Brightest_Kidz: A Place 2 Learn

"The time to look is during the dark hours before dawn on Tuesday, August 12th," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "There should be plenty of meteors--perhaps one or two every minute."

Right: A Perseid meteor over Joshua Tree National Park in California, August 11, 2007. Credit: Joe Westerberg. [more]

The source of the shower is Comet Swift-Tuttle. Although the comet is far away, currently located beyond the orbit of Uranus, a trail of debris from the comet stretches all the way back to Earth. Crossing the trail in August, Earth will be pelted by specks of comet dust hitting the atmosphere at 132,000 mph. At that speed, even a flimsy speck of dust makes a vivid streak of light when it disintegrates--a meteor! Because, Swift-Tuttle's meteors streak out of the constellation Perseus, they are called "Perseids."

(Note: In the narrative that follows, all times are local. For instance, 9:00 pm means 9:00 pm in your time zone, where you live. )

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"Earthgrazers are long, slow and colorful; they are among the most beautiful of meteors," says Cooke. He cautions that an hour of watching may net only a few of these at most, but seeing even one can make the whole night worthwhile.

A warm summer night. Bright meteors skipping overhead. And the peak is yet to come. What could be better?

The answer lies halfway up the southern sky: Jupiter and the gibbous Moon converge on August 11th and 12th for a close encounter in the constellation Sagittarius: sky map. It's a grand sight visible even from light-polluted cities.

For a while the beautiful Moon will interfere with the Perseids, lunar glare wiping out all but the brightest meteors. Yin-yang. The situation reverses itself at 2 am on Tuesday morning, August 12th, when the Moon sets and leaves behind a dark sky for the Perseids. The shower will surge into the darkness, peppering the sky with dozens and perhaps hundreds of meteors until dawn.

Above: The eastern sky viewed during the hours before sunrise on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2008.

For maximum effect, "get away from city lights," Cooke advises. The brightest Perseids can be seen from cities, he allows, but the greater flurry of faint, delicate meteors is visible only from the countryside. (Scouts, this is a good time to go camping.)

The Perseids are coming. Enjoy the show!

I've been hearing quite a bit about this new software that allows you to create your own creatures who can evolve into different states. It is called SPORE and it is pretty neat. Once you load the software you have two options - to load a creature or create a creature. Since you will have no creature to load the first time in, you will click the create a creature button. This takes you to a simple interface where you can take various "parts" and start building your creation. You get a wide variety of mouths, eyes, arms and legs, graspers, and other body parts. When you place your cursor over a particular part a menu appears that provides information on that part - for example the "mouth menu" provides the mating call a creature with that particular mouth piece will make (with audio file so you can actually hear the sound), the power of its bite, the song it sings, and if it is a carnivore (in the test version all mouths appear to be carnivore mouths). As you design your beastie it mutates and seems to start agreeing or not agreeing with your design ideas. Finished with the basics you can then change the color. Once you are happy with your creature you can put it in an environment and using various controls, see how it walks, runs, leaps, fights etc. You also get to test its various emotions - how does your creature behave when it is happy or angry?  You can even cause your creature to lay an egg! You can save your creature and create more, take photos and video of your creature and I imagine, once you've played with the program for a while, figure out all sorts of other things to do. I found myself fairly amazed at what my creature could do. I know my kidz are going to love playing this and I'm pretty sure I will be purchasing the full-blown version.

The program itself is not yet available but you can test drive the free trial version and if you like it, pre-order the full blown version which is scheduled for a September release.

Spore Creature Creator requires at least the following:

FOR WINDOWS XP
 * 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
 * 512 MB RAM
 * A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
 * The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
 * At least 190MB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for created creatures.

FOR WINDOWS VISTA
 * 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
 * 768 MB RAM
 * A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 
 * At least 190MB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for created creatures.

FOR MAC OS X
 * Mac OS X 10.5.3 Leopard or higher
 * Intel Core Duo Processor
 * 1024 MB RAM
 * ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100
 * At least 260MB of hard drive space for installation, plus additional space for created creatures.

 This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac).

For computers using built-in graphics chipsets, the game
requires at least:
 * Intel Integrated Chipset, GMA 950 for Windows, GMA X3100 for Mac OS X
 * Dual 2.0GHz CPUs, or 1.7GHz Core 2 Duo, or equivalent.

Recently our blogging platform provider upgraded. So while they work out the bugs and as we learn how to use to the new interface, things may not be as tidy as we like them, but bear with us - eventually it will all sort out and we'll get back to normal. In the meantime.....

Here's a simple and cheap experiment.

Take a hard-boiled egg and crack its shell. Does the egg remind you of anything? The Earth, perhaps? The egg could be seen as a tiny model of the Earth. The thin shell represents the Earth's crust, divided into plates; within the shell is the firm but slippery mantle. Move the pieces of shell around. Notice how the shell buckles in some places and exposes "mantle" in other places. The same thing happens on Earth, but on Earth, this activity results in the formation of mountains, earthquakes, and new ocean floor.

Even though the theory of continental drift was proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, the idea of moving continents wasn't generally accepted until the early 1960s. That's when Wegener's theory was resurrected by Harry Hess, Robert Dietz, Fred Vine, and Drummond Matthews. The ensuing theory, known as plate tectonics, has had a major impact on Earth Sciences. It represents a scientific revolution as significant to geology as relativity was to physics.

This activity lets you manipulate tectonic plates. Pull the plates apart and push them together and watch what happens to the Earth. This is an online interactive activity and requires the Shockwave plug-in. Check it out here: Egg-Tonics.