TRANSFORMERS!

Sunday has come once again and that means exciting and new discoveries. After a long weekend of driving around to a tennis tournament and the swamp romp race in Kaneohe, my phone had be depleted of its battery power! OH THE HORROR. As I went to go charge it, the only electrical circuit source I had was the sockets in my house. But I remember Doc! saying that power plants dissipate electricity at super high voltages and even our outlets have high voltages. I didn't want to fry my phone with an energy overload, I merely wanted to charge it with a small amount of voltage. WHAT TO DO!? Then, seemingly out of the junkyard, Optimus Prime DOC! jumped into my backyard. With his huge mechanic, transformer figure, he said in a loud voice, "Have no fear, the Transformers are here!". Thank the Lord!. There was a transformer in my charger like the AllSpark. Like the AllSpark, the outlets in my house contained huge amounts of stored energy/voltage. This transformer was a step down transformer that utilized an alternating current and a ratio of loops to step down the voltage from the outlet to my phone. Finally! I was able to charge my phone without completely destroying it. Thanks to Optimus Prime DOC! and his buddy transformers, I could now continue to communicate on my cellular telephone. Lesson of the week: Transformers are real! They're all around us, protecting us from daily disasters.

Spidey DOC!, Spidey DOC!...does whatever a Spidey DOC! can

During meeting period on Tuesday, I walked into to Seto Hall completely oblivious to the wondrous world of spiders. Dr. Hayashi began her talk by explaining to us how she landed into the profession of being a spider silk researcher. She stressed the fact that throughout her experiences, she went with the flow and found that certain opportunities were presented to her. It was interesting to hear how she allowed her curiosity and desire to lead her life towards something unknown.

When Dr. Hayashi began to talk about spiders and silks I was fascinated at how complex and special the process was. She explored in vivid detail how a spider creates the silks from a duct in their abdomen. She explained that spiders have multiple kinds of silks that they emit from their bodies used for various purposes. I found it interesting that different kinds of silks served different purposes. Besides the known silk used to build webs, some silks were made to protect the mother’s eggs, while others were uses to make droplets. As Dr. Hayashi began to talk about her research, I was intrigued at how silks were very complex, useful materials that can be helpful to humans. I found it particularly interesting when she showed that her research led to the genome of spider silks, which in turn helped her to program tomato and tobacco plants to create the silk. She explained that her research was useful and innovative because of the variety of physical properties that spider silks have. The silks are as durable as Kevlar, biodegradable, far more stretchy than elastin, and is a lightweight material that can take in a lot of force. These ideas made me ponder, along with my fellow peers in the audience, how spider silks could help to provide inventions of the future by utilizing such a strong material. Dr. Hayashi’s journey towards her spider research showed me that there is much in the world that humans have yet to discover. As she says, “with every solution, there are ten more questions that arise”. I no longer view spiders as just household pests, but rather interesting creatures that could contain lots of value to humans.

G-Men Go Big, Pats Go Home

Ahh...another Sunday passed so fleetingly from my grasp. It was mainly spent in front of a big screen TV watching high definition football. Just some ordinary game called Super Bowl XLII, nothing special. The vaunted, undefeated Patriots attempted to go after a perfect season, but the mighty Giants of New York stood in there way. O how sweet is was to see those Pats go down. Not only that, when I was watching the game in the fourth quarter, Eli Manning was driving his team down the field with less than two minutes left to play. After nearly getting sacked Eli was able to throw up the ball high enough for David Tyree to leap into the air and haul it down with his Madden Spectacular Catch Ability. AHH! That's when that weekly epiphany game. How in the world did Eli do that?! Pigskin-DOC! appeared to me out from my bowl of boiled peanuts and shouted loudly "STUPID!". Why of course, Pigskin-DOC! was correct, Eli must've been a natural-born physicist with supreme projectile motion skills. Eli had to throw the ball with enough velocity to travel a distance of about forty yards, not only that he had to battle that ever-apparent force of mg (down). Calculating kinematics quickly in his head, Eli was able to not only escape the grasp of the defensive linemen, but also calculate theta so that the football would reach Tyree at such a height that he could jump and catch it above the not-so great Rodney Harrison. Boy, were they correct to give MVP to Eli Manning. Pigskin-DOC! was correct. MVP doesn't stand for Most Valuble Player, it stands for Most Vaunted Physicist. Ahh. It was good to turn off the television with the sweet taste of victory from a fans point of view. Lesson of the week: Mastery of 2-D Kinematics can land you a starting quarterback job in the NFL.