Wednesday, November 10, 2010

General Announcements:

• Reminder: There is no school for students this coming Thursday, 11/11 (Veterans' Day) and Friday, 11/12 (Professional Development Day).
• All materials left over from Day of the Dead ofrendas need to be taken home ASAP!
• We need tissues! Cold season is upon us and we need nice tissues for sore noses. If every Prism family donated one box of tissues, that would almost certainly get us through the worst of tissue season.

Math:

• Nada

Language Arts:

• Nada

Social Studies:

• Due Mon., 11/15: Type a bibliograpy (using citation protocols here) for every source used in your timeline research.

Science:

• Due Mon., 11/15:
  • Type (12 pt. Times or similar) summary of the Bioassessment.
  • Include your drawing of an image from the activity—~1/3 page.
  • Notes on bioassessment available here

Spanish:

• Grade 7:
  • Due :
• Grade 8:
  • Due :

Moment of Zen:

Scientists Excited At Cluelessness About Bubbles

Something big is going on at the center of the galaxy, and astronomers are happy to say they don’t know what it is. A group of scientists working with data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope said Tuesday that they had discovered two bubbles of energy erupting from the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The bubbles, which will be in a paper to be published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal, extend 25,000 light years up and down from each side of the galaxy and contain the energy equivalent to 100,000 supernova explosions.

“They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the team that discovered them. The source of the bubbles is a mystery, [but] what it’s apparently not is dark matter, the mysterious something that astronomers say makes up a quarter of the universe and holds galaxies together.