The World Around Us

The World

Around Us

2

Dear Readers, This issue of The World Around Us was written to inform people about a few of the various fields of science.

It spans from what keeps our body alive to out of this world information about the stars and space. The great variety of science makes it practically impossible to cover all of it, but we supplied a wide range of topics for you to learn about.

There’s an interesting branch of science for everyone out there, and we hope we can help you find yours.

Sincerely,

Photo By: Suhun Kim

Alia, Edward, Beck, and Corvina

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Letters

From

ALIA

BECK Alia is a freshman who was born and raised in Austin, Texas. In her free time she enjoys watching Netflix, playing with her dog, and reading. She works hard in school and hopes to pursue a career in science and medicine. She wanted to use this magazine as a chance to pursue her interests in the different fields of science. Recently, she’s become more interested in the brain and how it works with the rest of the body.

Her fascination of the work neuroscientists do and the recent breakthroughs that have been made led her to select neuroscience as her feature article topic.

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Beck is a freshman at LASA whose strongest subjects have always been math and science. Outside of school, he spends his free time mostly playing video games, listening to music, and running with his dog.

Ever since 6th grade, chemistry has fascinated him and he has always been looking to learn more about it. So, when he and his group of science enthusiasts had to choose a topic to write about, Beck naturally called chemistry for his topic. Interviewing three chemistry professors was a great opportunity to learn more about this branch of science.

The

Editors

CORVINA

EDWARD Corvina is a freshman, just like all the other Ezine students, who loves volleyball, Netflix, and always has a book on her person. During a volleyball game she always ends up diving to the floor. She will read anything that gets you on the edge of her seat. Her group was bunched together because, at some point, they all picked science as their topic. She chose astronomy as her feature article topic, because her grandparents are big star nerds and her family often lays in the yard (or on a roof) and watches the stars.

Edward is a freshman and aspires to work in the field of biology when he grows up. In his free time, he enjoys exploring the world around him through textbooks and also enjoys staying up late watching animated TV shows on his laptop. He hopes to attend a top college after high school. He enjoys the sciences since there are many diverse fields with practical applications within each branch. With this diversity, everyone was able to select their own branch to focus on, with him specializing in cell biology and more specifically, how cells use energy due to his previous extensive readings on the topic.

Photos By: Edward Hao, Beck Sonniksen

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Inside the Core of the World

I Photo courtesy of Unsplash

Photo courtesy of Unsplash

II Photo courtesy of Pixabay

III Photo courtesy of Pixabay Photo courtesy of Pixabay

I

Introduction, Dear Readers. Letters From The Editors

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II

Edward on Cell Biology: Author of Energy and Life and creator of Anatomy of A Cell 8 - 13

III

Alia on Neuroscience: Author of Mental Exploration and creator of Progress Over The Years and Mind Blown.

14 - 21

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IV Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

V Photo courtesy of The Colossal Shop

VI Photo courtesy of Pixabay

on Chemistry: Author of The World of Chemistry and creator of IV Beck The Significance of Graphite

V

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Corvina on Astronomy: Author of The People Behind Space and creator of Space Time

28 - 33

VI Earth

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Dr. Appling’s lab, used to study metabolism in cells.

Photo by Edward Hao.

Energy and life

By Edward Hao 8

ells make up every structure of the human body, from the head to the toes. Cells perform a variety of functions, such as processing food and converting it into energy. The energy that drives these processes is important to every aspect of life, and when there are mutations in that pathway, it can result in disastrous consequences.

Energy is the basis of life. Without it, nothing would be able to survive. That is why the reactions that drive the processes that produce energy are critical to life.

The chemicals that cells use to drive their daily workings do not exist in nature freely. Rather, they must synthesize it from their food. This process, called metabolism, is present in every living thing on Earth. Complex interactions in the mitochondria, a cellular structure responsible for the production of energy in cells, allow organisms to produce vast amounts of energy that power their day to day life.

The molecule that the mitochondria generate is adenosine triphosphate (ATP). This molecule drives the complex interactions between the cell and its environment, and when there is not enough of it or too much of it, it can have unintended consequences that have systemic effects, such as the improper development of a fetus, or a potential tumor.

Compartmentalization, the division of something into sections or categories, is always present in the cell to increase efficiency and create distinct regions where different processes occur within the cell. The mitochondria is one example of compartmentalization, with two membranes

separating it from everything else.

