27 Apr 2018

Looking for a Good Science Book? But Where to Start....

By Claire Eamer

If you're curious about Canadian kids' science books, but you don't know quite where to start, consider taking advantage of the expertise of others. A lot of that expertise goes into choosing shortlists and winners for a number of annual book awards that honour science and non-fiction writing for children. Here's where you'll find some of the best titles in Canadian science writing for children -- including some books by Sci/Why bloggers.
L.E. Carmichaeil's Fuzzy Forensics won the
2014 Lane Anderson Award for Youth Books.

Canadian Science Writing Awards

Science in Society Youth Book Award is given annually by the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada. For recent and current shortlisted and winning books, follow the links on the organization’s website at http://sciencewriters.ca/  Award winners for 2014 and earlier are listed on the Canadian Children’s Book Centre website at http://bookcentre.ca/awards/science-society-book-award-0/

The Lane Anderson Awards recognize Canadian science writing in both adult and youth categories. The current year’s shortlist will appear on the main website at http://laneandersonaward.ca/  Past winners and shortlisted books are at http://laneandersonaward.ca/past-winners-and-finalists/

Canadian Information Book Awards

The Children’s Literature Roundtables of Canada’s Information Book Award names a winner and an Honour Book each year. Many of the shortlisted and winning books are science books. For current and previous winners, go to the Vancouver Children’s Literature Roundtable’s website at http://vclr.ca/information-book-award/

The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk by Sci/Why's own
Jan Thornhill won the 2017 Information Book Award
given by the Canadian Children's Literature Roundtables.

The Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction was established by the Fleck Family Foundation and the Canadian Children’s Book Centre. For a complete list of winners and shortlisted titles, many of them about science, go to http://bookcentre.ca/programs/awards/norma-fleck-award-for-canadian-childrens-non-fiction/previous-winners-and-finalists/ 

International Awards

The American Institute of Physics presents an annual award for science communication for children, and Canadian writers have won on occasion, most recently in 2017. The list of previous winners is at https://www.aip.org/aip/awards/science-communication/children

Claire Eamer's Inside Your Insides: A Guide to the
Microbes That Call You Home
was on the shortlist
for the 2018 AAAS/Subaru SB&F award.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science gives out the AAAS/Subaru Science Book & Film awards, and Canadian books have appeared on the award shortlists frequently. Find winners and shortlisted books at https://www.aaas.org/program/aaassubaru-sbf-prize

Our Booklist

If the awards lists have whetted your appetite for Canadian science writing for kids, why not delve deeper? Take a look at Sci/Why's own annotated listing of Canadian kids' science books. It's a free download on the Sci/Why site at https://sci-why.blogspot.ca/p/science-book-list.html

20 Apr 2018

A Mathematician Barbie???? Who'da Thunk It?

Post by Helaine Becker

When I was growing up, Barbie was the ultimate aspirational toy. She had a fantastic slinky black dress. An over the top wedding dress. And clothes for being a stewardess, a picnicker, and attending a sock hop.

But there was no Barbie mathematician attire. Are you kidding? This was the era of "men don't make passes at girls who where glasses." And "men don't like women who are smarter than they are. So play dumb!"

Image for BRB INSPR WMN DL 3 from Mattel




Times have moved on. Not enough, of course, but some.

And this is where I get to tell you about the newest dolls in Barbie's inspiring women collection, being released next month. One of them is Katherine Johnson, the subject of my upcoming picture book, Counting on Katherine. 

I only wish this doll had been available when I was growing up. I might not have skipped out on grade 12 calculus.

13 Apr 2018

The Littlest Mummy

Brooklyn Museum, 30 B.C.E. – 50 C.E.

Even people who really love Egyptology and know a lot about ancient mummies might be curious about this little bundle of linen. It's only about nine inches (21 centimeters) long, and less than two inches (3.5 centimeters) at its thickest point. What in the world could be mummified in such a small package?

The answer to this question can be found using modern technology! Modern scientists prefer to use non-destructive methods to learn more about mummies from the past. Instead of cutting or damaging their wrappings, they instead put them into a medical scanner.

Here's another mummy bundle with a very similar size, shape and date. When we look inside...what do we see?

Penn Museum, E12435: mummy from the side, paired with radiograph
It's a tiny animal! Even though the radiograph might seem a little hazy, this is obviously a small mammal skeleton. You can clearly make out the teeth and the long tail.

Most of us are not experts when it comes to mummies OR small mammals, but zooarchaeologist Kate Moore had the answer. It was the teeth that were the real give-away--this was a mummy of one of the world's smallest mammals, the Egyptian sacred shrew.

Dr. Moore and a shrew skull
Of course, this answer leads to more questions. What did a live Egyptian shrew look like, for example? And why would you make one into a sacred mummy?

The Egyptian pygmy shrew (Image Bibliotheca Alexandrina)
The answer to the first question is simple--an Egyptian sacred shrew was pretty adorable! It was a very tiny creature, which could easily fit into the palm of your hand. It was very similar in size and appearance to one of its close living relatives today, the Etruscan shrew.

Wikipedia image of Etruscan shrew.
The answer to the second question is a bit more complicated. The important thing to understand is that many animal mummies in ancient Egypt were made as votive offerings--they were gifts to be offered to the gods. The links between animals and the gods were symbolic.

