Out with the bugs, in with the new


Our new traveling exhibit, Sustainable Choices, opens on Jan. 22 and runs through Mother's Day Weekend. It's a terrific and informative exhibit on the ecological implications of the choices you make in day-to-day life, and a wonderful addition to our role as one of Southern California's premiere science education institutions.


There weren't any 12-foot robot bugs to install this time, so we were able to complete installation quickly once Backyard Monsters was on its way. The exhibit features several information panels on themes such as laundry, electricity, transportation, shopping, and bathing - each one providing quick facts and figures about how the choices we make affect the sustainability of natural resources. There are also several interactive exhibits that help bring these ideas to life. You can even plant a seed to bring home and grow!


Our exhibit space also gave us the opportunity to supplement the standard Sustainable Choices exhibit with some fascinating information about the Western Center campus - one of the most eco-friendly museums in the country. If you've ever wondered what our LEED Platinum rating really means, you'll be surprised to find out just how many intriguing and creative ideas went into the design and construction of our buildings - and you can see it as it came to life, through photos from the Water + Life Campus' construction.

Old Fashioned Holiday

The Western Science Center, in conjunction with the Diamond Valley Lake Visitor's Center, opened its doors to the community to usher in an "Old Fashioned Holiday". Visitors young and old explored the museum, took pictures with Santa and had a hand at our holiday crafts.

It was a great event and we hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season!

DA

Atom smasher catches 1st high-energy collisions (from Yahoo! News)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091209/ap_on_sc/eu_big_bang_machine

Its a big day in the world of subatomic physics. CERN's Large Hadron Collider, located in Geneva, Switzerland, had its first successful collision. This marks the first major functioning milestone for the reactor, the successful end of a long and interesting journey rife with enough political intrigue and technical miracles to fill a season of The West Wing and Star Trek.

The mere existence of the LHC is remarkable in itself. At a cost of about $9 billion (the same amount as the largest check ever written), its the most expensive scientific experiment in history. It's also, naturally, the largest particle accelerator ever built - a huge metal doughnut 17 miles around, kept at a vacuum so powerful that there is actually more air in interplanetary space than there is within the LHC.

All 9300 of its superconducting magnets are kept at a temperature colder than outer space, while the energies of the collisions produce temperatures 100,000 times that of the core of the Sun.

The initial test collision accelerated protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV (1.18 trillion electron volts), edging out the previous record of 0.98 TeV. 1 TeV is about the energy of a mosquito flying - but all packed down into the size of a proton. When fully charged, the LHC can achieve a remarkable collision energy of 14 TeV - allowing scientists for the first time to recreate the conditions jsut moments after the Big Bang.

One thing scientists are hoping to discover is the Higgs Boson, an elusive little subatomic particle first predicted in the 1960s - the particle that gives things mass. The physicists at the LHC hope, to oversimply it, to smash together protons so hard that they knock the very mass out of them.

There still remains several obstacles for the scientists of CERN to overcome before they can achieve that goal. The technical precision needed to handle the unfathomable energies of the LHC means that they have zero room for error or variance, and the technology has already failed several times, even at "low" energies. Some people even worried that the massive energies of the collisions would create tiny black holes (dont worry, even the LHC doesnt nearly approach the energies you'd need to crunch a proton down THAT much). But for now, we can celebrate a success in one of the latest great undertakings of Big Science.

Honoring America's Heroes

With the help of the VFW and the Hemet Fire Department, the Western Science Center proudly raised our new flag over the campus on November 10, 2009. The flag, flown over the United States Capitol on October 15, 2009, was provided by the Honorable Mary Bono Mack of the US House of Representatives.

Set at half mast in rememberance of our nation's recent tragedy at Fort Hood, the Western Science Center flag will be raised on Veteran's Day to honor those who have served our country.

This Veteran's Day, it is our honor to offer free admission to all veterans and active military.

