Ten Hundred Words of Science

The thing we make is a round box with living stuff in it, and a turning thing to move the stuff around. The living stuff is made of really little animals, like tiny trees that live in water. We put in the stuff that the living stuff eats a little at a time, so that how much of that stuff is in the round box stays the same, and we take out the stuff the living stuff likes to make at the same same. We make the whole thing warm and put air in it to keep the living stuff happy. Sometimes the living stuff needs light, so we make the round box out of glass.

We do all this stuff because the living stuff in the round box likes to eat a bad kind of air. This is the kind of air that makes the world get hotter. When it eats this air, it turns the air into sweet food. We can turn that sweet food into a thing we can burn in our cars and use to make lights in houses.

I’ve studied the stuff that holds our cells together; stuff that stops us from falling into pieces. Some of this stuff is tiny but strong and is made and ordered by cells in our body. This stuff is found between all cells. It is found in our eyes. It is even found in our hair. As we grow old this stuff breaks down and doesn’t hold us as well as it used to when we were young.

Even though the body makes this stuff, people can make simple types of this stuff too, to hold cells together. We search for ways to use this stuff to fix the body because it is safe and is already found in the body. Cells can grow on and in this stuff. It can stick cells to cell food or cells to cell parts so that a wound can close fast. We make simple types of this stuff to control cell changes and change how the cell works with other cells. We do this by making this stuff so that it holds other stuff that controls cells. This is hard work but can save lives.

More and more people are moving into houses and towns built near the woods, where the trees meet the more open and controlled spaces we usually call home. This is a problem because trees burn pretty easily, especially during the hot, dry days that are becoming “the new normal” in this part of the world. Sometimes houses or whole towns burn down when the woods catch on fire.

For over one-hundred years we’ve tried to fix this problem by not letting the woods burn at all; we stopped all fires as soon as possible after they started. But now we understand that this approach has actually ended up hurting us, because now there are lots more dead trees, large sticks, and young trees in the woods…all waiting to burn. These things have built up over time, because there have been no small, safe fires to burn them away. Now when we have fires, they are the large, hot kind that reach all the way to the tops of the trees, rather than the small, safer kind that stay closer to the ground and take care of the woods. Although we try very hard, we can’t really stop the large fires. But if we could go back to the smaller fires we would have an easier time dealing with them, we could stay safer, and we would could less money on fire-stopping.

I study these towns near the woods, and look at what they can do to make it safer for their houses and people. There are many ideas, like taking all the big sticks and dead trees out of the woods by hand; starting small fires during safe times to clean up the woods; learning how to build homes that burn less easily; keeping the town ready so fire men and women can more easily move their huge cars and find water; and talking to one another so that if a large fire happens the town can get better again quickly, and learn how to be safer next time.

Along time ago, ice fell from the sky in large numbers in high rock areas. When lots of ice falls it builds up. When a lot of ice has built up in high rock areas it moves down to low areas. As the ice moves it picks up rocks and carries them. When the ice stops moving it drops the rocks in a group in front of the ice.

My work looked at the rocks moved by ice that fell from the sky in these high rock areas. I wanted to know when the last time this ice fell from the sky and moved from the high rock areas to low rock areas. This would help people to understand why less ice is falling from the sky in high rock areas today.

I did this by figuring out when the ice moved and dropped the rocks. You can learn when these rocks were dropped by figuring out how many tiny pieces of a type of matter built up on a rock. Things like light come from space and hit the rocks. This caused the tiny pieces to build up. By knowing how quickly the tiny pieces build up on the rock, you can figure out how long the rock has been sitting in that position. The time that the rock was sitting in the position is the assumed to be the last time the ice dropped the rocks before the ice was gone.

Most of the time you see people using their voices to talk. Those talking voices can be written down as words on paper. Then we can read those talking voices. We put those papers together and call them books.

But some people can’t hear! What do those people do? They don’t use their voices. They use their hands to talk to each other. But those talking hands can’t be written down on paper yet. How do we make books if we can’t write down talking hands?

Those people use computers to make movies of talking hands. Those movies can be shared with many other people, like books are shared with many other people. But movies are not books.

Now computers can make books too. We don’t need paper anymore. So we can put both words and movies in the computer. People can then decide to read words of talking voices, or watch movies of talking hands.

If there is a good story in the computer, kids can pick to read the story or watch the story!

My job is to look at the sun. But, I do not look at the normal light that we see every day, I look at a different kind of light which is much stronger and is used by doctors to look inside your body. The sun makes this light only sometimes and it is hard to tell when it is going to happen. It is very important to know how this light is made, because if there is a man in space when the light comes from the sun, he is going to have a bad time.

