Blog post #3 In which Emily gets an Internship and explains what an MPA is and we talk about Gravity in Space!

Hello again!
As I'm writing this, it is currently 1AM, Thursday. I have a final in 17 hours, a final on Friday, a Scientific Paper due Sat, 2 Physics hw assignments due Sunday, and a Final on Monday... good bye sleep... I will see you Monday night.

So in a desperate effort to forego the studying for finals process, I present to you my next blog post.

Some pretty exciting things have happened recently.

- I got the internship I was dying to get!!!at the Moss Landing Marine Lab! (Located halfway between Monterey and Santa Cruz).  Specifically, I'll be an unpaid intern for the California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program.
Their job is to provide data on fish populations in the Monterey Bay in an effort to see if the Marine Protected Areas are doing their job. Marine Protected Areas are a new type of state park that prohibit all types of fishing/dumping/etc. They are very small, usually around 40,000 square meters or so and they are strategically placed here and there down the California Coastline. The idea is that if you protect an entire mini-ecosystem, (say one that contains a kelp forest used as a nursery for several economically important fish species), animals and algae will spill over into unprotected areas and stimulate fish populations everywhere. This is a fundamentally new way of looking at conservation of species. Before, as with the Endangered Species Act, you could protect one species at a time, but it's time consuming to protect one species and even then, it is very difficult to enforce. However this is not the way that biology works. Everyone knows about food chains (or food webs as they are called now), it turns out that they are sensitive to missing species, and it is often difficult to nail down what precisely is causing a species' decline. But with the protection of an entire ecosystem, you could forego the paperwork for each species and easily protect the entire Food Web from implosion. It is especially interesting because this hypothesis may not have worked on land. Land animals do not have the ability to float freely from stream to stream or forest to forest. Marine animals can and do drift around freely in the sea, so there is a lot of mixing going on - especially in the planktonic or 'drifting baby' stage of many animals.
Anyways, these MPA's have been around for a few years and every year the CCFRP catch, measure, tag, and release fish in huge numbers. This propagates large amounts of data and also tells us where fish are going, as later when fisherman catch these fish they call us back with information about the location and size of said fish.
I will be responsible for doing this catching/tagging/measuring and also some external volunteer coordination as well as a little bit of educational outreach for the fishermen in the area.
In any event, I am very ecstatic to get this opportunity and I can't wait to start (June 25th)! I feel as if I'm getting my foot in the door of my potential career!
<<<TL;DR - They catch and release fish to tell if a national park is helping fish population numbers or not. I get to do this and other stuff and its awesome!>>>

-I quit (although I will technically be on call a little bit) my Dining Hall supervisor job. Nothing in college has ever felt sweeter. To know that in a couple of weeks I'll be sitting on the banks of the King's River with a cold beer, with no more frustrating food service job to return to and the internship I've been waiting for ahead of me... feels like this and this.

-I cut my hair... like a lot... you mustn't panic. I cut off 12 inches to donate, but my hair is still long by some people's standards. Though Marc, Madi, and Laney all have longer hair than I now... hmm.

12 inches of hair... To Locks of Love it goes!

Short hair... it curled up a bit I think... 

-Given how much I've enjoyed writing this blog and how much I enjoy writing in general (There was about a month where I was considering switching to the Creative Writing Major - Physical Chem will do that to you), I've decided one of my goals for the summer is to write a short story (short novel?). I have a pretty good idea of what I want to write about and I'm going to spend some time researching it so its factually accurate. I may or may not put it here. :0

Alright so some cool stuff:

-There is gravity in space. This seems pretty intuitive as the Moon is connected to the Earth through gravity and we are connected to the Sun by it. Everything is affected by everything else's gravity, therefore we can say that the Andromeda galaxy, approx. 2.5 million light years away, has a tug on you as you read this, therefore affecting your every action in some minute form. Therefore, weightlessness does not exist. Why is it that the astronauts can apparently float around, free of the pull of gravity? The truth is that they are falling. They are falling just as how a sky diver falls from a plane. That skydiver does not 'feel' gravity - only the rushing wind resistance keeping them up. The astronaut is falling, but also moving to the side so fast that it takes longer to fall to the earth's surface than it would take to travel around the earth. Because of the lack of atmosphere in space, we do not see the quick sideways movement or fall. They appear to be stationary as the Earth rotates beneath them. 

To better explain this, imagine this. You throw a baseball the same time as you drop one. They hit the ground at the same time. Why? Because gravity affects them both equally. The baseball that you threw, is 10 feet to the left though. Now do the same thing, but throw the baseball so fast that it is an Earth Radius away from you instead of 10 feet. Earth's gravity is still affecting it, but the Earth's surface has curved away from it faster than it can reach it. Congratulations, you have just thrown a baseball at orbital velocity. Your arm must be tired. Look at this - it might explain it easier:

-Just watch this. It makes stressful things go away.