Category Archives: Science/Nature

Science/Nature

🍁 Why leaves are nature’s changing fashion show.

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By: Canaan Nonnemacher

Have you ever wondered why, after being perfectly green all summer, trees suddenly explode into bright red, yellow, and orange colors every fall? It’s not magic, it’s science, and it’s a critical way trees prepare for the cold weather ahead.

The Color Change Explained

During spring and summer, leaves act as tiny food factories for the tree. They are filled with a green chemical called chlorophyll, which is essential for photosynthesis, the process of using sunlight to make food (sugar). Because there is so much chlorophyll, it completely covers up all the other coloring chemicals, or pigments, in the leaf, making everything look green.

As summer ends, the days get shorter, signaling to the tree that it’s time to stop food production and get ready for winter. The tree stops producing new chlorophyll, and the existing molecules quickly break down. This disappearance of the green pigment reveals other colors that were hidden all along.

The Colors That Were Always Hiding

As the green fades, the yellow and orange colors, created by pigments called carotenoids, become visible. These pigments are always in the leaf but are simply masked by the strong green chlorophyll.

However, the deep reds and purples are created by a different pigment called anthocyanin, which is not present during the summer. Anthocyanins are made in the fall when the tree seals off the leaf stem, trapping sugars inside the leaf. When these trapped sugars are exposed to bright sunlight, they create a brilliant red color. Scientists believe this red acts like a protective sunscreen for the leaf while the tree quickly pulls out and stores all the important nutrients before the leaf falls.

Why Trees Drop Their Leaves

The color change is the first part of the tree’s survival plan for winter. The main reasons trees shed their leaves is to save water and prevent damage. Leaves constantly lose a lot of water. When winter comes and the ground freezes, the tree’s roots can’t suck up new water. By dropping its leaves, the tree avoids drying out and enters a state of, like a long sleep, to conserve water until spring. Additionally, being leafless prevents heavy snow and ice from building up on branches, which would otherwise cause them to break.

Thus, the spectacular colors of fall are a clear sign that the tree is being smart, preparing for a long, cold winter rest

Science/Nature

Why are our winters getting warmer?

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By Hannan Mohammed

Image by Kenneth Allenvia Wikimedia Commons

In recent years, you may have noticed that our fall season has become much warmer, and so has our winter season as well—snow comes later in the year, and according to an article by NPR, the 2023-24 winter season saw the 48 lower states in the U.S. had their warmest winter in 130 recorded years. And in the U.S., winter is the season that’s warming faster than any other. However, why is this change occurring?

The main cause of these warmer seasons is climate change, and in particular, global warming. While Earth’s climate has changed across time, with ice ages and warmer periods, this current global warming is caused by human activity; specifically, how we add heat-trapping gasses to the atmosphere. When we do this, we produce gases such as carbon dioxide that come into the atmosphere and trap more of the Sun’s energy on Earth, which is warming up the planet. According to NASA, Earth’s average surface temperature has increased by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century, caused mostly by carbon dioxide emissions.

As these average temperatures rise, the coldest season is being affected the most. According to the Climate Reality Project, average winter temperatures across the 48 contiguous states have increased by 3 degrees Fahrenheit since the pre-industrial era. Because of this, many areas are beginning to see warmer winters overall. But how else is climate change affecting winter weather?

One of the other effects of climate change on winter, besides warmer overall temperatures, is that there’s more precipitation during the season, which can either be rain or snow. This happens because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture within; this excess moisture is released from the atmosphere as precipitation.

Another effect of climate change on winter is that severe winter storms, such as ice storms and blizzards, are becoming both more frequent and more powerful. This happens because there’s increased energy in the atmosphere from the Earth’s general warming, which can make these events more volatile. Furthermore, a powerful air current called the jet stream is starting to change easier. Because it can influence weather patterns, its shifts may lead to sudden changes in both temperature and precipitation.

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Science/Nature

About comets

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By: Hannan Mohammed

Image by Philipp Salzberger via Wikimedia Commons

What are comets?

Comets are bodies made of ice covered in dark organic material, including dust. These comets are leftover from the dawn of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago, and it’s speculated that comets may have brought water and organic compounds to Earth and other planets.

There’s a belt of icy bodies beyond Neptune where dark comets orbit the Sun around Pluto. Some of these comets are pushed closer to the Sun from gravity in other orbits, and they take around 200 years to orbit the Sun. These are called short-period comets, and their appearances are easier to predict. However, there are also long-period comets; these comets come from a region called the Oort Cloud about 100,000 AU (astronomical units) away from the Sun. Long-period comets can take about 30 million years to complete just one orbit around the Sun.