As the sun goes around, it builds up a kind of power inside it. When enough power is built up, lines of this power can go up to the outer part of the sun and let out a big sudden burst of light and hot stuff. The hot stuff can hit us and make space men have a bad time, but it can also break the space things we put up into space so that we could make phone calls and find out where we are. This is another reason why understanding these bursts is a good idea.

The kind of light that I look at is only made during these sun bursts. When the power lines break at the outer layer of the sun, tiny things are made go very very fast. Sometimes they can even get close to how fast light goes. These tiny things are pushed in all directions, but many of them go down back into the sun and hit a place where there are slightly bigger things that are all very close together. The tiny things hit into this place very hard and make it very hot, but also make the type of light I like to look at.

Because this type of light is made straight away when the tiny things hit their bigger friends, I am able to look at the light and make a good guess about how fast all the tiny things were going. This also gives me an idea about what made them go so fast, and what they did on their way down before they hit their bigger friends. If I look at enough of these bursts, I hope I will be able to make a good guess on when to give space men a warning so they have a good time in space.

It is very hard to understand how new ideas for things have made people’s life different; ideas and things we think of as old come from older ideas that used to be new and cool. Phones and computers are good things that have changed the world a lot, and they are all over the place, but we only sort of understand how they change they world. They change things a lot! But that change doesn’t just HAPPEN. All new ideas and things are part of a LOT of OTHER things that join up and make the world we’re used to seeing work like it does. Some of the ways that ideas and things change the world come from the way people think the world works, some come from the way people live and work together in different places, or even the way we think about the new idea and how to make it work.

I try to understand how a new idea or thing, like phones and computers, really WORK in real world situations, how they change the world, from the approach of someone who makes new things and comes up with new ideas. A very bright guy said that asking questions and trying to make new things is like how everyone has a way to make amazing things happen… but that same way also makes very bad things happen. My thought is Right now a lot of new ideas could make amazing things happen very soon. The US Space Team are really trying to make space cars that can go to other stars; People are changing tiny living things so that they can do anything we want. A hundred hundred hundred other new ideas. But right now the world is in trouble, because of how people have acted.

The question, then, is how do we bring these really cool new ideas into the world in a way that makes amazing things happen, to deal with the problems that are coming to a head now around the world, and to make something better for us as people together. What do these new ideas mean for the world, and also, how can I, as somehow who wants to make cool stuff, act to make a better world?

That’s the big question I think about. Inside that question, I study the way we make power and get it to people and things, and the way new ideas and new things change the way we set that stuff up. Everything we do uses power, from moving, seeing or thinking, to lighting things, making food, or flying places, and all the ways we power that stuff is joined up in hard to understand ways. So I try to figure out how new ideas for making more power or using power a lot better change everything else, and how different people will be changed in different ways, and how we can make those changes good for everyone. We have a lot of good ideas, but they don’t work very well with the way we have been making and using power for a long time, and they change things in different ways in places with lots of money like the US, than in places which don’t have a lot of money. We try to come up with new ways to join up things so that really cool new kinds of power can get to people in really good ways, and then use those new power ways in real places around the world.

A little part of everything is really in every place at once, especially very little light things. If a wall is not very thick at all and some thing can be on either side of it and the thing gets close to the wall, sometimes that thing just shows up on the other side of the wall from where it started. Tiny things like that have stuff on them that makes forces on other things. They take some of that stuff through the wall with them.

We study how little things go through walls and how to make the tiny walls that more tiny things can go through and so that they can take more stuff with them when they go. If the tiny things can take more stuff through, we can use that to make better computers some day.

How should I live? What should I do in life? These are questions we all have to answer. Because we all have to live some way or the other. Big and small questions about the right way of doing things come up all the time. And our life as a whole is always our own attempt to answer the question about a good way of living.

Still many people don’t think much about these questions. They just live like they are supposed to live. They live like they believe other people would want them to live. And believe in things that people around them believe in. So they let other people decide about their lives.

But there are some people who feel that they must try to answer these questions. Who stop and ask: Should I really believe this? Should I really live like this? And they will not go on, before they know the answer. They are willing to go deeper and deeper and spend a lot of time with these questions. In fact, they can spend their whole life trying to figure out something other people think is not interesting at all.

In the best case, these people can find new answers to life’s big questions. Answers that open people’s eyes and change the way they look at their lives. This could change the way people are living. In the best case, these answers can help all of us to live our lives better.

This is what I do for work. I try to find new ways of thinking that will make people live a better life.