“The mitochondria is a separate compartment from the cytoplasm, which is a separate compartment from the nucleus. And it’s a way to organize metabolism, to increase the efficiency and the control what would otherwise be a very complicated mess,” Dean Appling, Ph.D., a researcher and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said. By doing this, the cell is able to categorize the different processes and partition them among the cell’s separate compartments to ensure that there is maximum efficiency.

One such pathway that occurs in the mitochondria is a pathway that is mediated by folic acid. Folic acid, more commonly known as vitamin b-9, is one such molecule which participates in the synthesis of almost everything in the cell that requires carbon, such as the amino acids that are used to build proteins.

“It turns out that mitochondrial folic acid metabolism

“Mitochondrial folic acid metabolism is central to the entire cell, not just mitochondrial processes” — Dean Appling is central to the entire cell, not just mitochondrial processes but cytoplasm processes and nuclear processes as well,” Appling said. Folic acid is a carrier for carbon atoms and it delivers the atoms to various things that are being synthesized, so that the cells are able to build all of the required products for the continuation of the processes that occur within all of the compartments within the cell.

For all of these processes to occur at once, the cell must spend a great amount of time generating the energy to power these reactions. The mitochondria are responsible for the majority of the energy produced within the cell.

“Your biology textbook probably talks about the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. That’s an old term that comes from the fact that, in the presence of oxygen, mitochondria generate most of the ATP that cells use to do pretty much everything,” Appling said. The amount of ATP that is generated from the mitochondria allows the cell to

drive the reactions that maintain its function while allowing for all of the metabolic reactions that happen within the cell to take place, especially the folic acid pathway.

When a person does not have enough folic acid, there can be disastrous consequences. In humans, folic acid is used for optimal brain and nerve function. However, there are potentially worse complications that can occur. “If a mother-

“The specific kind of birth defect that’s related to folic acid are called neural tube defects” — Dean Appling to-be either doesn’t have enough folic acid for her diet or she has some sort of a genetic or other disease problem that interferes with the use of folic acid, she’s going to be at high risk of having a baby with a birth defect and the specific kind of birth defect that’s related to folic acid are called neural tube defects,” Appling said.

Babies that have this particular neural tube defect are usually not born, and if they are, they have a rare condition called spina bifida, where the spinal cord is split open.

Various other pathways also occur in different compartments, such as the nucleus and the cytoplasm.

However, the molecules within the cell that convert the energy from ATP into actual work are proteins. “Proteins are actually responsible for basically all functions that stay within the cells life, they are responsible for everything from making the cell move to the creating energy for the cell so any process that requires energy,” Can Cenik, Ph.D., a researcher and professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said. There are many different types of proteins that are found within the cell, but they are all made from the same process.

The central dogma of biology states that DNA forms RNA, which forms proteins. A structure called a ribosome, which is found in the cytoplasm, helps to synthesize proteins, which are made from amino acids.

“What the ribosome does is it basically reads this message and three bases, three letters at a time, to convert the message to proteins,” Cenik said. In order to make sure that the cell has just the right amount of proteins available to 9 maintain equilibrium, there are many

different regulatory aspects of this conversion of DNA to RNA, even within the RNA message itself to control protein synthesis.

Lack of control in the regulatory aspect of this part of metabolism can result in a lot of unintended consequences that lead to uncontrolled cell growth, or cancer, as defined by Ashley Henneghan, Ph.D., a researcher and professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“There is a specific treatment that’s commonly used that actually targets translational machinery and components but there are also many others that are currently being tested.

So far results have been mixed but given that this is such a common feature of cancer cells, it’s definitely an area of active investigation,” Cenik said.

In all cells, there exists a common goal: survival and reproduction. Through these common goals, a common pathway has emerged from it: a remarkable feature through the 3.5 billion years that life has existed.

“So far results have been mixed but given that this is such a common feature of cancer cells, it’s definitely an area of active investigation” — Can Cenik

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A fume hood is part of Dr. Cenik’s lab to ensure dangerous chemicals do not harm the researchers.

Photo by Edward Hao.

Dr. Cenik’s lab is used to study various RNA sequences to determine their link to the proteins the sequence codes for.

Photo by Edward Hao.

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ANATOMY OF A CELL Edward Hao

Rough ER

Produces proteins.

A diagram of a typical animal cell is shown, with major parts labeled with their function.

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Nucleus

Duplicates DNA.

Smooth ER

Produces lipids.