But how are comets structured? Each comet has a nucleus that’s a few miles wide; this part contains ice, frozen gases, and some embedded dust. As a comet orbits around the Sun and gets closer to it, the comet heats up and develops its own atmosphere, which is called a coma. As the comet heats up, the ice in the nucleus becomes a gas and makes the coma grow in size, and the coma can extend to thousands of kilometers. Pressure from sunlight and solar winds can also blow gas from the coma and dust away, creating a trail or a ‘tail’ on the comet.

Notable Comets

Image by NASA/Kuiper Airborne Observatory via Wikimedia Commons

A particularly famous comet is known as Halley’s Comet, which has been observed for around 2,000 years. It’s named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, who accurately predicted that the comet would return in 1758, thus proving that comets orbit around the Sun and don’t pass through the solar system once, which was a popular belief beforehand. Halley’s Comet takes 76 years on average to orbit the Sun, which makes it a short-period comet. It was last seen from Earth in 1986, and it will likely be next seen in 2061.

Image by International Gemini Observatory via Wikimedia Commons

One notable comet right now is the 3I/ATLAS comet, which NASA first made observations on in July 2025. It is named after the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope that first recorded the sight of the comet. It doesn’t follow a closed orbit around the Sun, and its origins are outside the solar system, making the comet interstellar. The 3I/ATLAS comet reached its closest point to the Sun on October 30, 2025, at which point it became too close to the Sun to observe. However, it’s expected to reappear on the other side of the Sun in early December 2025, and it will be able to be observed again.

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Science/Nature

About solar and lunar eclipses

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By: Hannan Mohammed

According to the Planetary Society, we see around two to five solar eclipses every year and about two lunar eclipses each year as well. When these occur, we like to observe and take photos of these phenomena. But what is an eclipse in the first place? And what is the difference between solar and lunar eclipses?

Image by Wibu lu via Wikimedia Commons

Solar Eclipses

A solar eclipse occurs when the Sun, Moon, and Earth align in such a way that the Moon blocks sunlight from reaching the Earth and casts a shadow over an area of the Earth’s surface. For this to happen, the Moon needs to be perfectly aligned between the Earth and the Sun. But, a total solar eclipse doesn’t occur very frequently because the Moon doesn’t orbit in the same plane as the Earth and the Sun. Instead, it orbits in the ecliptic plane, where it’s tilted by five degrees, and because of this, the Moon’s shadow often misses Earth.

There are only two times a year where a new moon has an opportunity to show a solar eclipse when it crosses the Earth-Sun plane, called ‘eclipse seasons’. When a total solar eclipse happens, the Moon directly blocks most of the Sun. However, the Moon doesn’t completely block the Sun, allowing the Sun’s outer atmosphere—called the corona—to be briefly visible to us on Earth. A partial eclipse occurs when the Moon and the Sun aren’t aligned well enough to show a total eclipse, so only a part of the Sun is blocked.

But what about the shadow that’s cast on Earth’s surface during a solar eclipse? It has two main parts, called the umbra and penumbra. The umbra is the inner shadow, usually around 50 miles wide, and only within it is a total solar eclipse visible. The penumbra, on the other hand, is the outer shadow that can span around 1,000 miles; only a partial eclipse is visible from this area.

The Moon’s shadow traces a path across the Earth’s surface as it continues to orbit our planet, called the eclipse path, and it takes around four to five hours for the Moon’s shadow to fully pass over Earth. Within the eclipse path, the path of the umbra is called the path of totality, and along the path of totality, a total solar eclipse lasts for about a few minutes.

Image by Robert Jay GaBany via Wikimedia Commons

Lunar Eclipses

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Moon is covered by the Earth’s own shadow, preventing sunlight from reaching it. This phenomenon works similarly to how solar eclipses work; when the Earth is positioned between the Sun and Moon and casts its own umbral shadow onto the moon. This doesn’t happen every month for the same reason that total solar eclipses don’t happen frequently: the Moon rotates on its own ecliptical plane, and when it rotates around Earth, it won’t always line up with Earth’s shadow.

However, when it does, we can observe that the Moon becomes a shade of red. Why does the Moon appear to change color? This is due to the Earth’s atmosphere scattering blue light coming from the Sun. As it does so, the edges of the atmosphere reflect a bit of red light onto the Moon’s surface, making it appear red. This is what’s usually called a ‘blood Moon’.

