Rutter,+Kyle

I think that the article about how you can recreate the wonders of Harry Potter showed me that it was possible to make some cool things like green fire but also showed that I will never be able to ride a broomstick to school or throw purple fire balls. Most of the article focused on how different chemicals could react when lit to make a different color flame than your average campfire. I may have had to high of hopes of the article but all I really got out of it was that with proper chemicals and safety equipment I could maybe have a shower of green sparks but after that I kind of felt as if it was just repeating the same thing with different colors of fire. Kyle, Did you pick three things? Seems a bit general. 4 stars. MW

Kyle, I would also like to ride a broomstick to school, but seeing as this is nowhere near possible we could find some trouble. It would be so cool to be able to recreate some of these in the lab although for many of them you need to be outdoors. I also found it interesting that scientists studied and knew that certain chemicals could make colorful fires. I also found that this article repeated many of the same topics, just in a new color or with a different chemical. All in all, most of the readers of this article found the same occurrences. -Kelly

Kilogram

The official kilogram is losing weight. I guess dieting is bad if you're the official measurement of the world. I was surprised that they had seven official measurements in the SI. I thought that the watt or volt would be for energy not the ampere. I think that their are advantages and disadvantages of having a measure based on a molecule and not an actual object. The disadvantage would be that it's harder to picture how much molecules of a particular atom weigh instead of a real item. The advantage would be that it would always be correct and not change over time. The most important point of the article is that we will soon have a new official kilogram and the old one will be discarded.

Kyle, Looks good. 5 stars! MW

Crude Oil I thought that only one kind of oil or gasoline from crude oil so I thought it was interesting that a large variety of molecules are in crude oil and they are all used for different things. I also learned that the oil industry doesn't have a special process to separate crude oil that we cannot try, it turns out they do the same thing we could do just on a much bigger scale. I also didn't know that natural gas could be gotten out of crude oil and the variety of oils I only thought there was a few kinds, like gas, diesel or heating oil, that could be found together.

Kyle, Actually very little natural gas comes from crude oil. There are natural gas pockets in the earth that are tapped. Mostly liquid fuels come from crude oil. 5 stars. MW

Motion DEtectors Some of the things about motion detectors that i knew were that there were three kinds but I wasn't sure how they all worked. The kind that sent out waves was tested on mythbusters to see how to beat it, they didn't. I didn't know how it sent out waves or how it could tell if they hit something. The light be that sets of the alarm if i nterupted is the most common in the movies so I knew they were out there. I didn't think about there needing to be a second censor to make sure the light wasn't interupted. The heat detrectors I knew existed but I didn't know snakes could see infered heat to catch prey.

Kyle, OK. You definitely satisfied the spirit of the post but you need to spell and grammar check your work! Proper English is important in all studies! MW

Chemical elements come from the merging of hydrogen atoms into larger atoms inside of a star due to great pressure causing subatomic particles to merge.

Kyle, Good Job1 5 stars. MW

Sugar Explosive I learned that many things we think are safe like wood and sugar can explode in the air. They will not explode in normal situations but in dust form they have hundreds of times as much surface area so they can explode. I never knew that you could have such massive surface areas of small particles just by grinding them up. I guess if they are light and small enough to fit in air they will have the oxygen from the air take up most of the space around it and because oxygen cause combustion this causes the problem. The government wants to help prevent this but I think that would be very hard to do because be think dust is harmless and don't worry about it. Companies that this applies to should take action and improve their filtration systems to prevent them from going up in a sugary blast.

Kyle, Well written! You made some excellent points! 5 stars! MW

This article was very informative and know I know why helium floats. One of the reasons that helium floats is that it is lighter then the hydrogen and oxygen that is in the air. Another is that buoyancy forces that are always in effect but they only lift 1/5 of a pound so a ballon is about the only thing they will lift. Also more molecules are at lower levels so the bottom of objects are hit by more molecular collisions also making them rise. The most important force we learned about I think is how different densities cause things to float because the other two are too minor to be helpful.

Kyle, Air is not made of hydrogen and oxygen!! It is primarily nitrogen and oxygen. 5 stars. MW