Golgi Bodies

Transports molecules.

Mitochondria Produces ATP.

Sources:

• leavingbio.net/cell-structure • biology4kids.com/files/cell_er.html • Dean Appling, University of Texas at Austin

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Neuro Breakthroughs in our

By Alia Arya Lifetime young child travels thousands of miles for the chance of a lifetime. A worldrenowned hospital awaits his arrival. A recent discovery has been made in the disease chiseling away at his brain. A couple of miles away, the boy’s heroes who developed this cure are still working tirelessly to eradicate more diseases and save more lives. Their goal is to end the suffering of people from all over the world and give them a chance at a long and healthy life.

These heroes are neuroscientists. Neuroscience is a type of research that studies the brain and nervous system.

Neuroscience research has exploded in popularity in the past decade resulting in the discoveries of new life-saving treatments. All areas of health are important, but recently other fields of study have lagged behind, while neuroscience has made astonishing leaps. These leaps include discoveries of how a healthy brain works and unraveling how diseases and disorders affect the function in what would otherwise be a normal brain. This field also requires a lot of collaboration to

Neuroscience Lab at Dell Medical School that’s used to research a variety of aspects of the brain.

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Photo by Alia Arya

succeed and create successful treatments, but the cures can’t be created without the people.

Current neuroscientists were all drawn to the field for different reasons. “If you make a big discovery, you can help far more people with the discovery than you could with being a doctor,” Jonathan Pierce, Ph. D. and professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas, said. Pierce added that it is more interesting to be in research, so he could be at the forefront of knowledge.

While Pierce focuses on research, Dr. Alex Bruchey creates clinical procedures at Lumos Pharma to test treatments for rare diseases. Rare diseases affect less than one in 20 thousand people, but put together, one in seven people actually have a rare disease. Bruchey said part of what brought her to neuroscience was that it’s a multidisciplinary area with lots of fields involved.

For Andrew Dunn, Ph. D. and biomedical engineering professor at the university of Texas, neuroscience’s range of topics comes from the fact that the application of his techniques are in neuroscience. Collaboration with neurologists and neuroscientists is essential, Dunn said. He added that he needs their expertise to help generate questions and give him feedback on his tools.

“We’ve got clinicians who keep it all very practical,” Dr. David Paydarfar, chair of neurology and director of neurosciences

“Neuroscience is the embodiment of hope for people who have these conditions.”

— Paydarfar

at Dell Medical School, said. Collaboration ensures that everyone’s on the same page and addressing the most pressing patient concerns.

Dr. David Paydarfar in his office.

Photo by Alia Arya

Communication also occurs between scientific groups and the people that they’re trying to help. Paydarfar said that his team often works with community-based groups that are interested in their work, and it gives them hope. Non-neuroscientists also benefit from these collaborations.

Dunn developed a technique to view images of blood flow in the brain and that technique is being used to image blood flow in places like the eye and skin. Dunn said that this technique has been applied to different things such as studying how paint dries and the dynamics of shaving cream.

Neuroscientists do great work that benefits all groups of people, but they face constant challenges. Pierce said that getting enough money for research has been difficult recently and that researchers had a 5 percent chance of receiving a grant. “If we run out of money, then we can’t do anything,” Pierce said.

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“Sometimes one of the big challenges is just finding time to just really understand a problem,” Bruchey said. She adds that finding patients willing to travel for her research can sometimes be difficult, since so few people have rare diseases.

The challenges are often hard to overcome, but it does supply them with new questions. “We don’t even know some of the simple things. When you write a sentence, exactly how does that happen? How do you get a thought? How do you get a new thought in your head?”

Paydarfar said.

“The biggest challenge is watching people with these conditions and Art by Alia Arya not being able to do anything about it.

So the biggest challenge is gaining the expertise, knowing that someone has a horrible condition, but that we don’t yet know how to treat it,” Paydarfar said. He

“Well, perhaps I’m biased, but I see understanding the brain as one of the most important areas in healthcare in the next decade.”

— Dunn

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adds that it’s not only a challenge, but a motivation.

Even when challenges are overcome, many setbacks are still faced. “The nature of research is overcoming setbacks,” Dunn said.

“We didn’t realize it until, like a year or so ago, that the gene we added into the worm had some spelling errors in it,” Pierce said. Even simple mistakes can cause experiments to be restarted.

Pierce works with worms called Caenorhabditis elegans, and their neurons die when given Alzheimer’s, so his team is working to find out how to stop the death of these neurons.

