#day2script

Videogames are really fun, but have you ever wondered how are they made?

Like websites and mobile apps, videogames are computer programs. They consist in a list of instructions that humans give to a computer, for example: show a character in the middle of the screen, or: when the player hits this button, change the position of that object in the game.

To give instructions, well.. to ask a favor to another person, we use a human language, like english, or italian. Unfortunately, we can’t talk to a computer in the same way, because computers are pretty inflexible. They can only understand simple instructions and they are quite fussy about the grammar. If we want to talk to a computer, we need a programming language.. and a fair amount of patience.

As with human languages, programming languages can be very different from each other. Most of them are text-based, so the programmers need to write the words corresponding to the instructions. Others, like Scratch, are visual programming languages, where instructions are represented by blocks that can be dragged, dropped and snapped together to create complex programs.

Suppose you want to create a simple videogame, where the user controls the movement of a cat on the screen using the keyboard. You need to tell the computer how the cat should move every time the user presses each of the arrow keys. For example, changing its vertical position by 10 pixels every time the users presses the up key.

Now, can you imagine what it takes to create something like Minecraft or Angry Birds?

A professional videogame can consist of millions of instructions and can require the work hundreds of people. However, you don’t need a lot of instruction to have a lot of fun.

We all know that gravity affects objects with mass. I mean, Sir Newton himself “discovered” gravity when the apple, burdened with the weight of its potential for fame in physics, fell from the tree. But what if this weren’t the case? Take a look at black holes.

Black holes are a region with a gravitational field soooooo intense that apparently, no matter or radiation can escape, not even light! Well, that doesn’t make sense, does it? Lights are made of photons, and photons have no mass, so how can the gravity from the black hole have an effect on the light?

Well, there are two ways of thinking about this. The first is looking at time and space. The gravitational fields from black holes are so strong that they literally warp the time and space around them. Straight lines become curved lines when exposed to such a field, and all paths end up going into the black hole. This means light will end up getting sucked into the black hole no matter what direction it’s going, even though it’s traveling in a straight line. “But, Teresa,” you might be asking “how can light be curving towards the black hole, if it’s traveling in a straight line?” Well, let’s look at an analogy. Say someone decides to walk all the way around the earth. From their two-dimension perspective, they would say they are walking in a straight line. But zoom out and look at it from a three-dimension perspective, they’ve walked in a huge circle. From the three-dimension perspective of a photon, the light is traveling in a straight line, but from the four-dimension perspective of time and space, it’s traveling in a curved line that ends up in the black hole.

You may have used music before to help you study. You may have used it as a de-stressor after a hard day. You may have listened to ballads of melancholy songs to help you get over heartache. (Cue sad breakup song.) Everyone has listened to music at some point and it is remarkably curious how music can affect our moods.

But have you ever wondered why? Why is it that a more upbeat and energetic song can drastically change our outlook to a more optimistic one? (Show schematic of sad face transforming to a happy face.) Why is it that certain songs can make us reminisce on old times? Your emotional reactions to music are all made possible by one of the largest organs in your body, the brain. So what is truly going on in the brain when someone listens to music?

Music appears to affect our brain on a biological level, releasing neurotransmitters, a kind of chemical in your brain, in response to music. (Show a schematic of neurotransmitters being released.) In fact, music triggers a cascade of chemical reactions, which can reduce heart rate and even boost the immune system. When listening to relaxing music, people’s cortisol levels even drop. Why might this be? Slower music tends to be calming because brain impulses match the tempo. (to be continued…)

A script! This is just the intro stuff so far - I realize now that the script is going to be kind of long for the “choose your own adventure” chemistry experiment. I didn’t even get to the variables part yet...

[H2O2 decomposition reaction happening as I walk by a lab]

Welcome to The Lab where you get to be the scientist! What you just saw was a demonstration of a decomposition reaction, where a molecule breaks down into different chemical species. Now, let's go experiment!

[YouTube link to “Enter The Lab”]

But before we get started...

[Walk into lab, clips of putting on personal protective equipment]

Remember to experiment safely!

We just observed the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, or H2O2. Let’s explore the components of the reaction.

[YouTube link on the bottle of H2O2] [Pick up the bottle of H2O2] This is hydrogen peroxide. You may recognize it from your first aid kit at home. [Walk over to a lab window with the reaction written on it] The decomposition of hydrogen peroxide actually happens slowly over time, splitting up into water and oxygen. But wait… what we just saw was happening really fast! There must be another component to this reaction.

[Pan back around to lab bench and have YouTube link on the packet of yeast] Here it is – a catalyst. [Pick up yeast packet] In this case, yeast! Yeast has an enzyme called catalase. You have this enzyme, too! Hydrogen peroxide is damaging to cells, so the function of catalase is to catalyze the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into water and oxygen. Now, what do I mean by catalyze? Earlier I mentioned that hydrogen peroxide breaks down slowly over time. A catalyst speeds this up by providing an alternate reaction pathway that has a lower energetic barrier, which results in the rate of the reaction increasing. Lets look at this a different way. [Walk over to window to draw] I want to roll this ball down the hill to my friend at the bottom, but there is a big, tall rock in the way. I could get the ball over the big rock, but it would take a lot of time and energy. I look around and find an area with smaller rocks that would be faster and easier to get the ball over and down to my friend. This is what the catalase enzyme in yeast does. It provides a different pathway that enables the hydrogen peroxide decomposition reaction to occur at a faster rate. We are going to add one more thing to our experiment.

[Pan back around to lab bench and have YouTube link on the bottle of soap] We are going to add some soap! The soap doesn’t take part in the reaction, but will help us make our qualitative observations during the experiment.