It’s important to note that blood Moons are only seen during a total lunar eclipse; when there’s a partial lunar eclipse, the Moon doesn’t fully pass through the Earth’s umbra, so only parts of the Moon will appear to be red. Lunar eclipses are also much longer than solar eclipses, as a total lunar eclipse can be as long as an hour and 45 minutes.

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Science/Nature

What is the p53 gene?

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By: Hannan Mohammed

According to the National Institute of Health, the human body has over 30 trillion cells, each in their own cycle of growing, dividing by mitosis or meiosis, dying, and being replaced. There are around 200 different kinds of cells in our bodies, but during the cell cycle, any one of these cells could begin to replicate uncontrollably, leading to cancer.

However, there is a small gene in the nucleus of each of these cells that can protect our cells from dividing uncontrollably and becoming cancerous tumors. This is called the p53 gene.

What is the p53 gene?

The p53 gene, or the tp53 gene, is located on chromosome 17, in the nucleus of many of our cells. The gene specifically controls instructions that are required to make a protein named tumor protein p53, which binds directly to the DNA in the nucleus of the cell. But, what does the protein itself do?

Image by Thomas Splettstoesser via Wikimedia Commons

What it does and why we need it

As implied in the name (tumor protein p53), this protein helps to prevent the creation and growth of tumors by controlling cell division to ensure that damaged cells don’t divide uncontrollably.

Because the p53 protein is bound directly to the DNA in each cell, it can detect whether a cell’s DNA is damaged. A cell’s DNA can be damaged by many things, including radiation or exposure to toxic chemicals, which can cause the processes of cell growth and cell division to go wrong; this is where the p53 protein becomes extremely important.

The protein plays an important role in determining how the regulation of damaged cells will occur. For example, if the DNA in the cell can be fixed, the p53 protein will activate other genes to repair the damaged DNA. However, if the damage to the DNA can’t be repaired and the cell still poses a risk of uncontrollable growth and division, the p53 protein will send signals to tell the cell to begin the process of apoptosis, or self-destruction.

The p53 gene and protein’s importance lies in its function of regulating cell division, which is crucial in preventing many types of cancer throughout our bodies. However, some people have mutations of the p53 gene.

What this means is that the p53 protein no longer functions as it should, which can lead to fast and unregulated cell growth and division without the protein to prevent this. These non-inherited (or somatic) mutations are linked to half of all cancers. An inherited mutation can lead to a cancer syndrome called Li-Fraumeni syndrome, which increases a person’s risk of developing multiple kinds of cancer, such as breast cancer and bone cancer.

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Science/Nature

Bunnies

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By: Sylvia Yannsdottir

Image taken by Josh Backflip via Wikimedia Commons

Bunnies are a very common animal, and oftentimes in the city you will see a few casually around your neighborhood. In the United States, the bunny population is an estimated 6.5 million, 4.3 million of which are wild bunnies, while 2.2 million of them are household pets. This number may seem high, but their population has been decreasing slowly over the past few years. This is because of multiple factors: like habitat loss, changes in available food and shelter, diseases, and increasing predators.

Typically, wild bunnies live up to 8-12 years. They are very small, and cute. They have excellent eyesight, digestion, and hearing. They have a wide variety of colored fur too, some of which are just one solid color, like brown, white, black, or grey, but sometimes they have a mixture of colors of fur.

Bunnies can have multiple litters per year, usually 3-5 every year. Each litter can contain anywhere between 4-12 babies. In the cities, it’s not too uncommon to find a nest of baby bunnies in your backyard.

Bunnies are very social and expressive animals that thrive in groups. Research has actually shown that they are very good at communicating, and they are excellent at forming strong bonds and friendships with each other. Bunnies can actually become very sad if they are deprived of being social with others.

Another thing that really shows how expressive bunnies can be are their binkies. A bunny can express its happiness through a leaping, spinning, kicking behavior called a “binky.” These are a very fun aspect of their behavior.

For the most part, wild bunnies are very calm, and unproblematic to their surrounding environment, although in some cases in the city it can be a struggle to maintain a garden if there are constantly bunnies eating the plants you may be trying to grow.

