DiscoverHow lightning works?

Has global warming affected the bee population. pg. 12

Cosmic rays and how they affectlightning and when they strike. pg. 7

Decline of the Bumblebees

Coffee or the environment?Is harvesting coffee beans destroying the environment? pg.4

March 2014 $6.95

March 2014 Volume 3

2 Discover

Table ofCoffee or the Environment --Four

How lightning works? --Six

Climate Change and Greenland: Where Ice Melt Could Raise Seas by 23 Feet --Ten

Pacific Ocean temperature influences tornado activity in US--Twelve

How can temperatures in the Pacific ocean affect tornado activity. What is the link between the two?

Where is all the ice melt going? What will our future coastlines look like in the future.

Have you ever wondered how lightning works and what to do during a storm.

Has the amount of coffee consumption damaging the ground.

Discover 3

ContentsFourteen--Decline of the Bumblebees

Seventeen--Universe re-created in computer simulation

Twenty--At Chernobyl, Hints of Nature’s Adaptation

Twenty-two--Cosmic Connections in the Deep Sea

Climate change has affected many things. Bees are slowly disappearing all around.

Advancements in technology,explains the origins and the universe.

It is amazing to see how nature has taken back Chernobyl. The photos are amazing.

Understanding the cosmos by studying the deep sea and learning about our oceans.

4 Discover

We go where you go.

Hublot.com

Discover 5

Not too long ago the sun, earth, mars, and the moon aligned. It was an amazing view in the sky. What made

this event so special was when they aligned it caused the moon to glow coppery red before and after the event. What’s the cause of the eclipse? It is when the moon moves directly into the earths shadow. It also is what gives the coppery glow around the moon. What else is special about this eclipse is that it is the start of four eclipses. Mars will also be the most visible during this time. It will be the glowing orange-yellow to the right of the moon. They will happen within this year and the next bring our attention to the sky. “There is no science in this world like physics. Nothing comes close to the precision with which physics enables you to understand the world around you. It’s the laws of physics that allow us to say exactly what time the sun is going to rise. What time the eclipse is going to begin. What time the eclipse is going to end—Neil deGrasse Tyson” which shows us how easy it is to track these events with modern science. We would not have modern science without wonder. Wonder is given by events like eclipses. Recently, we had an article about lunar eclipses that people questioned the im-portance of the event and how it will affect our future. Eclipses have been happening throughout the world’s history. They have caused events to play out like wars or people to look at the sky and wonder what’s out there. First, it helped the Syracusan defeat the Athenians in the Pelopon-nesian War. The Athenians were frightened by the eclipse and gave the Syracusans a chance to win. Secondly, it has given people wonder. “In about 350 B.C., The Greek philosopher Aris-totle observed that the curved umbral shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse was a proof that the Earth was in fact spherical. After all, what figure besides a spherical Earth could cast a curved shadow on the Moon?” The im-portance of studying and learning about eclipses

have given us advance-ments in our study if the cos-

mos. Lunar eclips-es have even helped those at sea to establish the hour of the day. Ac- cord-ing to the memoirs of Christopher Columbus,

On September 15 by the mercy of God they sighted an island which the Indi-ans call Adamaney.... That night he ob-served an eclipse of the moon and was able to determine a difference in time of about five hours and twenty three minutes between that place and Cadiz.

It is amazing that a small but astounding event can affect the course of history. Without the lunar eclipse, who knows how the exploration of the new world would have turned out? Lunar eclipses have touched our past and made us who we are today. It has help shaped our past. It shaped our past because of superstition and science. Who knows how it will shape out future. It can have last effects on those who see them. They may become our next future leaders and scientists.

An Editorial By Kasie Wegener

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WhenthePlanetsAlign

6 Discover

”

HowLightning

Works?A scientist asks: Could it be cosmic rays?

By: Katia Moskvitch

“Electricity is really just organized lightning.

-George Carlin

Discover 7

Lightning is a natural electrical discharge—but scientists are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what triggers it. Renowned Russian physicist Alexandr Gurevich tells Katia Moskvitch about his theory, which really is out of this world

hat don’t we know about lightning?The main problem is that we don’t know how a thundercloud gets the spark needed to initiate a lightning bolt. The biggest mystery is that the electric

field in thunderclouds is not very large. Years of experimental measurements from aeroplanes and air balloons have shown that the field is about 10 times smaller than what is needed to initiate lightning. It is not clear how a lightning bolt is born, but the idea is that something has to “seed” it first.

What do we know about how lightning works?In 1749 Benjamin Franklin discovered that lightning was an electrical discharge between a thundercloud and Earth. We know that thunderstorms can generate over 100 million volts of electricity, but we also know that this gets applied across a really large space—hundreds of metres. So the resulting electric field, or concentration of electric force, is not actually very big.It is estimated that Earth gets struck by more than 100 lightning bolts every second. How is that electric current released?For lightning to propagate from its point of origin to other locations—the ground, for example—the air, which is normally an insulator, must somehow permit electrical charge to move freely. The lower part of a thundercloud is negatively charged, and as a storm moves, it causes positively charged particles to gather at ground level. So, as the lightning is triggered, the lower part of the cloud generates a channel of ionized air—or lightning “leader”—that allows electric current to flow freely and transports the negative charge towards positively charged objects, such as trees or buildings. That is when a lightning strike happens. And these currents are huge: They heat the air to about 27,700 degrees Celsius, roughly four times hotter than the surface of the sun.How is that electric current released?For lightning to propagate from its point of origin to other locations—the ground, for example—the air, which is normally an insulator, must somehow permit electrical charge to move freely. The lower part of a thundercloud is negatively charged, and as a storm moves, it causes positively charged particles to gather at ground level.

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