CU Boulder sends high school students experiments into space
Sep 11th
Space experiments dreamed up by three teenage winners of an international contest that will be streamed live on YouTube from the International Space Station Sept. 13 were made flight-ready by a University of Colorado Boulder space center.
The two winning experiments — one of which tests the ability of spiders to learn how to catch prey in the low-gravity of space, and the other which investigates how nutrients and compounds affect virulent bacteria growth in space — were announced in March. The contest is sponsored by YouTube, Lenova and Space Adventures with the involvement of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency.
“We took the ideas of the two winning experiments and transformed them into actual experiments that could be conducted in space,” said Stefanie Countryman, the business manager and outreach coordinator for BioServe Space Technologies, a NASA-sponsored center located in CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department. The CU team also manifested the payload on an unmanned Japanese HTV rocket, conducted safety verifications and trained the astronaut flight crew on using BioServe hardware aboard the International Space Station, or ISS, for the project.
The global initiative sponsoring the contest is a new program known as YouTube Space Lab. YouTube Space Lab is one component of YouTube for Schools, a program that allows educators to access YouTube’s broad library of educational content from inside their school network. The contest generated more than 2,000 entries.
The student winners are Amr Mohamed, 18, of Alexandria, Egypt, who developed the idea for the spider experiment, and Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma, both 16, of Troy, Mich., who created the idea for the bacteria study. BioServe completed all of the mission integration and operations work for the two experiments and hand-delivered the loaded space flight hardware to the Tanegashima National Space Flight Center in Japan for launch to ISS on July 21.
The live, 45-minute YouTube Space Lab program stream from ISS, slated for 8:30 a.m. MDT on Sept. 13 will be hosted by Bill Nye “The Science Guy” and will include Mohamed, Chen and Ma. The winning experiments — selected by a panel that included British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, two NASA administrators, European Space Agency and Japanese Space Agency astronauts and Cirque de Soleil founder Guy Laliberte — will be performed by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams.
Countryman, who also will be part of the YouTube Space Lab live stream as she describes the role of BioServe in the project to Nye, said she was surprised by the sophistication of some of the experiments entered in the contest. “Seeing the level of intellect, not only from the top two winners but from six regional winners, makes us feel confident in the next generation of scientists and engineers,” she said.
Countryman said BioServe worked closely with Paula Cushing at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and MaryAnn Hamilton of the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, Colo., to obtain the jumping spiders and analyze their behavior. BioServe designed, developed and built the flight habitat for the spiders. Once aboard ISS, the habitat will be placed inside a BioServe-built device known as a Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus, or CGBA.
In addition, BioServe worked with AgraQuest in Davis, Calif., a company that manufactures and sells the bacteria strain B. subtilis, which will be used in the experiment by Chen and Ma. BioServe researchers worked with the students to design the experiment, which included 48 fluid processing devices carried in six Group Activation Packs built by BioServe and which have flown on dozens of space missions.
BioServe also developed an HD camera system to record high-resolution still images and HD video of the spider habitat, which included both the arachnids and their food, fruit flies, Countryman said. One of BioServe’s CGBA devices on board ISS is providing power for the lighting system of the spider habitat and thermal control for both experiments, said Countryman.
As part of the contest, 14- to 18-year-olds, either alone or in groups of up to three, submitted videos describing their experiments to YouTube. All experiments submitted to the contest had to involve either biology or physics. People tuned into the YouTube Space Lab event can vote for their favorite experiments, Countryman said.
“For decades, one of our major thrusts at CU-Boulder’s BioServe Space Technologies has been to provide educational opportunities for hundreds of thousands of K-12 students around the world,” said Countryman. “This has been another opportunity for us to work with students on space payloads, a unique project that we hope will help steer many students from around the world into careers in the sciences.”
BioServe is a nonprofit, NASA-funded center founded in 1987 at CU-Boulder to develop new or improved products through space life science research in partnership with industry, academia and government, said BioServe Director Louis Stodieck. Since 1991 BioServe has flown payloads on 40 NASA space shuttle microgravity missions and additional payloads on several Russian and Japanese space vehicles.
