Green House Simulation

Hi guys!! This is my weeks blog post about Green House Simulation. This is among many of the topics we covered this week while talking about Global Climate Change. During this lab we simulated how greenhouse gases trap in heat onto earth's surface. We did this by taking two cups , a blue on and a red one , one had a piece of plastic over it allowing gases to get trapped in there and the other one was open to the environment. Both had thermometers in them and in increments of five minutes we took the temperature until we reached thirty minutes. We found that the one that had the plastic on it which represented the ozone layer, trapped the gases and allowed the cup to get hotter than the other cup. This simulation showed us how the green house effect worked. For more information on how this works or if you have any questions go to www.windows2universe.org

Weekly Re-purposing Project

For my re-purposing project I decided to turn an old 3 ring binder into a key holder.

First you need a hot glue gun, an old binder, and a pair of scissors.

The Supplies

Now start to cut the binder so that you have the metal rings by themselves and two flaps.

The metal part that will hold your keys

Now take one of the flaps and the metal rings. Make sure that the flap is clean. If you are using a binder that has pockets on the inside use the front side (as pictured below) so that you can use the back to hold notes or mail.

One of the binder flaps and the rings

Next take the metal rings and flip it over so that the piece of plastic it is connected to is face up. Take the hot glue gun and start applying the glue quickly and smoothly. Be generous with the glue if needed.

Now quickly stick it to the flap where ever you want and press down. Make sure the glue cools before trying to move the piece. After the glue has cooled test to see if it has securely been adhered. If not you should apply more glue.

After securing the metal rings to the flap you should have a finished key holder that you can use!

Finished product

For extra fun add a handle to the back, using the hot glue gun, so you can hang it up on the wall. You can try using the metal wire from old notebooks or old ribbons and cloth. I used an old gift bag handle made of paper.

Key holder with a handle

This is an idea that I thought of on my own. I chose to re purpose old binders because they are really hard to recycle. Most people don't think twice when they throw them away or don't know that it can be recycled. Also, I know that these binders are not very durable to the everyday wear and tear. If we re purpose and recycle these binders there will be less in our landfill. It will reduce the amount of potential pollution that comes from landfills and reduce the amount of raw materials to make another binder. Also, we can reduce the amount of oil and fossil fuel use by re purposing this item. The reason is that factories use fossil fuels and crude oils to produce the materials that make the binders. If we recycle our old binders then we can effectively reduce air pollution and fossil fuel consumption. 

I hope that this get you to think about the impact one simple, everyday item has on our environment and that it gets you to reduce, reuse and recycle! 

Will's Weekly Repurposing Project

Fellow APES Students,

Well, my week for the repurposing project finally rolled around...better late than never I suppose.  It took me forever to figure out which item I wanted to repurpose and how I wanted to do it.  After over an hour of scrolling through Pinterest and other DIY websites, I decided to look around and see what I had an excess of or things that I normally just threw away.  I stumbled upon some of my Mom's clothespins and was immediately reminded of a Christmas ornament I had made in preschool back in the day.  I grabbed three of them and began to fashion my Rudolph ornament.  I used wood glue to hold them together with two facing down for the legs and another facing up for the head and antlers.  After the glue dried, I grabbed some googly eyes and a piece of red felt and attached them to the front clothespin and.....tada!  It's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

In my quest to find items for use, I came across a stack of old compact discs (CDs), one of which was scratched pretty badly.  So instead of throwing it away, I searched for ways to repurpose it and found this gem on Youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVxMM9SbjrU

This video was short, sweet, and to the point and I was actually able to get it right the first time.  Mine may not have looked quite as good as the one in the video, but it definitely served its purpose.  I would have shared photos of my creations with y'all, however I left both with Miss Bergeron on Friday.  I thoroughly enjoyed this project and I learned the importance of recreating items for different uses instead of just throwing them away.  After seeing all the awesome things out there on the web, I realize that almost anything can be repurposed and that it is our responsibility to do so in any way we can to keep trash from filling our landfills and polluting our planet!

Stay green and peace out!

Will Maness

Weekly Blog Post Thingy

Some of the main topics we went over this week in APES were:

• Air & water pollution
• Landfills
• Things that cause pollution (oil spills, nuclear disasters)
• Annnnnd (My personal favorite) The Tragedy of the Commons

Pollution comes from a lot of stuff and affects the world around this in many different ways. The topic of pollution concerns the actions of people that harm the environment, like driving a car (polluting the air via gas emissions) or using pesticides, or fertilizers (polluting by running into sources of water).

