Just Another Day at Work...

Friday at work we pulled out an instrument to get some practice on using it - it takes pictures of the back of your eyes - the red lines are blood vessels, the white blob is the optic nerve and the darker blob just to the side with of the optic nerve with a reddish center is the macula (impressed by my eye anatomy knowledge yet??).  To my untrained eye I have pretty healthy looking eyes! The science geek in me loves this!

Mixing Cub Scouts and... Science??

My friend Krysta and her husband are Cub Scout leaders in our neighborhood and they needed a "scientist" to come to finish up the requirements to get their science belt loop... and if nothing else, I am a science geek at heart!!  I had to be in full lab glory to convince these guys I was a "real" scientist!!

And then the guys had to wear my lab coat so they could be as cool as me, if such a thing is even possible... Here we're adding vegetable oil to water with red food coloring in it... and the fun is only beginning!! (wow - not kidding about the science geek...)

And then... what happens when you salt?  If you add sugar instead of salt?  Or how about flour??  You'll have to try it to see - we had some very creative hypothesis'... but of course boys being boys, they wanted to blow stuff up and get covered in slime....

So we finished by up blowing up sandwich bags... no slime though!!  Some budding scientists in that group I think!!

Really??

OK - so I don't want to get down to work today, and what better way to justify my lack of ambition than to think I'm doing the world a favor by updating my blog??

But... I find this really interesting... a group flew over the Amazon rain forest this week and photographed unknown tribes of natives, who they believe have never had contact with the outside world before. And what's more... this group believes that there are approximately 100 similar tribes -people who've never been in direct contact with the outside world, 50 of these groups live in the Amazon region along the border between Peru and Brazil. And we're in danger of losing them because of the pressure and loss of the Amazon rainforest. Having spent some time in the Amazon last year, what an unimaginable tragedy this would be... and what makes the outside world so superior anyways?

Long Time No Posts - part 1 ...

The science geek in me is absolutely fascinated by how UDOT is building a new overpass along I-80 by building it in pieces along the side of the road. I can't wait to see how the pieces get moved into place and held together...