YouTube, a video-sharing website, is a subsidiary of Google. Lenovo, a global company headquartered in Morrisville, N.C., is the world’s third-largest PC maker. Space Adventures, headquartered in Vienna, Va., provides flights for private citizens into space, including trips to the ISS.
To watch the winning experiments being performed on ISS go to http://www.youtube.com/spacelab. For more information on BioServe visithttp://www.colorado.edu/engineering/BioServe/.
CU led mountain forest study shows vulnerability to climate change
Sep 9th
A new University of Colorado Boulder-led study that ties forest “greenness” in the western United States to fluctuating year-to-year snowpack indicates mid-elevation mountain ecosystems are most sensitive to rising temperatures and changes in precipitation and snowmelt.
Forests where people live and play to be hit hardest
Led by CU-Boulder researcher Ernesto Trujillo and Assistant Professor Noah Molotch, the study team used the data — including satellite images and ground measurements — to identify the threshold where mid-level forests sustained primarily by moisture change to higher-elevation forests sustained primarily by sunlight and temperature. Being able to identify this “tipping point” is important because it is in the mid-level forests — at altitudes from roughly 6,500 to 8,000 feet — where many people live and play in the West and which are associated with increasing wildfires, beetle outbreaks and increased tree mortality, said Molotch.
Researcher Noah Molotch at work
“Our results provide the first direct observations of the snowpack-forest connections across broad spatial scales,” said Molotch, also a research scientist at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “Finding the tipping point between water-limited forests and energy-limited forests defines for us the region of the greatest sensitivity to climate change — the mid-elevation forests — which is where we should focus future research.”
While the research by Molotch and his team took place in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, it is applicable to other mountain ranges across the West, he said. The implications are important, since climate studies indicate the snowpack in mid-elevation forests in the Western United States and other similar forests around the world has been decreasing in the past 50 years because of regional warming.
Forests are drying and becoming more vulnerable
“We found that mid-elevation forests show a dramatic sensitivity to snow that fell the previous winter in terms of accumulation and subsequent melt,” said Molotch, also a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “If snowpack declines, forests become more stressed, which can lead to ecological changes that include alterations in the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species as well as vulnerability to perturbations like fire and beetle kill.”
A paper on the subject was published online Sept. 9 in Nature Geosciences. Co-authors on the study include Ernesto Trujillo of INSTAAR and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, Michael Golden and Anne Kelly of the University of California, Irvine, and Roger Bales of the University of California, Merced. The National Science Foundation and NASA funded the study.
Molotch said the study team attributed about 50 percent of the greenness in mid-elevation forests by satellites to maximum snow accumulation from the previous winter, with the other 50 percent caused by conditions like soil depth, soil nutrients, temperature and sunlight. “The strength of the relationship between forest greenness and snowpack from the previous year was quite surprising to us,” Molotch said.
The research team initially set out to identify the various components of drought that lead to vegetation stress, particularly in mountain snowpack, said Molotch. “We went after snowpack in the western U.S. because it provides about 60 to 80 percent of the water input in high elevation 
mountains.”
The team used 26 years of continuous data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer, a space-borne sensor flying on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite, to measure the forest greenness. The researchers compared it to long-term data from 107 snow stations maintained by the California Cooperative Snow Survey, a consortium of state and federal agencies.
In addition, the researchers used information gathered from several “flux towers” in the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range, which measure the exchanges of carbon dioxide, water vapor and energy between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. Instruments on the towers, which are roughly 100 feet high, allowed them to measure the sensitivity of both mid-level and high-level mountainous regions in both wet and dry years — data that matched up well with the satellite and ground data, he said.
“The implications of this study are profound when you think about the potential for ecological change in mountainous environments in the West in the not too distant future,” said Molotch, an assistant professor in the geography department. “If we take our study and project forward in time when climate models are calling for warming and drying conditions, the implication is that forests will be increasingly water-stressed in the future and thus more vulnerable to fires and insect outbreaks.
“When you put this into the context of recent losses in Colorado and elsewhere in the West to forest fire devastation, then it becomes something we really have to pay attention to,” he said. “This tipping-point elevation is very likely to migrate up the mountainsides as the climate warms.”
