Thanksgiving

For all of you who need to know more of what we are all up to out here in Colorado, you should join Facebook. Seriously, check it out! There are many pictures posted and even a video of Eric and Blayne plucking their nose hairs with their fingers.
This Thanksgiving was a fun one, with lots of food and friends. Eric and I ran the Turkey Trot in our goal times and then he started grilling the turkey. We went over to the Chastains and sat around on computers and watched football. A nice relaxing holiday!

Beer & Biofuels!

Colorado has a great selection of breweries- there's Crabtree here in Greeley, and then the more well known Anheuser-Busch and Coors, and that means CO2. Good old carbon dioxide. We love it in soda, use it as dry ice, need it to brew beer, but read about it these days with conflicting feelings. Isn't it what's accumulating in the atmosphere and reaching concentrations of over 380 parts per million, which is causing climate change? Yep.

I love beer and also love the idea that excess carbon dioxide from brewing beer could be a way to feed CO2 loving algae. Why algae? There's a company right here in Colorado that is using the excess CO2 from breweries and nitrogen dioxide (NO2)-a wast from industry- to grow algae because that's what they use to grow! Some algae photosynthesize and produce copious amounts of oil. They are really efficient at this and don't take any land from food crops, such as corn and soybeans, because they can be grown in small places within labs. No worries about soils being used or having shortages of food crops for this oil which is a great biofuel. Even better the carbohydrates that are waste products can be used to make ethanol or animal feed. If you are a nerd like me, check out SOLIX and read more. Now, if we can just convince scientists to figure out a way to use Kudzu as biofuel...you'd see southerners hacking away at those vines night and day!

Interesting Facts

I had a great week teaching. If you've ever taught you know that the occasional great day, the kind where kids listen, interact, come up with new ideas, ask amazing questions, and they THINK.. is something to celebrate, so an entire week is quite a memorable experience. I speculate the reason for the students response this week has been my enthusiasm. I'm teaching 7th graders about energy resources (renewable and nonrenewable, CO2 footprints) and 6th graders about the circulatory system. If you know me you know I LOVE those subjects and know a lot about them.

What I did to prepare for my lessons was read, read more, and then read even more. I read their textbooks, got online, and then went to the library and started reading magazines and newspapers on the content I was teaching. I ran across an article in Scientific American and got hooked on the entire magazine. I figure if there isn't anything exciting happening around here I'll just post facts from what I'm reading that you might find interesting and might get YOU thinking like my students :-) So here goes.

This is a seed vault in Norway, specifically on the Svalbard islands, where scientists store seeds of crops and other plants. As I was reading I thought of how we all have these million gigabyte computers and external hard drives to "backup" our precious information. So if you think it's crazy for a government to spend $9 million on a seed vault deep within permafrost to protect & backup the genetic diversity of plants, think about how you feel about your digital pictures and documents. Losing those is nothing to losing the genetic diversity that exists on earth. The vaults purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters, as well as climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may get wiped out. This is a real possibility, considering the evidence for climate change (no matter what you think, climate is changing, and it doesn't matter if you think it's human caused or a natural cycle, either way there will be consequences). In fact, there are other seed vaults-1,400 around the world-so someone has already put a lot of thought into this. Climate change will affect crops, among other things, and that means food on your plate. Scientists don't have the doomsday mindset like you may think. They are trying to find solutions to problems, just like scientists have always done. Now, if we could just get politicians to look at data, listen to scientists, and then think- just like my students did this week. Something to ponder...