Sometimes setbacks can turn

A brain.

into great successes. Paydarfar was working in a lab and worked on a simple experiment for six months “that failed every time, every single time, every day.”

He was experimenting on the oscillating nerve that drives the diaphragm to breathe in a mouse. Paydarfar said that after six months of the oscillator randomly turning on and off, he noticed that when a small water heater turned on, the oscillator would turn on. “Of course that was my biggest discovery,” Paydarfar said.

He was trying to figure out what caused sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). SIDS is where a healthy, sleeping

baby suddenly stops breathing and dies. Paydarfar discovered that a “very tiny mechanical stimulation to the receptors in the skin will cause this little oscillator in the brain to stay on.”

Paydarfar said that this discovery led to 20 years of research and a clinical trial. This resulted in a woofer and subwoofer, two types of speakers that produce low frequency sounds, being put into infant’s beds that makes the breathing center in the brain breathe. “I’m not unique and I think that many people have said stories like

“You put something in your mouth and you chew it and then you swallow it, there are literally hundreds of muscles that have to coordinate just right.”

— Paydarfar

this, that you face these setbacks that lead to more questions and more questions and then you have a breakthrough,” Paydarfar said.

Neuroscientists hope to better the world through their research. “I would like to see the diseases we are working on currently, which have no treatment, become something that can be alleviated, if not Photo courtesy of Pixabay completely rescued and treated, so that these children who have these diseases can have a normal and healthy life,” Bruchey said.

Over the past decade, neuroscience has grown from minimal to multiple breakthroughs. “I think neuroscience is one of the most interesting areas of biology nowadays. There’s just so much being discovered and when you pick up your textbook, there are parts that are going to be wrong in 10 years probably,” Pierce said. Neuroscience has made astounding leaps, but there are still more discoveries to be found.

Ten years ago, people all over the world were dying from deadly neurological diseases, and now they can come to the hospital for a lifesaving treatment. The heroes, neuroscientists, are still working diligently to create and improve remedies for everyone.

A machine from a lab at Dell Medical that holds the frog during dissections.

Photo by Alia Arya

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The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke established

1950

1953

Rapid Eye Movement (REM) is measured during sleep by Eugene Asermslai and Nathanial Kleitman

1956 1961

The Illuminating History of Neuroscience

1965 1968 1969 1974 1974 1992 1993 2005

By: Alia Arya

2013 2018

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Progress Over the Years 1950 - Today

Ultrasound is used to examine the brain by L. Leksell

Parkinons disease is successfully treated by the medicine Levadopa The gate control theory of pain is published by Ronald Melzack and Patrick D. Wall The National Eye Institute is established The Society for Neuroscience is formed The First NMR picture of mouse is taken The PET scan is invented which provides visual information about brain activity Functioning magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is used to map human brain activity The gene responsible for Huntington’s disease is identified The optogenetics technique is created by a team of Stanford scientists The BRAIN Initiative is started CRISPR is used to map every gene in a mouse brain

Sources:  https://singularityhub.com  https://brainworldmagazine.com  https://faculty.washington.edu

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Having a dream is a sign that the brain is working during sleep

The can

Successful brain surgeries go back to the stone age

The human brain begins to lose abilities by its early 20s

MIND B

The brain contains about 86 billion neurons

Explosive In Yo 2 percent of a human’s body weight comes from the brain

By

Short term lasts fro 20

e brain itself n’t feel pain

Humans don’t just use 10 percent of their brain, they use all of it

Almost half of a child’s energy goes to their brain

BLOWN

nformation About our Brain

By: Alia Arya

m memory usuallly om 20-30 seconds

Modern human brains are smaller than their ancestors

When awake, the human brain has enough energy to power a small lightbulb

Brain storage capacity is basically unlimited Sources:  https://www.rd.com  https://www.healthline.com  https://www.livescience.com

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v

The World of Chemistry

by Beck Sonniksen

hen one pictures chemistry, one image likely comes to mind: someone in a lab coat with vials of strange substances, who pours two together and gets an explosion. And in a way, this wouldn’t be inaccurate. But chemistry can’t be narrowed down to one specific field. New fields are being opened and new discoveries are being made all the time.