Do you wanna build a snowman? (clip from Frozen) I think it stinks.(clip from local News) I’ve always loved the idea of summer! (clip from an Ad with voiceover from Frozen)

They say no two snowflakes are alike. That’s amazing! But, how many snowflakes are there anyways? If someone were to ask you, “How many snowflakes fall in a year?” how would you go about answering that question?

You can start by counting them. You can use a microscope to see the individual snowflakes; you’ll need a cool temperature so they won’t melt away before you count them.

But, we could do better. We can count them in indirectly using their weights. If we know the approximate weight of individual snowflakes, we can just measure a lump of snow, and figure out how many snowflakes comprise the lump.

How heavy is an individual snowflake? Researchers were able to calculate this based on how many molecules of water (H2o) are in an average snowflake. There’s about  1.4 × 10^15 water molecules in a snowflake, and a single H2O molecule weighs about x. This would give the average weight of a snowflake: 0.000042 grams.

Now, if we could measure the weight of all the snow that fall in a year, we could divide this by the weight of a snowflake and get the total number of snowflakes. But, how do we do that?

Various cities and countries keep a record of its average snowfall per year. These are measured by the depth that is in centimeters.

Multiplying this amount by the surface area of the locale would give the total volume of snow.

We estimate a total snowfall over the earth’s surface per year as 3.3*10^21 cm. However, this is not the weight of total snow that were looking for. To measure the total weight of snow from its volume, we need the density of snow.

…

So, in this way we can estimate that about 6.6x10^28 snowflakes are produced worldwide each year.

What does that number mean anyway?

We laugh when something’s funny. But more often, we laugh when someone falls down, when being tickled, or even upon hearing comments as dull as "I've got to go now". [1] Why is it so?

The Humor Research Lab (HuRL) [2] has a general theory of humor called the ‘Benign Violation Theory’. It states that humor occurs when and only when three conditions are satisfied: (1) a situation is a violation, (2) the situation is benign, and (3) both perceptions occur simultaneously.

Research in HuRL has highlighted three ways that a violation can seem benign: 1) Alternative norms (e.g., one meaning of a phrase in a pun doesn’t make sense, but the other meaning does), 2) commitment to a violated norm (e.g., men find sexist jokes funnier than women do), and 3) psychological distance (e.g., “comedy is tragedy plus time”). [3]

For example, tickling is a benign violation when done by someone you trust, is purely benign when you try to tickle yourself, and is purely a violation when a creepy stranger tickles you. [4]

To understand further why do we laugh, let’s take a closer look at the evolutionary significance of laughter.

Firstly, we laugh to signal safety. At a point sometime between 2 million and 4 million years ago, there was an outgrowth of the breathy panting emitted by primates during play fighting. This sort of laughter signals that danger was low and basic needs were met, and now was as good a time to explore, to play, to socialize. [5] Also, the loud explosive sound is produced, we suggest, to inform peers that there has been a 'false alarm', to which they need not orient. Smile evolves similarly as laughter: when one primate encounters another, he may have always begun with a threat gesture--to bare his canines--but upon recognizing the individual as kin he may stop the grimace halfway and 'smile'. [5]

We also laugh to socialize. Known as the social brain hypothesis, it says that the brain evolved to better cope with the social demands of living in larger groups. Since the act of talking limits the number of individuals who can take part in a conversation, laughter is a method that individuals use to signal their participation in larger group chats. And the result of all this extra bonding is that the larger group, and hence the individuals within it, flourishes. [7]

  [1] A laughing matter, Psychologists are finding that the ancient roots of laughter predate the idea of “funny”. Lea Winerman. American Psychological Association. http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/laughing.aspx

[2] Humor Research Lab http://humorresearchlab.org/

[3] Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/pdf/mcgraw.warren.2010.pdf

[4] Opinion: What makes things humorous, Caleb Warrena and A. Peter McGrawb, http://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/pdf/warren.mcgraw.2015.pdf

[5] Gervais, M., & Wilson, D. S. (2005). The evolution and functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach. Quarterly Review of Biology, 80, 395–430

[6] Ramachandran, V. S. (1998). The neurology and evolution of humor, laughter, and smiling: The false alarm theory. Medical Hypotheses, 51, 351–354.

[Open in grocery store]You may have heard of GMO food, but what does GMO actually mean? Well, in the simplest sense, GMO mean [text on screen] Genetically Modified Organism. GMO. But did you know that many of the organisms you interact with every day that have been genetically modified? Take this dog! [hold up Daisy] Over the years, we bred dogs like her to be small, happy, agile, and good companions. How did we do that? Well, the breeders found a male and a female dog with the most desirable traits and selectively bred them, making puppies with a higher likelihood of having similar offspring. This has changed to genetics of her breed. Now this process took thousands of years to end up with all of the dog breeds we have today, but what if science could do it faster?

Well, we're getting there and that's where the term GMO come in. Scientists can modify the DNA of crops to give the organisms some new selective advantage or other desirable trait. We’ve already been doing this through crop selection for thousands of years. Take this watermelon: what does this look like on the inside? If you guessed this [picture of watermelon] you’d be right! But what if this watermelon was from 400 years ago?  A painting by Giovanni Stanchi, a renaissance painter, shows a very different picture of the watermelon [show old watermelon]. Over those last 400 years, we’ve selectively chosen to plant seeds from the watermelons with the most flesh. Yea, the ones from 400 years ago were probably just as refreshing on a hot summer day, but you’d definitely get a lot less of it!