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How A 22-Year-Old Boulder Woman Learned How To Fix Cars By Driving A ‘72 VW Beetle Across The West
Sep 7th
At 22 years old, Morgan Johnson knows the ins and outs of a few things. She’s lived in Oregon and Colorado, and she managed a King Soopers grocery store for a few years.
But when she decided to quit her job and give the Great Western Road Trip a try, she didn’t know anything about cars other than that they get you places and cost money to fix. But when she decided to buy a 1972 Volkswagen Beetle for a trip that would cover thousands of miles, she faced a sink-or-swim learning curve that’s an inevitable part of old Volkswagen ownership.
Now, she chatters about valve adjustments and wheel bearing tightness like an old hand. More importantly, she has joined the ranks of auto enthusiasts. Before, cars were just something that carried her to and from work. Now, she’s approaching full-on gearhead status.
A Volkswagen Beetle wouldn’t be my first choice for an epic road trip car, but those old German workhorses have the kind of charisma that can entice a young lady like Morgan Johnson into the strange world of auto enthusiasm. Needless to say, the car — packed to the gills with three or four passengers and all of their crap at any given time — broke down a lot during the trip. But with a little help from friends and strangers and by asking a lot of questions, Morgan’s understanding of how cars work grew considerably. But so did her appreciation for cars; bugs in particular.
I met Morgan and two of her travel companions when we were all stopped in front of Utah’s Great Salt Lake one evening this summer. It was nearly 10 p.m., and the sun was finally sinking below the horizon, turning the lake’s surface into an iridescent orange sheen. The only way to get to that part of the lake, as far as I know, is from I-80, so I was surprised to see an olive drab green Beetle, Colorado tagged and topped with a bulky, tarpaulin covered bindle, come trundling down the offramp toward the beach parking lot. I had to find out who was bold enough to take a road trip in a car like that.
Morgan and her friends, Johnny and Cherri, live in Boulder. They all explained, with that sort of fresh faced excitement you seen in young people caught up in an adventure, that they planned to drive all the way out to San Francisco, then up the coast through Oregon to Seattle. They didn’t really have any plans other than that, just a chunk of free time, a little bit of money, and a knack for finding things cheap on Craigslist.
By then, only a couple of days into the trip, they’d already broken down once, and were making their way ever so slowly due to the car’s limited capacity to carry a ton of weight.
The Journey Begins
Morgan had quit her job as a grocery store manager in Boulder just before the trip. She’d been working there for three years, and had always wanted to take a long road trip around the American West. She didn’t know much about cars, but she did know enough to realize that her rusted-out Jeep wasn’t going to cut it. But one day, when she was buying a saxophone from some guy off of Craigslist, she noticed that he had a lot of old Volkswagens in his yard. One of them — the army green one — was for sale for $1,600.
A lot of people would say that going from a rusted out, inoperable Jeep to a Volkswagen that’s been sitting around since 1997 is leaping from the frying pan into the fire. But Morgan said she was enchanted by the car — which she always refers to as “she” — and bought it with some money she’d saved for the trip. Mike, the Volkswagen nut who sold her the car, unwittingly became her on call mechanic as soon as he handed over the keys.
“I told her when she got it to drive it around for a few days before leaving on her trip, but she just took off,” he told me at a Volkswagen rally we all attended together a month later. “I’d say I got 200 texts while she was out driving the thing.”
“I sent him a lot of pictures of my finger pointing at something and asking, ‘What’s this part? How do I fix it?'” she explained.
The trip lasted about a month, and the trio (they picked up another person in California, completely stuffing the little car) saw a lot of amazing scenery. But they also met people they wouldn’t have met if they weren’t driving an old car that broke and made them stop and smell the oil filter. Here’s a breakdown of their itinerary, by geography:
- Boulder, Colo.: Morgan, et al hit the road, headed north through Cheyenne before hanging a left on I-80 toward Utah.
- Evanston, Wy.: The car’s fanbelt broke. Johnny skateboarded five miles to the nearest town, but everything was closed. But he met a lady who had a bunch of random fanbelts laying around. None of them fit, so they tied a piece of rope around the pulleys and drove it to someone or other’s friend’s house. The guy had a bunch of old Volkswagens, and they found a fanbelt that worked until they could buy a new one.