Chemistry, just like biology or physics, is a broad discipline. It concerns everything about the building blocks of the world around us. Though it may seem trivial how these building blocks, atoms and molecules, interact, there are infinitely many intricacies in the inner workings of these interactions, some that we may never learn about. Fields in chemistry deal with all types of situations: Some are broad, encompassing all kinds of chemical reactions, whereas others relate to extremely specific substances and situations.

Test tubes and graduated cylinders. Photo Courtesy of Pexels

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At chemistry’s broadest, this vision of combining substances and seeing what happens isn’t entirely inaccurate. For Ruth Shear, her job in the past has been primarily concerned with this combination of substances and molecules.

“What I was interested in is having a molecule of A, plus a molecule of B, put them together, how do they make molecule AB,” Ruth Shear, lecturer in chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, said. Shear says that when researching what she referred to as chemical physics, her job was finding out not just that A and B made AB, but also all the other things they could make, and how they made them.

Shear also talks about a field she’s learned about from another professor, a field called microdroplet chemistry. This recently introduced field deals with chemistry inside extremely small, micrometer large droplets of water.

“He’s discovering that reactions inside one of those droplets happen much much faster than they happen in regular situations,” Shear said. Some of these reactions not only happen faster in droplets, but wouldn’t even happen otherwise without a catalyst, another substance used to help start a reaction.

Ruth Shear, lecturer in chemistry at UT Austin. Photo courtesy of UT

“If chemical chemistry is happening much faster inside or differently inside those water droplets, then that can skew a lot of our climate change calculations from atmospheric modeling,” Shear explains. Discoveries in this field have the potential to affect climate change models, since the atmosphere consists of many of these microdroplets of water.

“He’s having trouble publishing it because it’s so unbelievable,” Shear said.

Lastly, Shear brings up a substance that’s been gaining traction recently, both in science and in the eyes of the public: graphene.

“One of the Nobel Prizes fairly recently was for graphene, which is a different form of carbon, very thin sheets of carbons arranged in hexagons, but just a single molecule thick,” Shear says. Graphene has many unexpected properties, such as its conductivity and strength, and is an example of one field of chemistry that’s gone especially mainstream.

The technology that surrounds us, that we interact with daily, can also be examined with chemistry.

“This phone has a lithium ion battery in it that’s based on chemistry, electrochemistry as a matter of fact,” Paul McCord, a lecturer at UT, said. Electrochemistry was McCord’s area of expertise before he began teaching. This branch of chemistry deals with how electricity interacts with and alters chemicals.

But for some, chemistry isn’t necessarily about hands-on experiments; for a small group of chemists, computers and models are how they get what they need.

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“We use computers to calculate the mechanism of reaction how reactions take place,” Graeme Henkelman, professor and researcher at UT, said. As Henkelman said, this field of computational chemistry has become much more popular in recent years, as computing power has improved exponentially since when he started in the late 90s.

Henkelman’s computational research is primarily concerned with energy and energy storage, such as batteries. He looks to use computer models to improve aspects of batteries such as capacity and cost.

Unfortunately, however, his research in this area hasn’t necessarily been fruitful.

“No battery material or catalyst that’s commercial has ever been designed on Graeme Henkelman, researcher in computational chemistry at UT Austin. Photo courtesy of Graeme Henkelman a computer,” he said. The interest in the field of computational chemistry is still mostly in the potential behind the computers that power their to be a doctor and if you’re a doctor that you do a science degree,” Shear said. She said that many students come to the science program out of parental pressure to be a doctor, but can’t handle it.

Due to issues like this, Shear helped start the Freshman Research Initiative, where students can experience what actual scientific work is like before going into science. “We wanted to give students, freshmen, research experience so that you come to university and you’re all excited about what you’ve chosen to do,” Shear said. Whereas normally a student is expected to do what Shear describes as cookie-cutter experiments, where you do the same experiment and get the same results as everyone else, in the Freshman Research Initiative, students perform their own experiments.

According to Shear, the percentage of students who stay in the science program at UT has now risen from 26 percent 14 years ago, to 80 percent this past year.

research.

One issue, however, is that to get into these fields, people need to be introduced to them, which often falls on the shoulders of universities.

“Huge numbers of people go to science and drop out, the obvious thought is medicine, everyone assumes you’re going

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Even with all that we know about chemistry and how our world works as a whole, it has been shown time and time again that there are always new things to be discovered and new branches and fields of chemistry to be opened.

Test tubes and beakers.

Photo courtesy of Pexels

Test tubes and beakers.

