11 Meaningful Earth Day Activities for Every Grade Level Our students are the future caretakers of our Earth. These fun Earth Day activities help empower kids to have a positive impact on the planet. From recycled art projects to farming simulations, here’s how to roll out the green carpet in your classroom on Earth Day this year. 1. Engineering for Good (6–8) Your middle schoolers know that drinking plenty of H2O is good for them, but they may not realize the impact all those plastic water bottles have on the environment. In this project-based learning unit, they’ll design their own solutions for this issue by using engineering. Bonus: The lessons are aligned with the NGSS Engineering Design Standards. 2. In this art activity, students learn how to take their ideas from paper to reality. Through videos, activities, and lessons, students learn about the importance of recycling. 3. This lesson helps kids understand what could happen to plants and animals if they don’t adapt when their environment changes. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
Timelapse: Landsat Satellite Images of Climate Change, via Google Earth Engine TIME and Space | By Jeffrey Kluger Editors note:On Nov. 29, 2016, Google released a major update expanding the data from 2012 to 2016. Read about the update here. Spacecraft and telescopes are not built by people interested in what’s going on at home. Rockets fly in one direction: up. That changed when NASA created the Landsat program, a series of satellites that would perpetually orbit our planet, looking not out but down. Over here is Dubai, growing from sparse desert metropolis to modern, sprawling megalopolis. It took the folks at Google to upgrade these choppy visual sequences from crude flip-book quality to true video footage. These Timelapse pictures tell the pretty and not-so-pretty story of a finite planet and how its residents are treating it — razing even as we build, destroying even as we preserve. Chapter 1: Satellite Story | By Jeffrey Kluger It’s a safe bet that few people who have grown up in the Google era have ever heard of Stewart Udall. 1 of 20 1 of 14 Full Screen 1 of 13
Rolex Awards for Enterprise - 2014 Rolex Young Laureates Pär Holmgrens hemsida Abrupt glacier melt causes Canadian river to vanish in four days Updated A vast glacier-fed river which flowed from Canada's Yukon territory across Alaska to drain into the Bering Sea has disappeared in just four days, in what scientists believe is the first observed case of "river piracy". High average temperatures in the first three months of 2016 caused a dramatic spike in the amount of meltwater flowing from the Kaskawulsh glacier, carving a deep canyon in the ice and redirecting the flow toward the Alsek River in the south, rather than the north-flowing Slims River. That changed the Slims River from a three-metre-deep, raging torrent to a place where "massive afternoon dust storms occurred almost daily", according to a scientific paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience. "We were really surprised when we got there and there was basically no water in the river," lead author Daniel Shugar said of the Slims River. "We could walk across it and we wouldn't get our shirts wet."
Why Time Flies Have you ever noticed how older people keep mentioning that time keeps moving faster and faster? It's because we perceive time relative to the 'absolute' time we can compare it to... When you are 4 weeks old, a week is a quarter of your life. By the end of your first year, a week is just a fiftieth of your life. By the time you turn 50, a whole year will be a fiftieth of your life. This theory was first put forward by Paul Janet in 1897. Like many things, this will require some patience to get through. But in the end it'll be over faster than you thought or hoped it would be. Albert Einstein said about the perception of time, that 'an hour spent in the company of pretty girls passes more quickly than an hour spent in a dentist chair'. Waiting 24 days for Christmas at age 5 feels like waiting a year at age 54. According to this theory, assuming you'll become 100 years old, half of your perceived life is over at age 7. Did you notice how much faster the 10th year scrolled by than the first?
Rally Interactive What the World Would Look Like if All the Ice Melted This story appears in the September 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine. The maps here show the world as it is now, with only one difference: All the ice on land has melted and drained into the sea, raising it 216 feet and creating new shorelines for our continents and inland seas. There are more than five million cubic miles of ice on Earth, and some scientists say it would take more than 5,000 years to melt it all. If we continue adding carbon to the atmosphere, we’ll very likely create an ice-free planet, with an average temperature of perhaps 80 degrees Fahrenheit instead of the current 58. North America The entire Atlantic seaboard would vanish, along with Florida and the Gulf Coast. South America The Amazon Basin in the north and the Paraguay River Basin in the south would become Atlantic inlets, wiping out Buenos Aires, coastal Uruguay, and most of Paraguay. Africa Europe London? Asia Australia Antarctica
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