Today I untucked my legs from my resting pose and looked about. I had curled up on an aspen leaf last night and hadn’t moved since. I spotted a small aphid and crawled over and ate it for breakfast. After I was done I crawled to the edge of the leaf and looked across the skyline of my city. I wondered what I was going to do today. I decided that I was going to move to a faraway tree. When I got tired I happened to be over a farm. It was an all-out aphid feast!

This is me!

Farmers love us because we eat aphids! Aphids are small insects that cause destruction in plants. They can destroy large plants and even full crops. They usually feed in large groups so it’s easy for us ladybugs to pick them off. I kept on flying, however, I had to stop because I got too tired. After all, ladybugs can only fly about 74 miles. I arrived at my new tree and promptly tucked in my legs for the night.

1. How fast can a ladybug fly?
2. How many ladybugs are there in the world?
3. Why do ladybugs smell bad?

Hello, Fellow orthopteras! Today I had a grand old sticky day! I got up today at sundown and got ready for a big day! After all, today is the day that my left leg will finish growing back! (A pesky bird broke it off and flew away with it). I ate a small breakfast of Oak leaves. When I finished, I headed off to a nearby branch.

This is me!

When I got to my new branch I looked around to see if there were any good places to sit. Now that I was on a low branch I thought that a human may pick me up. I was excited! When one walked near I swayed like a leaf! It noticed me and came over to look at me! It picked me up the right way! (Picking me up by my torso with your pointer and thumb and then gently placing me onto your palm.) It gently set me back down after about two minutes. I still didn’t know what a human was doing in a park at three a clock but that didn’t bother me. As an end to my great day, I checked out my leg. It was great! I ate some more leaves and then started swaying like a twig in the breeze. I stayed like this all day!

1. How big are stick bugs?
2. How many stick bugs are there in the world?
3. How fast can stick bugs walk?

Today I had a great spikey day! (My body is shaped like a thorn after all.) I woke up to bird diving down to eat me and then being scared away by my great spike. I pierced the outer- layer of the plant that a slept on and drank the sap. That was my breakfast for the day!  After all, I am a vegetarian and survive in the nutrients of that sap. Ants love eating what we leave. It’s called Honeydew, and it’s a type of excrement that we produce after eating the sweet sap.

Later I traveled over to our neighborhood plantation and overthrew the farm. While we were over there we thought it was a good idea to pester the farmer. We mainly focused on the Peach Trees but the rest of the crops were good too. I fell asleep there so I don’t have much more of a story to tell but I can tell you some facts instead! I have the thorn on my back to scare away predators! It also helps me camouflage myself in the landscape. Well, thank you for coming along with me on the journey of my first social media post!

1. How tall are the thorns on a thorn bug?
2. How fast can they walk?
3. How many thorn bugs can there be per plant?

Coronavirus was a terrible virus that infected people all over the world. Symptoms of this virus were mild to severe respiratory illness with fever, cough, and difficulty breathing. Using the available data, the recovery time for this virus was two weeks for mild cases or three to six weeks for more severe cases. Science plays a large part in any situation where we are faced with sickness. Science played a very large part in finding a cure for coronavirus. It also helped people know when to lock down, or when to open up. I remember being very scared of not seeing my friends. I was also very scared of someone very close to me catching the Coronavirus.

I remember thinking of a time where everyone caught Corona, and all of us could hang out, coughing, and stuff but I knew that wouldn’t happen. I don’t even know if I would want it to happen. It doesn’t sound the best to be infected with the Coronavirus. I remember being very sad that I couldn’t see my friends and that we were all stuck in our houses. Being stuck in your house isn’t that bad really, other than how boring it is. However, it is pretty depressing, or lonely at times. There is also always a constant chance of catching Coronavirus to worry about. (unless you and all of your family has been home and very safe.) It was also very hard to stay home because there was virtual schooling. Virtual school was the worst type of school I’ve ever done. It is much harder to learn things over Zoom, it’s also much more boring. Thankfully they found a cure from the blood of frogs! It sounds very strange, but it was found that the blood of frogs reduced the symptoms of the Coronavirus.

Currently in science we are doing a unit on water and water pollution. Alisha and I made a video that talked about water pollution and Lake Karachay. I would like to share my speech with you.

Our oceans are dying from water pollution. Everyone knows this but not to the full extent. Ther are six types of water pollution. Agricultural, wastewater and sewage, oil pollution, radioactive waste, urban development, and plastics. Today I will mostly be talking about radioactive waste dumping. 

Lake Karachay is the most polluted lake and place in the world. It has an EBQ of 4.44. An EQB is a measure of radioactivity. One EQB means that an amount of material produces one nuclear decay a second. 

Lake Karachay is a small lake in the Southern Ural Mountains in Central Russia. Starting in 1951 the Soviet Union used Lake Karachay as a dumping site for radioactive waste from Mayak. Mayak was a nearby nuclear waste storage and reprocessing facility. Mayak was located near Ozyorsk, (then called Chelyabinsk-40). Today the lake is completely infilled. Lake Karachay is so polluted that you can die from standing near it too long. You can also very quickly die from swimming in it. 