Science/Nature

Elephants

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By: Maya Song

Image by Byrdyak via Wikimedia Commons

The elephant is one of the largest mammals on earth. Elephants live across Africa and Asia and are very popular sightseeing animals. There are approximately 415,000 elephants in Africa and 40,000-50,000 elephants left in Asia. It is estimated that there were once 20 million elephants in just Africa and an estimated number of 26 million on the whole earth. The elephant’s population is continuing to decline because of causes like habitat loss, and poaching, which is also known as illegal hunting.

The elephant’s habitat is very large, they can live in places like forests, savannas, deserts, wetlands and grasslands. Most elephants just need areas with a lot of space as they are very large. They also need their food and water; the elephant is a herbivore and eats food such as grass, bark, leaves, fruits, and roots. An elephant can feed for up to 12 hours and eats over 100 pounds of vegetation in just one day.

When the elephant is pregnant the baby elephant also known as a calf stays inside the mother for about 22 months which is one of the longest gestation cycles. After the calf is born its mother and other elephants in the herd will help the calf stand up as baby elephants are able to stand up a few minutes after birth. When the calf reaches the four month mark they start to eat things besides their mothers milk but will continue to drink its mothers milk for up to two years and can drink 3 gallons a day.

Elephants are social animals and will travel in herds. Most elephant herds are large families that include members over multiple generations; and usually they travel with these same herds for the entirety of their lives.

Elephants usually live around 60-70 years, they usually die because of starvation or a disease called anthrax. Annually there’s a range from 40,000 to 70,000 elephants dying.

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Editorials/Student Voice, Science/Nature

Empty nets and a dying ocean

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By: Maya Vossen-Nelson

Image created with Canva

The ocean absorbs large amounts of heat without a large increase in temperature. Given this property, the ocean has always played a central role in stabilizing Earth’s climate system, but in the past 100 years humans have created a climate that produces heat at an intensity that has overwhelmed the ocean. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the most telling sign of the overworked oceans is that over the past 100 years, the average global sea surface temperature has increased by approximately 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit each decade. This is significant because a large amount of heat needs to be absorbed by the ocean for water temperatures to rise even slightly.

According to NASA, 90% of global warming is occurring in the ocean. The ocean is not able to keep up as efficiently as it used to and is creating devastating consequences. 

When the ocean temperatures begin to rise, this is an indicator of extreme levels of carbon and methane in the atmosphere that are trapping solar rays and damaging the ozone, thereby trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. The levels of carbon dioxide dissolving from the atmosphere into the ocean have become so high that the water has become acidic.

Fisheries and fishing boats are reporting more frequent marine heat waves and whole fish community die-offs. At the very least, in response to the warming sea temperatures, many fish populations are migrating to colder waters. This has become so noticeable that many fishing businesses are being forced to change their fishing strategies and some are even considering calling it quits.

A perfect example is the seafood industry on the east coast. Boston NPR station, WBUR, reports that “The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most of the world’s oceans. As a result, iconic New England species like cod and lobster have shifted north or moved deeper into the ocean in search of colder water.”

Without any interventions, it will only be a matter of time before the world’s fishing industry is turned on its head.

Science/Nature

Whale sharks

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By: Sylvia Yannsdottir

Image taken by Nicholas Lindell Reynolds via Wikimedia Commons

Whale sharks are commonly known for their size. They are the third largest creature in the ocean; capable of growing up to 12 meters long, and weighing more than 3 elephants combined. Whale sharks are very solitary creatures, and although they are a type of shark, they are extremely gentle and calm compared to other animals in the ocean.

A whale shark’s life typically begins in tropical warm waters, and they spend most of their life cruising around aimlessly feeding on plankton, small fish, and other organisms. They do this by using their teeth to strain through large amounts of water, where they separate their food from water. Generally, they spend up to 7-and-a-half hours feeding each day.

The average lifespan for a whale shark is up to 100 years, if not even older, some reaching 130 years. They grow very rapidly when they are young, but their rate of growth declines and becomes steady after a while, and by the time they are 30 years old, they have reached maturity.

When it comes to reproduction, whale sharks are able to give birth in a unique way. A single whale shark is able to produce eggs that are already formed inside of its body, and over a steady amount of time, it will birth around 300 young.

One thing that makes whale sharks very unique is their patterned skin. Every whale shark has their own individual pattern of white polka dots and stripes that go across their gray bodies. Their patterned skin is not only very pretty but it can be super useful for researchers to identify, or recognize a whale shark.

