Near and Far

LIFELINE:  We spent our morning at the Food Lifeline warehouse, as part of a small group of students (and parents) in a community service project. 

Obviously, a few hours helping hungry neighbors is time well spent. 

Food Lifeline is a non profit organization in Shoreline, just north of Seattle city limits. It's not a food bank. It's a warehouse, where tons and tons of food collected, sorted and routed. 

Food Lifeline works with a network of 275 member food banks and meal programs. In doing so, it provides 82,000 meals every day across Western Washington. Awesome.

CJ and Annabelle attend a twice weekly class all about social issues, with the current emphasis being hunger. 

CJ shares a couple of food-related facts ...

1 in 4 calories intended for consumption is never actually eaten. Volunteers for organizations like Food Lifeline are some of the most important for making sure that the hungry are fed. Volunteering for organizations like Food Lifeline is not hard and helps thousands of people. I believe that campaigns need to be started to raise awareness for food waste.

Today, our task was taking hundreds and hundreds of individual cracker packs, affixing an ingredients label (since they were not originally intended for individual consumption/distribution) and repackaging them. 

I'm not gonna lie, a big part of me was disappointed that all we were doing was putting stickers on cracker packs that have almost zero nutritional value. That said, I realize that if you're hungry, crackers help. And they're tasty. And it's MUCH better that the thousands of packets our group's hands touched today are redirected to hungry people rather than having the food wind up in the landfill. 

CJ, Annabelle and I packaged 1560 cracker packs today. Not bad for a couple hours' worth of work. I would love to return to Food Lifeline and help out again. They seem like an extremely organized  operation and make volunteering easy. 

NEW HORIZONS NEWS: The science from #NASA's New Horizons' probe continues to come in. Today's big news? There are blue skies on Pluto! How 'bout that?!

More specifically, the first color images of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes reveal that those hazes are blue.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

“Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It’s gorgeous,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado said in today's press release.

NASA science team researcher Carly Howett, said, “A blue sky often results from scattering of sunlight by very small particles. On Earth, those particles are very tiny nitrogen molecules. On Pluto they appear to be larger — but still relatively small — soot-like particles we call tholins.”

Oh, and another kind of big deal: New Horizons has detected numerous small, exposed regions of water ice on Pluto. 

                Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The discovery was made from data collected by the Ralph spectral composition mapper on New Horizons. 

Regions with exposed water ice are highlighted in blue in the composite image (above) from New Horizons' Ralph instrument.

Right now, New Horizons is around 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth and, per NASA, has all systems healthy and operating normally.