Photo courtesy of Pexels

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The Graphite

by Beck Sonniksen

Introduction Graphene was theorized about for decades, but only isolated in 2004. This repetitive, less-than-paper thin material was found to have a number of unexpected and useful properties.

Graphite is the single strongest substance currently available, at over 100 times stronger than steel

Being extremely absorbent, graphene can absorb up to 900 times its weight in oil.

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The impermeab of graphene lead to better s for minute pa

Graphene is exceptionally elastic, being able to stretch to 20% its size.

Graphite is the thinnest material, only an atom thick.

Graphene absorbs nearly all light that hits it, making it a possible candidate for solar panels.

Despite being made purely of carbon, grapene is one of the strongest known conductors.

bility could sensors articles.

Though it is still high quality graphite, the ability to produce graphite is constantly improving.

Sources: Will Nicol, “Stronger than Steel, Thinner than Paper, Graphene Could Be the Future of Tech.” Digital Trends.

Graphene, Wikipedia Jesus de la Fuente, “Graphene - What is it?”, Graphenea

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The People Behind Space

By Corvina Williams

hen the blanket of night fills the sky and the artificial lights go out as the world sleeps, another world is shown.

Different lights are shown in colors ranging from orange gold, pearlescent blue, and then the distant lavender mist. This is space. The worlds beyond the reach of human capability. Take a closer look and see undiscovered planets as well as cargo ships transporting people and items to the international spaceship.

W

Astronomy is the study of stars, space and planets; while astrology is the study of how it affects personalities or characteristics of people on Earth. For example, astrology studies how zodiac or astrological signs affect different people, while astronomy studies if there is water on Mars.

Professors, scientists and astronomers alike have been opening new horizons to share with the world. As of right now one of those horizons is finding a second earth. “One of the missions of NASA is to help sustain human life because if something were to go wrong on Earth, we might need to look for somewhere else to live,” Ryan East, a flight controller at NASA, said.

“So I’m kinda like a mom.”

— Ryan East His job is getting the cargo ships loaded with objects and tools that are needed on the International Space Station. SpaceX is the company he works with that supplies those cargo ships.

“I am a part of that team and I am more of an expert on their vehicle, their spaceship,” East said.

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There are other companies with cargo ships all around the world, but if some of the teams were to switch vehicles, the cargo ships wouldn’t be stocked to full capacity. This would cause some of the items and tools not to reach the space station.

East acts as the mother of all the astronauts on the International Space Station. When the astronauts can’t find anything, and there is nothing in his database for this item or object, East will tell them to backtrack and retrace their steps.

If they find an object or tool just floating around they call East and figures out where it belongs from searching up the barcode within his database. “Things get lost and we will find them like a year later,” East said. When this happens he calls the flight instructor and asks for the barcode. After looking through his database for the item he will tell them it goes in a certain cubby hole or locker.

“Everyday I play Tetris. I have this box and it’s so many inches wide, long, and tall; and I need to fit it in this space.”

— Ryan East In addition to all of the other tasks he has to accomplish, East also keeps track of and creates the astronauts schedule with his team. Their schedules covers everything they do, “You can look at the schedule and it tells you like when they get up, it

but within a bowl it cools faster because it has more surface area and it takes less time to start the formation of stars. And with the formation of stars comes their explosion which leads to the chemicals that creates metals and the metals create planets.” explained Andreia Castillo, an undergrad in Astronomy at U.T. This means that we are made of the same chemicals as stars.

A NASA satellite orbiting the Earth. Photo courtesy of Pexels

tells you what science experiments they are going to be doing, it tells you what maintenance activities that they are going to be doing because things break on the space station so they have to fix them,” East explained.

“Helium and hydrogen are the OG’s.”

— Andreia Castillo

Each individual team that works with the astronauts takes up a certain amount of time so they always have to be in communication with the other groups. If the stowage team working with East, has an activity that takes around two hours and they only have 30 minutes, the schedule needs to be rearranged.

NASA is a big player in the field of astronomy. They fund all of the dark matter research that is being done and they were the first government organization to land people on the moon. Without the people who work at NASA, the world would be ignorant to the wonders of space.

Professors also influence the knowledge of the world.

Professors, along with scientists, have found the way the universe formed and the reason why it keeps growing. After the Big Bang “the universe expanded like liquid cooling in a cup or a bowl. Within the cup the liquid will cool slower and take longer to be able to get to the point of star formation,

Ryan East is working in NASA’s mission control.

