Rotting animal carcasses? Yeah, my response would be avoidance at all costs.
At the Chautauqua Series lecture at Temescal Gateway Park on Tuesday night, Cal State Channel Islands professor Sean Anderson spent the better part of the evening convincing visitors otherwise.
It helps that his organization, the Pacific Institute for Restoration Ecology, is also known as PIRatE.
According to Anderson, there's about a 1 in 10 chance you'll see road kill during a mile of driving in Southern California. For every ten miles you travel by road, you're more likely than not to be driving past a dead animal.
Anderson wants to learn more about exactly how much road kill is happening, and how we can build cities and roads that will minimally harm animal populations. And he's recruiting you (Me? Well, mostly your smartphone) to help.
At approximately 4pm on Monday, August 13, two children and a vehicle were taken near 3500 Wilshire Blvd (pictured above). According to LAPD Officer Webster Wong, the children were released, and are currently safe.
The day before the much-hyped August 5th launch, Melissa Soriano, a
scientist on the Curiosity team at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, visited
students ages 6-12 at 826LA in Echo Park.
Soriano told students, “The most exciting thing would be if
Curiosity found some evidence of life,” but warns that life on Mars might not
look like it does today.
The students were attending It’s (Partially) Rocket Science,
a science writing workshop held over four Saturdays sponsored by Time Warner
Cable to provide STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) enrichment
for low-income and minority students.
Soriano talked students step-by-step through the landing
using this footage, highlighting, among other features, the heat shields and parachute
that helped Curiosity slow from over 13,000 mph when it entered the Martian
atmosphere to a mere 1 mph on the surface, all in only 7 minutes.
Just the week before, workshop students had built their own spacecraft
from paper trays and popsicle sticks, attempting a safe landing on the surface
of an imaginary planet. The challenge? The planet’s surface was made of ooblek,
a non-Newtonian fluid made from cornstarch and water.
Photo from Casey Fleser
While not many astronauts would have survived some of these
landings, Soriano says “It’s possible we’ll send a person to Mars.” She emphasizes
the challenges of getting along in a small space over a long, laborious journey,
and says, “I wouldn’t necessarily want to be the person going.” While Curiosity
made the trek to Mars in 8 months, a manned journey would have to travel at a
slower speed to take less of a toll on the human body.
Soriano, who graduated from the California Institute of
Technology, has worked for JPL since 2003. Her final words to the students encouraged them to work hard, so that perhaps they could be rocket
scientists working on the next shuttle.
--
826 runs creative writing workshops and after school
programs for low-income students nationally. 826LA is located in Echo Park and
Venice. Storefronts of 826 sell novelty items to fund their programs—the original 826 is The Pirate Store, and 826LA Echo Park
is The Time Travel Mart. This author attended the workshop as a volunteer with
826LA.
Rotting animal carcasses? Yeah, my response would be avoidance at all costs. 
