On Thursday, the whole class participated in an activity called “Oh Deer!” , this was a game that stimulated the different types of factors which would have an effect on the population. From this activity I learned and fully understood what would happen when a population reached its maximum capacity. In the deer situation, when the deer were out of resources, the number would decrease and thus less competition and after a while the population would reach the maximum capacity and due to the intense competition the population would again go down. Therefore, when this pattern was shown on a graph, a wave was shown, which showed the constant increase and decrease of the deer population. Furthermore, I learned that there were two factors, the density-dependent and the density-independent factor. The density-dependent factor in the activity were the resources and natural disasters while the density-independent factors were the wolfs. In the game, no matter how much the density-dependent affected the population, the specie would not become extinct; however in the density-independent part of the game, it only took a while before the whole deer population became extinct. I also noticed that when the deer population was large, the wolf population was small; on the other hand, when the wolf population was big, the deer population was small.  Overall, I felt that this activity was really fun, and helped me have a real experience of how the two factors could affect a population. Now when reading the textbook, I can have a mental image in my head. I hope we can have more fun and engaging activities and games.  

Blog – 3 laws of thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is the study of energy, ability of energy to do work and how it can change into different forms. There are three accepted and established laws of thermodynamics, the first law, also called conservation of energy, states that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. The first law is just saying that the total amount of energy in the universe is constant, whether the energy is in its original form or a different form. The second law, commonly known as the law of increased entropy, says that the entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will increase slowly, approaching the maximum value of equilibrium. This law basically means that the universe is constantly losing usable and useful energy and never gaining any. Furthermore,entropy is a measurement of the randomness or disorder, thus an increase in entropy equals an increase of randomness and disorder in the system. The third states that  as temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant minimum. At absolute zero ( 0 Kelvin), all molecular movement stops, since temperature is a measure of molecular movement and no temperature can be lower than absolute zero, energy will be very limited and at its minimum when approaching absolute zero. Thus these are the three laws of thermodynamics which together states that concentrated or useful energy must be used to accomplish useful work and useful energy is constantly being lost into another form of energy.