Water pollution is killing our earth, if we do not stop things like this, we may all die. We only have 29 years and 227 days until there is more plastic in the ocean than fish. We only have 27 years, 227 days until there is no more seafood left in our oceans. A lot of the population on our earth relies on fish for their main source of protein. If we do not help our earth it will have long term effects on everyone.

The Base of this story is when the bubonic plague struck America, officials tried to cover it up. Now let’s get into some more detail. On March 6, 1900, the body of a 41-year-old Chinese- American was found dead in the basement of a San Fransisco- Chinatown hotel. While the doctor was writing the death certificate, he started noticing strange little nodules on the body. He sent tests to a municipal lab, and they came back showing that he had died from the Bubonic Plague. He was the first case ever in America. The city’s newly-founded health board immediately put Chinatown under strict quarantine. The next two years consisted of a battle between California officials and federal scientists. The Officials said that the plague didn’t exist while the scientists were fighting to stop the growing epidemic.

This fight between the two resulted in nation-wide controversy. This drew in the president and nearly two dozen governors. This ultimately led to forcing California’s governor out of office. But this didn’t happen before a leading scientist was demonized and over a hundred victims had died from the dreadful disease. By this time “The Black Death” was now raging across Asia, killing millions. US officials had worried for a long time that it would make its way across the pacific, to West Coast ports. The highly infectious disease, which was mainly carried by rodents, was usually fatal. The secret did come out into the San Fransisco Chronicle and was no secret anymore. But sadly I’m out of sentences.

1. Why did they try to cover it up?
2. If they covered up the Bubonic Plague for that long, why didn’t they try to cover up Covid-19?
3. How did the plague mutate to mainly travel by rodents?

Yesterday, the eighth, my mom and I made a timeline. We went outside and I immediately got attacked by bugs. There were water bugs, mosquitos, no see ’ems and I’m just getting started. But overall it was a good time, it was very sunny and warm! I could even wear shorts! On the timeline, we had to put many major events in the history of the earth. These events were all about geology. These events were like “the earth forms” or “modern plants”.

The events consisted of “earth forms, 4.6 billion years. 46 meters” All of them will have a time and a place on the timeline.  Next comes “Oldest rocks found today are formed, 3.9 billion, 39 meters.” These go on, to become a total of twenty events on the timeline. All of them extremely important events in our earth’s geologic time. But the most interesting thing about this was that around 100 million years ago, more things started happening in the geologic time of our earth. Things started speeding up in a sense. All in all, this timeline project was pretty fun! I enjoyed it.

1. Are there any major events missing from Shane’s timeline?
2. How many minor events are in-between the major ones?
3. To get a true perspective of time, what would we, humans ave to do?

This week we have been out of school! sounds nice but we had quite a bit of homework. But on the other hand, we didn’t have to wake up early! We had homework in almost every class. A lot of it wasn’t due until Friday or Sunday though. That was the only thing keeping my sanity in check. These last couple of days I think that I’ve lost my motivation to do anything. Working on homework most of the day every day is a little boring. Some of the homework was fun though.

Shane assigned an at-home experiment. It was making no-bake cookies and answering questions about the scientific side of baking. It was very fun making these cookies! I got the ingredients out and started making it. Then while I was stirring the mixture on the stove my mom did the other parts of the recipe. Like measuring the peanut butter and oats. When the mixture on the stove started to boil, I was very surprised. I didn’t know that sugar, milk, cocoa, salt, and butter could boil!

1. I wonder if we had more zoom classes and less homework, would it be better?
2. How many times could I make these cookies before running out of the ingredients at my house?
3. Where did Shane find this recipe? Or did she make it herself?

This summer I’m going to one of my favorite places on earth. It’s called Interlochen Center for the Arts. Last year I went for two weeks and studied general arts. In general arts you get to pick your electives that you will be doing for the next couple of weeks. I studied Arts & Crafts, Environmental Education, Modern Dance, LUNCH, Ceramics and Instrument Exploration. This year I am attending for audio engineering and production. I think it will be very fun!!! No I shall explain sound!!!

Basically sound waves are vibrations. The speaker vibrates, it moves the air. The air then bounces of of each other, until it reaches your ear. That’s why it’s called a sound wave. But if your ear is out of range for those vibrations to keep going to reach you, your ear won’t be able to hear the sound. In your throat you have vocal cords. Your vocal cords vibrate, making sound. Did you know that your vocal cords vibrate multiple times per second??? Or that there is no sound in space? This happens because there are no molecules there. Here on earth we have air molecules for the sound to travel through.

I wonder if I’ll have fun at Interlochen?

I wonder how far sound can travel through water?

If sound can travel through air, what other gasses can it travel through?

In science class today we did a lab. The lab was about matter, volume and density. We used bubble gum for our dependent variable. The time chewed was our independent variable. Lizzie and I were partners for this lab. She chewed the gum while I timed it. We chose to chew the gum for two minutes, other groups chose three minutes, or two minutes, just like us!

To find the matter you have to weigh it on a scale. Matter is the amount of mass something has. To find the amount of volume something has you have to put that something in a marked cylinder and see how much that object displaces the water. Volume is how much space something takes up when in a controlled area. To find the density of an object you divide the mass with the volume. Density is the degree of compactness of an object. This was a very fun lab! Thank you Shane!

1. How good was the bubble gum?

2. Does saliva break down sugars?

3. What year was bubble gum invented?