Now with landfills, I actually learned a bit in class. Okay, being perfectly honest here, I always thought landfills worked a little like this:

You dig a big hole

You throw people's trash in it.

I didn't really have a second thought of it. So I was pretty surprised that so much work went into making and maintaining landfills. For example, these "landfillians" (I will use this to refer to landfill workers of any sort) put these barriers around the landfill so that chemicals and other stuff don't spread through the soil. Landfillians also make these systems that remove hazardous waste that builds up in the landfills, like methane gas. These guys have more important job than I thought. Now that I think about it, that's what they should be called. It's epic and fitting. Really gets the importance across.

Things that cause pollution can be anything from little things, like using cars, to huge accidents like oil spills and nuclear accidents, both of which we dealt with in class. Pretty serious stuff for accidents. Both of these can really mess up the surrounding environment in ways that we sometimes can't even hope to understand. They can occur because of poor maintenance, mechanical problems, and even just plain carelessness. On another note, nuclear accidents affect us both more so than oil spills, which only affects us because we make a priority of cleaning up (pat on the back for society). Still, the effects of both are devastating. And two notable nuclear disasters weren't accidents...

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Quite easily one of the most horrible events in history. Really shows the cruel price of war and what it takes to end it once it has begun. I'm not going to get into the debate on the use of nuclear weapons or the morality behind it for the sake of not making this post longer than it already is. 

*Ahem* Moving on.

Well, my favorite part of this week, I'd say, was going through the Tragedy of the Commons. It was more on the philosophical side of things, which I like to think about a lot. It talked about how one act at a person's convenience can build up to be something that harms surroundings if everyone does it. Think about it like this: One person smokes and throws their cigarette on the ground, because it's honestly takes too much effort to dispose of it properly.

Well, it's not much right? It's just one person. 

But then, what if isn't? Then you got hundreds or thousands or so people smoking (good for the industry, not so much for those individuals) and dumping their junk all over the place. The Tragedy of Commons presents many concepts like this that really get you thinking.

Well, that's pretty much it for this post. Happy Holidays to all and be careful out there; a lot of crazy stuff goes on in the world. Be observant of your surroundings and be safe alright?

After all,

"This cosmic dance of bursting decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively, but

if sweetness can win, and it can, then I'll still be here tomorrow to high-five you yesterday, my friend. Peace."

    -The Royal Tart Toter

-Alex

Weekly Blog Christmas Edition

http://youtu.be/0H19uWxtvfc

Hello Fellow APES students,

This is going to be a special christmas edition of the APES weekly blog. We hope you enjoy


This week we went outside to test the Albedo of different surfaces, by measuring the tempature 2 inches from the surface. This works because if the temperature is higher then the Albedo is lower, and if the temperature is lower the Albedo is higher.  This is important because it Albedo is becoming lower then the energy from sunlight is becoming trapped into the earth, thereby heating our atmosphere.

and now please enjoy these special Christmas pictures

And now as we all know of the tragic events in Connecticut I would like to post something special for the families of the victims. We as human beings should all be disguisted by this, and I am sure all of us are.

Thank you guys for your time

-Jeffrey Davis

Salt Concentration Lab

This week in our APES class we are conducting a lab in which we test what salt concentrations plants can properly germinate in.

 

                The salt concentration is determined by the numbers located on top of the labels. The number 3 located on the label above means that there was three grams of salt dissolved within a 100 mL beaker. Although you are unable to see the seeds germinating in the salt concentrations above other salt concentrations like the control or .5 have already began to germinate. While our lab continues we will be writing down how many seeds germinated, how many haven’t and the percentage of germination.

By Kelby Butner

Weekly re purposing project

for this project i decided to make a bird feeder out of a plastic Coke bottle and two wooden kitchen spoons.  For this i used box cutters to make two large holes and two smaller holes.
-Every year in the US over 380 billion plastic bottles are thrown into land fills.
-An estimated 11 billion trees are cut down every year.
- In many areas the food sources for birds are being depleted.
This was important to be because in our area there are many birds and we also waste many plastic bottles.
Supplies- plastic bottle, 2 wooden spoons, box cutters, marker, bird seed

http://www.savvyhousekeeping.com/from-bottle-to-bird-feeder/