October+BABM

October 6, 2014, Science Discovery

This week was about yeast! Yeast is one of those ingredients in cooking that nobody really understands. Most people think it's a magic powder that makes bread rise when it's baking, but I sought to prove them wrong. Yeast is actually a single-celled organism. Yeast is not just a helper when it comes to baking bread, for example did you know that you can make wine with yeast? Wine is made when yeast feed off of sugar and deposit waste, the waste is the wine. If you are going to try and make wine with yeast, you will need some fruit that has been cooked long enough for the fruit to secrete juice. You will also need //active// yeast and white sugar. To make the wine, you need to put all the ingredients in a bucket or large container in the following order, Fruit and fruit juice, then yeast, then sugar (preferably 2-3 cups of sugar). After you've done that, all you need to do now is wait. The longer you wait, the better, but it is best to add more yeast every month, at the latest. Yeast cannot make children with two parent cells, so it reproduces through asexual reproduction. Asexual reproduction is when a single-celled organism makes a "copy" of itself with the same DNA makeup and everything. There's a lot to know about yeast and I hope you will research yeast and try this experiment yourself.

October 14, Science Discovery,

I found out about something every home has, aerosol cans! I found out how they work and why you can't put one in a fire. an aerosol can is (often) an aluminum can filled with pressurized liquid and a valve that, once opened, the liquid is forced out of a small hole where the liquid quickly spreads and becomes a mist. In the can, gas expands to force the mist out of the hole. This creates an uneven pressure in side the can, so to compensate, some of the liquid inside evaporates to maintain an even pressure. Now, if a gas is kept at a constant volume, pressure increases in direct correlation with the temperature. That means that if the temperature is very high, the can will build external pressure, if that pressure is to much for the can to hold, the can will explode. If it explodes, shrapnel will explode everywhere, possibly killing you.

October 20, 2014, Science Discovery,

This week was about how a bee builds a honeycomb. In other words, what a honeycomb is made of and why it is shaped the way it is. A honeycomb is made naturally, by the bees. honeycombs are made from nectar, which is transformed into honey.(It turns out that honey is bee vomit, which means that bees puke honey, only after glands in the bee's body change it to honey.) The honey cells are solidified and arranged in a horizontal and hexagonal way. As a hexagon, the comb will be the strongest it can be, and it will hold the most honey possible, [out of a square or a circle].

Science Discovery of October 27, 2014

This week was about weather. I asked myself why weather happens, so I asked everybody and listened to the news. I gathered that there are "fronts" that collide and mix and create atmospheric pressure differences that change whether it is going to be sunny, rainy, windy or snowy. High pressures would mean that you are going to see "sunshine and lollipops and rainbows" (quote from a song). Lower pressures would mean that you'll see rain and snow and all that weather you don't like. Next time you go outside, take a look up, see what the weather's like.