- Utah: They met me at the Great Salt Lake. We parted ways (because an old VW is the only car that my car can drive faster than) until later that night. They caught up with me and we camped next to the Bonneville Salt Flats.
- The Nevada Desert: Nevada in summer is hell on Earth. With all that weight piled into the little car, it began to overheat and lost power. So they parked under a bridge and slept there until it was dark and cool outside. Once they got up into Tahoe, the weather was cooler and the car worked OK.
- Sacramento/San Francisco: They went to Pride, crashing with some guy they’d found on Craigslist in the Castro. Morgan found out that one of the reasons the car had been overheating was because of the bag strapped directly to the roof. It blocked airflow to the engine, which is cooled by air. So Morgan bought one of those cool metal and wood roof racks on eBay and poor Johnny, who had been crammed in the back with all that crap for a little while, got a reprieve. They also got an oil change (I’d told them that because VWs don’t have oil filters, it’s a good idea to change it every 2,000 miles).
- Humboldt County/The Lost Coast: Three days of backpacking on the Lost Coast and a day spent tripping balls on mushrooms in a redwood forest were car-free, thus devoid of mechanical problems.
- Portland, Ore.: The car smelled like gas, and they found not one, not two, but three fuel leaks. The big filler hose and some of the fuel line were dry rotted. The filler hose was a specialty part, and Morgan ended up skating 10+ miles on a hot summer day trying to find the right one. Morgan noted that “Portland isn’t a good place to skate — the roads are shitty.” She also replaced the fuel filter and the distributor cap and rotor.
- Washington State: A friend wanted to take a different, more reliable car to Seattle, but Morgan said, “You haven’t experienced the bug yet. You gotta feel what it’s all about.”John Muir couldn’t have said it better himself, but the rest of the group voted to take the more reliable car.
- Oregon to Idaho: The car, of course, broke down again. This time, the battery cable was loose (for those of you who know bugs, good thing the damned thing didn’t catch on fire!) and there was another fuel leak from another dry rotted line. They used someone’s brother’s AAA card for a free tow to nearby Boise, Idaho. Morgan also had to fix some frayed wires in the dash when the lights stopped working. By this time, Johnny had strep throat, and Cherri had really bad poison oak from their redwood frolic.
- Evanston, Wy.: The car died and wouldn’t start again. The carburetor was leaking gas and the engine was running too hot. The tips in the pea shooter exhaust had completely melted. They took the Greyhound the rest of the way home, and Morgan and Cherri came back later to get the car with a Uhaul.
Although they’d had to tuck their tails between their legs and take a bus the rest of the way home (and Greyhounds in the West aren’t like those sleek new D.C.-to-N.Y.C. jobs, they’re bleak, Morgan wasn’t ready to give up on her bug. She talked Mike, the guy who’d sold her the car, into taking a look at it. The valves were way too tight, and she’d missed spotting a spark plug wire that had come loose. The thing had been running on three cylinders (one or two, if you count the cylinders with valves that were stuck open) for hundreds of miles.
But when Morgan, Cherri, Mike and I went to a bug rally a few weeks later, the car was purring (well, a clattery Volkswagen purr). Better yet, Mike had taught a man to fish, so to speak, and Morgan had a more thorough understanding of what those valves do, why they need to be adjusted, and how the car’s ignition and carburetion systems work.
“I learned a lot about engines and how they work and how to fix things,” she told me as we watched souped up bugs scream down the drag strip. “I was told owning one of these cars would make you learn how to have a lot of patience, and it really has.”
If you live in Colorado or Wyoming, don’t be surprised if you see a little army green bug chug up a gnarly hill near a trailhead in the middle of nowhere. Morgan isn’t afraid to drive her car and now, she knows its limits and how to fix it.
Of course, she only knows how to tinker with Volkswagens (and by today’s standards, a VW Type I scarcely qualifies as a car), but it’s a start.
Photo credit: Benjamin Preston; Morgan Johnson
