This Week on Physics
We will complete assignment 3 and take a quiz over goal set 3 as announced. We will also complete the Law of Conservation of Mechanical Energy Experiment. When announced please take notes on PODCAST 4: Power. (This will be your favorite podcast of the year for reasons that will become apparent when you watch it.) We will complete the very brief assignment 4 and will then take the test over unit 4. Note: Your lab report for the Work-Energy Theorem Experiment is due as described in last week’s blog. (Note that 8th period’s due date is advanced to Wednesday.)

Cool Science of the Week
We’ve been discussing conservation of mechanical energy. A type of energy we don’t cover in class deals with the rotational motion of objects. This is called rotational kinetic energy, and a system’s initial mechanical energy can convert to rotational kinetic energy as well as straight-line (“translational”) kinetic energy. Engineers have put this concept to good use by creating rolling traffic barriers that take the translational kinetic energy of vehicles and convert some of it to the rotational kinetic energy of rolling barrels inside of the barriers. This helps slow the cars down more than rigid barriers. Pretty cool use of simple physics!

Welcome to our first five-day week of school since the week of December 11! (wow!) We will have guest speakers from the TEE program on Friday, so if you have an interest in TEE, be sure to make an extra effort to be in class on that day.

This Week in Physics

• We will discuss our results from the Work-Energy Theorem Experiment. The lab report will be due next week on Tuesday, January 30 at the start of your class period. You must share your Google document with me at my Gmail address, not my school email address. You must then upload your document to TurnItIn.com by 3:00 p.m. on the due date. The class ID is 16214937, and the password to join the class is Tesla.
• We will go over assignment 2 and will take a quiz over goal set 2 as announced. When announced please take notes on PODCAST 3: The Law of Conservation of Mechanical Energy.  We will do assignment 3 and will take a quiz over goal set 3 as announced (most likely next week.)

Cool Science of the Week
Who doesn’t love adorable sea turtles? They’re precious, right? Almost every species of sea turtle is also endangered, and their plight has hit a serious hurdle by way of climate change. The sex of a hatchling sea turtle depends on the temperature of the sand during incubation, and with rising global temperatures, 99% of the recently hatched green sea turtles are female! Obviously that’s a big problem for future generations of sea turtles. Sad!

“Not cool, dude!”

This will be a four-day week as we pause on Monday to pay respects to the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This Week on Physics
For Tuesday please complete Unit 4 assignment 1 and goal set 1. (Both are due at the start of class on Tuesday.) We will take a quiz over goal set 1 on Wednesday or Thursday, as announced in class. For Wednesday please take notes on PODCAST 2: Work-Energy Theorem. We will go over this and will then do assignment 2. Time-permitting we will perform the Work-Energy Theorem experiment. (If we don’t get to it this week, we will do it next week.)

Cool Science of the Week
I don’t know about you, but when it’s as cold outside as it’s been lately, I love to comfort myself with a nice, sugary, hot beverage. One chilly day in 2016 an engineer poured himself a latte and discovered a strange phenomenon: The latte formed striped layers! Being an engineer he used his scientific resources to figure out why and ultimately discovered that lattes can undergo a process that involves both fluid mechanics and thermodynamics, a process called double-diffusive convection. This process is similar to the one that creates the weird hot/cold layers that freak you out when you swim in Lake Erie!

Well, that was a lot of snow days! Obviously our schedule has shifted forward.

This Week in Physics
For WEDNESDAY please take notes on any parts of PODCAST 1: Introduction to Mechanical Energy that we didn’t cover in class on Tuesday (our first day back.) We will then do assignment 1 and, time permitting, take a quiz over goal set 1.

Happy New Year and welcome to the start of third quarter! (Can you believe it?)

This Week in Physics
For THURSDAY please take notes on any parts of PODCAST 1: Introduction to Mechanical Energy that we didn’t cover in class on Wednesday (our first day back.) We will then do assignment 1 and, time permitting, take a quiz over goal set 1.

Cool Science of the Week
Check out Time Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2017, including a better football helmet, a real-life Wonka-vator, a hijab for women athletes, Halo Top ice cream, AND the ubiquitous FIDGET SPINNER!