Science Fun

From the Old Farmer’s Almanac, we present Sky Watch, a monthly column on the astronomical events for the month. 

Jupiter falls into the Sun’s glare at dusk and vanishes for the season.  It meets slowly emerging Venus at midmonth, but is too close to the Sun for the pair to be readily seen.  Mars has a banner month, still brilliant all night long even while it loses half its brightness as Earth pulls away from it.  Saturn enters convenient viewing hours, rising by 8:30 P.M. at midmonth, due east in Virgo.  By midnight, the planet is high enough to appear through thinner air, its rings still very much edge on.  The thin crescent Moon is orientated “on its back,” like a smile, in the fading dusk from the 14^th to the 17^th.  It meets Mars when almost full on the 25^th. 

The last quarter of the Moon is on the 5^th day at 18:48.  New Moon is on the 13^th at 21:51 followed by the first quarter on the 21^st at 19:38.  The Moon becomes full on February 28^th at 11:38.  All times are given in Eastern Standard Time.

Our ‘word for the week’ is Plumule. It is part of a seed embryo that develops into the shoot, bearing the first true leaves of the plant. In most seeds, for examples, the sunflower, the plumule is a small conical structure without any leaf structure. Growth of the plumule does not occur until the cotledons have grown above the ground. This is called epigela germination. However, in seeds such as the broad bean, a leaf structure is visible on the plumule in the seed. These seeds develop by the plumule growing up through the soil with the cotledons remaining below the surface. This is known as hypogeal germination.

We hope you enjoyed this short lesson on plant growth. Word for the week is chosen by random finger pointing at any word on the page that opens up in the Big Book of Science Terms.

January 25, 2010, the weather in New Hampshire – Rain!  After an overnight of freezing rain with a temp near 32F, the day progressed right into a hard rain with the temperature warming up to 48F.  This is unusually warm for this time of year as for the most part, January is one of the coldest months of the winter, we do on occasion have a January thaw. 

On this day in weather history, we will look at some extremes for this day with snow and cold.  Let us go back to the year 1821 when the Hudson River froze over.  The Hudson River was frozen solid during the midst of the coldest winter in forty-one years. Thousands of persons crossed the ice from New York City to New Jersey, and refreshment taverns were set up in the middle of the river to warm pedestrians. 

48 degrees below zero and a tornado – just a bit nippy and breezy on this day in 1988!  Bitter cold air, coming down from Alaska, settled over the Northern Rockies. Wilson WY reported a morning low of 48 degrees below zero. Thunderstorms produced severe weather in the south central U.S. One thunderstorm in north central Texas spawned a tornado which injured three persons at Troy.  Historical weather data from the historical archives of the Weather Service and weatherforyou.com.

Today, January 18, 2010 is Martin Luther King Day, a holiday here in the United States.  In my geocaching adventures, I started a series of caches on the holidays celebrated in the United States.  As part of each cache entry, I publish a short history lesson or tidbit on the holiday, below is my short lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, to Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King in the family home in Atlanta, Georgia.  He attended Atlanta University Laboratory School and Booker T. Washington High School before going to Morehouse College to obtain a degree in Sociology.  In June 1948, King graduated from Morehouse College and entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.  It was there that he began to study the teachings of Gandhi.  After King graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree, he married Coretta Scott on June 18, 1953, in Marion, Alabama.  The couple had four children: Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice Albertine.

An excerpt from one of Dr. King’s famous speeches: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.  I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.  I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.  I have a dream today.”  Martin Luther King, Jr. said during his I have a Dream speech.

On this day in 1863, the greatest snowstorm of record for Cincinnati OH commenced, and a day later twenty inches of snow covered the ground. That total has remained far above the modern day record for Cincinnati of eleven inches of snow in one storm.

On this day in 1979, Chicago, IL, was in the midst of their second heaviest snow of record as, in thirty hours, the city was buried under 20.7 inches of snow. The twenty-nine inch snow cover following the storm was an all-time record for Chicago.

On this day in 1989, a winter storm spread snow and sleet and freezing rain from the Middle Mississippi Valley to the northeastern U.S. Freezing rain in West Virginia caused fifteen traffic accidents in just a few minutes west of Charleston. Tennessee was deluged with up to 7.5 inches of rain. Two inches of rain near Clarksville TN left water in the streets as high as car doors.

On this day in 1990, A winter storm in the southwestern U.S. blanketed the mountains of southwest Utah with 18 to 24 inches of snow, while sunshine and strong southerly winds helped temperatures warm into the 60s in the Central Plains Region. Five cities reported record high temperatures for the date, including North Platte NE with a reading of 63 degrees.

Historical weather data from the archives of the National Weather Service and weatherforyou.com

January 1^st was not the original day for New Years.  The earliest recording of a new year celebration is believed to have been in Mesopotamia at around 2000 B.C. and was celebrated around the time of the vernal equinox in mid March.  There were also other dates tied to the seasons that were used by ancient cultures.

In the early Roman calendar, March 1^st rang in the New Year.  This calendar designated March 1^st as the New Year.  The calendar had just ten months, beginning with March.  January joins the calendar  and the new year was first celebrated on January 1^st in Rome in 153 B.C.  The Julian Calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. and was a solar based calendar that was a vast improvement on the Roman calendar, which was a lunar system that had become wildly inaccurate over the years.  The Julian calendar decreed that the New Year would begin on January 1^st.

We enter the Middle Ages and January 1^st was abolished.  In medieval Europe, the celebrations accompanying the new year were considered pagan and in 567 the Council of Tours abolished January 1^st as the beginning of the year.  At various times and places throughout Europe, the new year was celebrated on December 25^th, March 1^st, and March 25^th, the Feast of Annunciation, and on Easter.

In 1582, the Gregorian Calendar reform restored January 1^st as New Year’s Day and it took until 1752 for all countries, including the American colonies to adopt the Gregorian calendar and switch their observance of the new year from March to January.

January 1 marks the beginning of a new year and the passing of the old year.  It is the culmination of the holiday season that began with Thanksgiving and moved through Christmas and now to the end of the season with New Years.  The week of New Years is also a time of remembrance where you might see on the news and in publications a re-cap of the year’s significant events, whether they are disasters, politics, scientific achievements, music and the arts.  New Year’s Resolutions also are part of the traditions of New Years as well as fireworks and midnight ‘toasts’ to ring in the New Year on December 31^st, New Years Eve.