly defying Trump by crafting a deal with Tehran to preserve the nuclear deal and keep open trade and investment links. And oil prices are on the rise, which means more discontent at the pump in the US, particularly among Trump's carbon-guzzling supporters.

Trump says he wants a new nuclear deal. But really the end game is regime change in Tehran. For all but the craziest of neocons, the Iraq War has created a new kind of syndrome: maximum pressure, minimum military involvement. It's what some observers have cannily described as “regime change on the cheap.” So far, thanks to some powerful allies, Iran is hanging tough.

Big Stick, Then Talk

Perhaps if Kim Jong-un were Muslim or didn't have nuclear weapons or had made the supreme mistake of being nice to Barack Obama, Trump wouldn't be interested in sitting down to talk with him. As it was, Trump ratcheted up the rhetoric against North Korea in the first year of his term. Then he pivoted, against the advice of many in his administration, toward negotiations. The result was the Singapore summit in June, the first time a sitting American president met with a North Korean leader.

There have been a few interesting changes in the US-North Korea dynamic. The Pentagon agreed to suspend war games with South Korea last summer. Pyongyang has continued a moratorium on nuclear and missile testing as well as dismantled some non-essential parts of the nuclear complex. But the key problem remains the same. Who will make the first bold move?

Meanwhile, North and South Korea aren't waiting for Trump to get off the dime. They've already begun removing landmines from the Demilitarized Zone. At the last inter-Korean summit, North and South agreed to significant de-escalation, from a no-fly zone over the border to a transformation of the DMZ into a peace park. That's bold, and it's happening now.

As for Trump and Kim? They are apparently enjoying those early days in a romance when men's thoughts turn constantly to love. As Trump said at a recent rally in West Virginia: “I was really being tough and so was he. And we would go back and forth. And then we fell in love, ok? No really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they're great letters. And then we fell in love.”

So, the two bullies have hit it off. No surprise there. But as in Romeo and Juliet, today's Montagues and Capulets haven't yet ended their generational conflict despite the love of the two principals. Such love affairs usually don't end well.

But let's say that it does, and the mutual bullying works. In reality, the détente between Washington and Pyongyang will have more to do with the patient negotiations of the quintessential anti-bully, South Korea President Moon Jae-in.

Stomping on the Palestinians

Trump has promised a brand new deal for Middle East peace. That's the fraudulent businessman at work. He's slapped a “new and improved” sticker on a product that is demonstrably inferior to its previous versions, and somehow he thinks the world will buy it.

The Trump administration has put maximum pressure on Palestinians to negotiate from a progressively weaker position and minimum pressure on Israel to make any concessions at all. Trump has moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem (a major Israeli demand), zeroed out $200 million in bilateral assistance for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, cut US financial support for a UN agency that has long helped Palestinian refugees, and closed down the Palestinians' de facto embassy in Washington, DC.

The proper response to this bullying is, of course, to tell the Trump administration to shove its “deal of the century” right up its Foggy Bottom.

And it's not just Palestinians and liberal American Jews who feel this way. Here's what former Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner has to say: “While it is Trump's prerogative to pick and choose whom to support, and how to support them, the ramifications of these abrupt steps will only empower the radicals. The deal of the century can't be made with Israel alone, and hardballing the Palestinians into submission is likely to blow up on Israel's doorstep.”

It's one thing bullying Iran and North Korea. These countries might be backed up against a wall, but they have choices. The Palestinians, after losing so much and then losing even more under Trump, basically have nothing left to lose - except their dignity. Why should they come to the negotiating table to trade this last resource for a manifestly unfair deal?

So, in the four examples cited, bullying worked with Canada, has half-worked with Iran and North Korea, and has had nothing but malign impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Unfortunately, for Trump and his minions, bullying isn't just a tactic, it's a way of life.

The Comeuppance?

If life imitated Hollywood, the bullies would either experience a life-affirming conversion or get their just desserts.

Let's forget about the first option. Donald Trump, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo: These guys are not going to pull a David Brock and suddenly realize the many errors of their ways. Then what about option two? I'd love to see Trump and his crew escorted from the federal government to the federal penitentiary. But how many members of the George W. Bush administration faced prison time for the mishandling of the Iraq War, the torture policy and the other disasters of US foreign policy? Only one: Lewis Libby, for his role in the Valerie Plame affair. And how many members of the financial community went to prison for their role in the banking crisis of 2008? Again, only one.

It may turn out that a couple more Trumpsters have to face jail time as a result of the Mueller probe. Maybe even the president himself will be Caponed over his myriad tax scams. But I have my doubts that the aftermath of the 2020 elections will provide us with the grand spectacle of a mass perp walk from the White House.

Unfortunately, the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election disproved the adage that “cheaters never prosper.” Indeed, his whole life stands testament to the grim truth that cheaters, if they cheat on a truly grand scale, can get away with it. The same, alas, applies to bullies.

But not always. The #MeToo movement is only the latest reminder that organized resistance can bring down very powerful bullies. It's not exactly a Hollywood ending - not until they make a movie about Harvey Weinstein's rise and fall - but it's a whole lot better than suffering in silence. As for the Trump administration, well, I don't know about you but I'd like to shorten the arc of the moral universe and bend it a lot more acutely toward justice.

*[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

The post Do Bullies Always Win? appeared first on Fair Observer.