By Blog Editor Susan Wells
Rescuers are still digging through the rubble and debris after a monster tornado roared through Moore, Oklahoma yesterday. Spectacular video is surfacing of the tornado that leveled neighborhoods, schools and more.
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Have you ever wondered how clouds form? We all learn the water cycle in school - water falls from the clouds in the form of rain or snow and collects on the ground. The water on the ground heats up and turns to vapor and the vapor travels up into the atmosphere and creates clouds.
But how do those clouds form?
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Rescuers are still digging through the rubble and debris after a monster tornado roared through Moore, Oklahoma yesterday. Spectacular video is surfacing of the tornado that leveled neighborhoods, schools and more.
How Does a Tornado Form?
Tornadoes need two things to form – a thunderstorm and wind shear. Wind shear is created from winds blowing in different directions and increasing with height. The winds are at two different altitudes and blow at two different speeds. For example, a wind at 1,000 feet above the surface blows at 10 mph and one at 5,000 feet blows at 25 mph. This creates an invisible column of horizontal air that is rotating. The rotating air will be drawn into the thunderstorm cloud by the updraft which tilts the air. If the column gets caught in the supercell updraft, the spin
Spring time means getting out and enjoying the sun, watching the trees bloom and cleaning out those flower beds and garden patches and filling them with flowers and plants. Before you start clearing out the dead of winter and putting plants in the ground, get a little compost going.
Compost is the single most important supplement you can give your garden soil. - EarthEasy.com
Compost creates nutrient-rich humus – a natural fertilizer. This super charges plant growth and helps keep moisture in the soil. Your water bill can be reduced by 20%. It also adds microscopic organisms that works to aerate the soil, break down organic materials and fight off plant disease and insects.
By composting your organic kitchen waste, your trash will be lighter and your footprint smaller. About 30% of household trash is compostable materials.
Have you ever wondered how clouds form? We all learn the water cycle in school – water falls from the clouds in the form of rain or snow and collects on the ground. The water on the ground heats up and turns to vapor and the vapor travels up into the atmosphere and creates clouds.
But how do those clouds form? Here’s an experiment that demonstrates how the water molecules join together and form a cloud.
Before you start on your own cloud, let’s learn a little more about clouds.
A cloud is a lot of droplets of water and or ice crystals, depending on the temperature. The droplets float in the air molecules.
Even though we don’t see them, water molecules are in the air all around us. These airborne water molecules are called water vapor. When the molecules are bouncing around in the atmosphere, they don’t normally stick together.
Clouds on Earth form when warm air rises and its pressure is reduced. The air expands and cools, and clouds form as the temperature drops below the dew point. In other words, cold air cannot hold as much water vapor as warm air. Invisible particles in the air in the form of pollution, smoke,
I recently spent some quality time soaking in the hot springs pool in Salida, Colorado. After sitting there relaxing and watching the kids play, I noticed my fingers and toes were really pruney. It made me start wondering why and how this phenomena happens. Is there a reason why our skin becomes wrinkled and old-looking after soaking in water? Or is it just a side effect of getting wet?
I knew one thing – prunes turn into raisins by drying out. But we were IN the water. Our skin couldn’t be drying out in the water. It had to be soaking up the water.
Scientists once believed the same thing – that the pruning and wrinkling of fingers and toes was caused by the outermost layer of skin absorbing water. Recent studies by Kyriacos Kareklas and Tom Smulders of Newcastle University in England have showed the wrinkling comes from the nervous system constricting blood vessels in the skin.
When the blood constricts, it reduces the volume of the fingertips and pulls in the skin. So even though you feel like your fingers have swelled in the water, their volume has actually decreased.
Jeff Bush, 36, was killed last Thursday when a sinkhole opened up under his house and engulfed him and his bedroom in Seffner, Florida. Authorities began demolishing the house to get a look at the sinkhole. The house itself was too unstable to enter.
Crews worked carefully to save some of Bush’s belongings while also figuring out how to stabilize and fill the hole, which is estimated to be about 30 feet wide and 60 feet deep. The hole is so unstable that nearby houses are also in danger and have been evacuated.