DA

A Goodbye to the "Father of Modern Anthroplogy"

October 31, 2009 anthropology lost one of its greatest contributors, Claude Levi-Strauss. At the age of 100, the "father of modern anthropology" quietly passed away in his Paris home. Levi-Strauss was a leading post-war intellectual who inspired academics in multiple fields with his studies in structuralism, and is the leading contributor to the structural anthropology school of thought.

Defined as an approach to studying the structures and oppostions that make up human phenomenon, Levi-Strauss used strucutralism to analize myth, language, religion and food preparation of serval cultures. He proposed that all humans see things in binary opposites and that culture interpretes those opposites in a way that is unique and logical to its members. He went on to study commonalities between tribal and industrial communities, and a better understanding of universal human patterns of thought. With his research, Claude Levi-Strauss published some of the most influential academic works of the post-war era, including The Savage Mind, Tristes Tropiques and The Elemental Structures of Kinship.

A noted and respected author, teacher, and academic, Claude Levi-Strauss will be remebered for his great contributions to the study of anthropology and the humanities as a whole.

DA

Megaquake in Seattle?

Megaquake Looms Over Seattle from Discovery News

Southern California isnt the only part of the US that lives in fear of a major earthquake. This new study suggests that a major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest might occur much closer to major population centers in the Seattle area than previously thought. As Southern Californians, we all know what kind of dangers earthquakes can pose near major metropolises.

The Cascadia fault in Washington is a different type than the faults we have in Southern California. It's a thrust fault - where two continental plates are converging, and one slides underneath the other. As they grind along each other, they can produce earthquakes. In Southern California, our major faults are transform faults - where two plates are sliding past each other. Thrust faults typically generate deeper and more powerful earthquakes than transform faults - while the study estimates a 9.0 magnitude quake on the Cascadia fault, the largest that the San Andreas fault can support in this area is about 8.6, about 2.5x less energetic.

The Northridge earthquake of 1994 was also triggered along a much smaller thrust fault that ran underneath the Los Angeles area. Although that quake was only of moderate intensity (6.7 magnitude), it exemplifies the type of damage that an earthquake along a thrust fault can wreak near a major city.

This might actually be good news, though, for those not in the immediate earthquake area - the new "hot zone" for the fault has moved from offshore to under the Olympic peninsula. A suboceanic earthquake would pose a higher risk of generating devastating tsunamis that would propagate up and down the Pacific seaboard; the last major earthquake on the fault, around the year 1700, caused destructive tsunami waves that traveled as far away as Japan.

Mammoth Discovery

Baby mammoth yields secrets after 40,000 years in Siberian Tundra
from the Times UK

A woolly mammoth was discovered in 2007 in the Arctic tundra, and is making news this week. What's truly fascinating about this is the age of the mammoth - only a month old when she died. She was amazingly well preserved, as well; the best-preserved woolly mammoth mummy yet found. Her eyes, her organs, even the food in her stomach were all preserved by the clay that trapped and suffocated her.

Scientists hope that this exceptional preservation will let them explore details that might shed new light on mammoth physiology and the changing environment of her times - about 40,000 years ago.

Lyuba is a woolly mammoth - different than the Colombian mammoths that inhabited the Diamond Valley area in the Pleistocene. They lived in colder, more northern, tundra-like environments, and grew the shaggy wool coat that gives them their name. Colombian mammoths inhabited more temperate lower-latitude grasslands, and while they had some hair, it was not the full, thick coat you see in Woolly mammoths.

One similarity between Lyuba and mammoths in this region, though, is how she was first found. She was discovered by a Siberian reindeer farmer, having eroded partway out of a riverbank. Similar finds pop up in Southern California every year - mammoth tusks or horse bones that may have lain under the surface for millenia, peeking out after a rainstorm or catching the toe of some lucky hiker passing by. Fortunately for paleontologists, the Siberian farmer got in contact with scientists before she was tampered with any more, and they were able to excavate Lyuba carefully to ensure this unique discovery will tell us all it can about the world of the woolly mammoth.

DJ