Whale sharks are in fact listed as an endangered species. This is because of vessel strikes, and being caught or hurt accidentally by commercial fishing services. While it is unfortunate, it is sadly often that those two factors are at fault for the population decrease of countless species in the ocean. Luckily though, there are plenty of organizations out there that are putting effort into protecting whale shark populations.

Getting To Know/History, Science/Nature

The cruel inter-workings of psychology!

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By: Maeve Brady

Psychology, it’s an amazing study of human behavior and cognitive functions, and, within this wide branch, there is so much to discover. That brings me to today’s topic, psychology experiments. More specifically speaking, notable psychology experiments. Now, you may have heard of popular experiments such as the Stanford Prison experiment and/or the Milgram experiment, which was an experiment with the intention of questioning people’s ability to adhere to an authority figure under who they assume to be someone in power. But, besides the most renowned ones, how about the ones barely anybody talks about? Are they considered notable or worthy? Today I will be explaining a very complex and appalling experiment, also known as the MK-ULTRA Project. I will try my best to explain all aspects of it and how it is notable to psychology.

First of all, what even was the MK-ULTRA Project? Well, the MK-ULTRA Project was a very bizarre experiment and the horrors of it run deep throughout history. The project was developed by the Central Intelligence Agency, also commonly known as the CIA. The CIA was a federal service tasked with enhancing national security through analyses of intelligence. Or in other words, the main foreign intelligence service of the United States. To be more specific, this experiment was primarily run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, although Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, agreed to let the procedures go through. This experiment was primarily based around the experimentation on humans and how they react.

This experiment had horrid intentions. In fact, the primary intentions of this experiment was to develop procedures, drugs, and/or some type of methods that would be capable of weakening an individual’s ability to resist, which would result in easier confessions due to this sort of “brainwashing” so that during an interrogation, they could easily get people to confess. It was a project just overall based around psychological torture on its participants. In order to figure this sort of “truth serum” out, experimenters would inject participants with drugs, usually this drug would be lysergic acid diethylamide, also known in the abbreviated form as LSD. They had hopes to discover at what point humans would break and essentially lose control of their cognitive abilities to adhere to authority figures. The ones that were experimented on varied from place to place.

Now, the majority of Gottlieb’s experiments were funded at universities and research centers, and others were conducted in American prisons and detention centers around the world. Typically, the ones being experimented on were people such as soldiers and most commonly prisoners. Prisoners were typically more popular because they were willing to operate in exchange for extra recreation time and were operated on. But, what makes this even more horrific is that many of the subjects had no idea they were going to get experimented on, and were unsuspecting people. And, adding on that fact, they tended to prey on the most vulnerable of people.

This experiment went on for a long duration of time, starting around November 18, 1953 and it was officially halted in around 1963 to 1973. This halt was due to the discovery by the CIA Inspector General staff of what was truly going on. Along with the discoveries of how dangerous and just morally wrong it was, as the subjects were given psychoactive drugs and other toxic chemicals.

Now, this experiment stemmed not only from new fascinations, but it also stemmed from fear and a continuation of the Nazi lead experiments through the duration of World War II. In 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, and with his Nazi party helping him to suppress opinions and political enemies, he created a dictatorship. Due to previous hate of Jews along with Hitler using the Jews as scapegoats for Germany’s misfortunes after World War I, many Jews were persecuted. Eventually, this led to Jews being sent to concentration camps in an effort to exterminate them. During the 1940s, Nazi scientists worked in the concentration camps, which were usually filled to the brim with Jewish people, along with other camps containing the Roma people and other prisoners of war. In these camps, along with the starvation and other cruelties they brought to victims’ lives, they also did interrogation experiments.

To really give you a picture of how unethical some of these experiments were, we must discuss Operation Midnight Climax. Operation Midnight Climax was a notorious LSD experiment conducted by the CIA. In 1955, George White oversaw this experiment by first decorating a room to look homey and unsuspecting, then he let everything play out. Paid people would lure unsuspecting people to the scene and then they would be drugged by LSD as George White watched behind a two way mirror. 

Now, the results of the experiment are hard to find. This is because in the 1970s, most of the evidence for the experiment was destroyed. Along with the fact that this experiment was kept secret for most of it due to the fear of peoples’ criticisms.  Although there are similar experiments to this such as the Stargate Project, this project also focused on the study of psychic phenomena. Though similar to the MK-ULTRA Project, its results were dismissed and only proved that the methods were harmful, and killed many. 

Thank you so much for following me along as I explain this intriguing experiment to you! I hope you also found this experiment intriguing and brought you a valuable critical thinking experiment!

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