(No school on Monday; Memorial Day) 
    When you start at the cornea, there is a short pathway leading to your brain. The cornea is in the same area as the lens. The lens is a clear cover that covers the pupil. When people get cataracts, the lens gets very cloudy. This can be fixed by a simple procedure where the surgeon removes the faulty lens and replaces it with a plastic one
     We dissected a sheep's eye not too long ago. The pupil is just a hole leading to inside the eye. When the light goes in, it travels through the aqueous humor: a jelly-like filling inside the eye.  When it reaches the back of the eye, it hits the retina. The crazy thing is that everything we see is upside-down. Our eyes are so complex that they actually got me thinking about how it would be if we didn't have that advantage. Would everything be on the ceiling, like, defying gravity?? I'm an insomniac, so I have lots of time on my hands.
     The image/light will eventually reach the optic nerve: the nerve that connects our eyes with our brains. 

     There was no blog post yesterday like we normally do for science because we've been working very hard on a project on a website for a certain animal at the Fresno Chaffe Zoo. Time flew, but I'm pretty sure we did just fine. The worst part was we got the most boring animal ever, the American Alligator. It just sat there. We had to stand there for like 5 minutes and take notes on its behaviors. Seriously?? It did nothing! We left for a few minutes and when we came back, he/she had moved from the water to the grass, but we didn't see it move.
     I learned a lot from this project. I mean, I had the basic idea of an alligator and its behaviors. Like it eats zebras, which is messed up because I love zebras (they're white with black stripes, by the way). I was surprised because I thought they were more active. The alligator did nothing, which was disappointing, but overall, the trip was fun. The research we did made the alligator seem very nice and tame, but you have to remember what dangerous animals they are. A lot of people get attacked, and that is never good. The research definitely changed my view of the animal. They aren't as bad as they seem. They are actually pretty interesting. Not in person, of course; they're super boring in person. The alligator was very long; it had to have been at least 7 feet long. It was very cool. Good thing it wasn't hiding like a lot of other animals were. 

     You usually see rainbows after it rains. Maybe you're playing in the sprinkler. At just the right angle, you can see a rainbow. Why does this happen?
     After it rains, there are still very tiny droplets of water in the air. They are so tiny, that just by looking in the air, you will never see them. The droplets act like prisms. We know when light hits a prism, a rainbow forms. These droplets work together and they each reflect the light, making a rainbow appear. When in the sprinkler, there are also water droplets in the air. The only difference is these drops are bigger. They can still act as prisms and create rainbows. 
     Rainbows aren't just a pretty sight. They are also a very complex, scientific matter. Rainbows have colors in a certain order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue. These are refered to as ROY G BIV.

     My last post was why I thought the sky was blue. Doing some research, I found out I was way off! With my dad's Einstein brain power, he helped me understand what all this meant.
     As we know, the atmosphere reflects light. This keeps us from burning to death (even though it already seems like it in the summer). The light from the sun shines down. It scatters light just like everything else does. The only color we see is blue because the other ones are reflected. Take for example, look at anything around you: a chair, a book, even your cat. The colors are being reflected so we only see the blue chair, the red book, or the black cat. All the other colors are gone. It's pretty cool when you think about it.
      We did several experiments to help us better understand this theory. We used mirrors to show how distance does affect the size things appear. A person next to you seems way bigger than a person 4 meters away. Maybe the two people are the same height. They appear to be different. We looked through a little box at a light and we say a mini rainbow. According to the color light we looked at, the rainbow appeared different. 
     Back to the sky, I originally thought that it was blue because it was reflecting off oceans. I saw that in a movie once, but never bothered to do any further research. Now it seems pretty cool.