Photo courtesy of NASA/ Markowitz

Andreia Castillo is teaching one of her Classes at U.T. Austin.

Photo courtesy of Andreia Castillo

An astronaut taking a selfie outside of the International Space Station.

Photo courtesy of NASA

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Considering everything we know about in space, there isn’t much known about dark matter. Although, we have a lot of information about what it doesn’t do. Scientists can measure dark matter because it refracts light. “If a ball was to lay on a cloth the cloth would dip and the depth of the dip would vary with the density of the dark matter,” Castillo said, because dark matter interacts with pretty much nothing, there isn’t a known way, to “see” it, yet.

“We also know that it clumps upon all scales from ~100 million an times the mass of the sun” — Mike Boylan-Kolchin Mike Boylan-Kolchin, a professor at The University of Texas at Austin, said he strongly supports NASA. “The only thing that would be better is if there was a satellite that was specifically designed to study dark matter’s gravitational influence. People have been thinking about this a bit, and it would be great.” He said a satellite that is designed to trace the gravitational influence is important. “It has gravitational mass that affects other bodies.

We can make good guesses about other ways that dark matter might interact, but they are just guesses right now,” Boylan-Kolchin explained.

Studying the gravitational influence of dark matter is the best proven way to understand its nuts and bolts.

A black hole. Photo courtesy of Pixabay

The “sister galaxy” of the Milky Way Galaxy: Andromeda (Image by Skeeze on Pixabay)

Before the sun explodes at the end of its life as a star “our sister galaxy, Andromeda, will collide with us,” Castillo said. Andromeda, the closest galaxy, is slowly inching her way towards the Milky Way galaxy. When she collides with the Milky Way, not much is supposed to change in the Milky Way galaxy. The gravitational force of the collision may pull stars from the solar system, but because there will be a collision of gases there will be a lot of new stars to discover and name.

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A Mars rover investigating the extraterrestrial terrain.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

A design of travel through the solar system with the planets and their moons (Image by The Colossal Shop)

The way Andromeda will make contact is similar to rubbing silk against another pieces of silk fabric. Static will be created, but there won’t be any major changes, such as, the loss of a planet. “It is crazily amazing how there’s a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way and two hundred billion stars in Andromeda and none of the stars from these galaxies are going to collide because space is made mostly of space.”

Andreia said.

The project that is sending a group of people to live on Mars and never come back is still going full speed. “All these big innovations and steps in science and technology need incremental progress that build on each other,” Castill theorizes. The idea of sending people to Mars without further research being done is a little premature because we don’t know much about how Mars will affect the human body and we only just started growing lettuce on a planet with no oxygen.

Throughout this galaxy, there is still much to be discovered and learned. All that can be done at this time is to take a moment to watch everything unfold in the sky above.

Watching the cargo ships unload all of the objects and tools that astronauts need, teaching others and documenting new, galaxy colliding discoveries to broaden the horizons of humans on Earth.

Professor Boylan-Kolchin on a vacation in Sydney, Australia.

Photo courtesy of Mike Boylan-Kolchin

A picture of Earth from a window on the International Space Station.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

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Space Time

By Corvina Williams

13.8 billion years ago

~280 B.C.

The Big Bang; start of the universe.

Aristarchus suggests the earth revolves around the sun

1609

Galileo uses telescope and discovers four Jovian moons, the milky way galaxy, and moon craters.

1969

1659

~130

Hipparchus dele accurate star map an with over 850 of the

1781

Christan Huygans discovers Satern’s rings and Titan, the fourth satilite of Saturn.

Uranus is discovered.

1990

Canon

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Neil Armdtrong and Edwin Aldrin are the first people to walk on the moon.

First photograph of the entire Solar System.

New evi

This is a timeline of the most important things that helped the evolution of astronomy. This timeline begins 13.8 million years ago, so let’s take a trip through Space Time.

0 B.C

1120 A.D.

evops the first nd star catalogue e brightest stars

1609

The first observatiory is built in Egupt, but is destroyed in 1125

1930

1957

Pluto is discovered.

Sputnik is launched a year before Explorer l.

2000

idance of water on Mars

A Dutch invents the first telescope

1961

Yuri Gagarian is the first man in space.

2015

Lettuce is the first food grown in space.

Sources -Astonomy Timeline; Windows To the Universe -Big History Project: The Universe -Space ExporlationTimeline; Tutorials Point

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Photo courtesy of Pixabay

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