Shrews, although they are very tiny, are incredibly fierce animals! And because they are such mighty mites, they are capable of killing snakes and destroying their eggs. In ancient Egypt, the shrews were representatives of the god Horus, the protector of the Sun. By day, Horus has the form of a Falcon, but by night, Horus takes the form of a shrew or an Egyptian mongoose, to keep up His eternal battle against the cobras and crocodiles that threaten the Sun on its cosmic journey.

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WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Animal mummies are a fascinating topic, and there are lots of great resources where you can learn more about them.

SOULFUL CREATURES: ANIMAL MUMMIES OF ANCIENT EGYPT is available on Amazon. But if you can't afford your own copy, you might find it in your library. If your library doesn't have a copy--you could always ask them to buy one for the collection!

National Geographic Magazine also has a gallery of ancient Egyptian animal mummies, which has beautiful images. It is connected to an article which was published in the magazine in November 2009. Does your library have back issues of National Geographic?

The Penn Museum Artifact Lab has a blog where scientist Molly Gleeson publishes posts about the lab's study of animal mummies using modern scanning technology.

The New York Times ran an interesting article about the Soulful Creatures Exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, which includes facts and interviews with scientists who study Egyptian animal mummies.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arinn Dembo is a professional science fiction writer and software developer working in Vancouver, BC. She has degrees in Anthropology and Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, and volunteers as a science educator at Vancouver's The Learnary, where she teaches an ongoing series of workshops called Gothic Science.

6 Apr 2018

Moby, we hardly knew ya!

By Claire Eamer

I recently wrote an article for Hakai Magazine, an online magazine about coastal life and science, on the accuracy (or lack of it) in the way whales are portrayed in children's books. Researching that article led me to a great irony: whole species and populations of cetaceans -- both whales and dolphins -- are at risk of extinction because of humans, while, at the same time, we humans are just realizing how amazing and possibly how like us cetaceans are. We could lose whales -- or, at least, a great many of them -- before we really get to know them.

A blue whale surfaces in the open ocean. Pixabay photo

The Bad News First

 Instead of teeth, blue whales and
right whales have baleen, plates
made of keratin, 
that sieve food
out of the water.
Claire Eamer photo
The bad-news side of that equation is how much damage we have already done to the world's whales. Take, for example, the blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived on Earth. Before the days of commercial whaling, the world population was probably about 250,000. Today, 50 years after an international ban on hunting blue whales went into effect, the world population has recovered to somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 individuals, scattered across all the world's oceans except the Arctic Ocean. That's a tenth or less of what the world once supported.

Other whale species are further from recovery -- some maybe too far. North Atlantic right whales had a terrible year in 2017. At least 17 died in the waters off Atlantic Canada and the Atlantic coast of the United States, most as a result of ship strikes or entanglement in fishing gear. The most recent estimates put the population of North Atlantic right whales at about 430. About 100 are reproductive females, but after the most recent breeding season no new calves have been spotted. Some scientists have warned that the whales are just a couple of decades from extinction if nothing changes.

The waters around southern Vancouver Island, where I live, are home to a population of killer whales that is in just as much trouble as the North Atlantic right whales. Maybe even more trouble. The southern resident killer whales are fish-eaters -- and a whale can eat a lot of fish. They rely heavily on chinook salmon, which used to return to their spawning grounds along the coast of the Pacific Northwest in huge numbers. But commercial fishing, habitat destruction, and contaminants have reduced the numbers of chinook and, along with them, the numbers of fish-eating killer whales. The southern resident killer whale population is down to just 76 individuals at last count, and even those few have having trouble finding enough salmon to stay alive and healthy.

Killer whales, whether they eat fish or mammals, have impressive sets
of sharp teeth to catch and hold their prey. Claire Eamer photo

And Now the Good News

The good news is that we're learning a lot about whales, both through science and through a growing recognition of the traditional knowledge of whale-hunting cultures, such as the Inuit and other peoples of the Arctic. Perhaps if we know enough about them, we will care enough to save and protect them. As a start, here are some cool facts about whales.

Whales have cultures. They pass knowledge and forms of communication down from generation to generation. The southern resident killer whales know how and where to hunt for salmon, and they pass that information on to their calves. The Bigg's killer whales (also known as transients) know how to hunt sea mammals, such as seals and sea lions, and they pass that information along, generation after generation, possibly for millennia. A 2010 genetic study showed that Bigg's killer whales, which often hunt in the same waters as the southern resident killer whales, have been separate from other killer whale populations for 700,000 years.

Whales have language. And they sing songs. The long and complex songs of humpback whales have fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike for decades, but they're not the only singing whales. Most recently, scientists working near Svalbard in the Arctic catalogued 184 different song types sung by bowhead whales in the icy dark of an arctic winter.

Whales are like us in another important way -- they're mammals and they breathe air. However, over millions of years, their bodies have adapted to life in the water. Their nostrils moved to the tops of their heads and became blowholes that can suck in a lungful of air at the water's surface. The passage leading from their mouths to their lungs -- that's what lets us breathe through our mouths -- closed off so that they could gulp up food under water without drowning.

A Bigg's killer whale, its blowhole clearly visible, swims past
 the shore of Vancouver Island. Alan Daley photo
And they learned to sleep without breathing in water instead of air. A whale or dolphin rests only half its brain at a time. The other half stays slightly awake in order to make sure the animal opens its blowhole to take a breath of air and closes it to keep out water. After the sleeping half of the brain has had a thorough rest, it takes over breathing and swimming duties while the other half sleeps. Scientists call this method cat-napping but whale-napping seems a much better name!

That's just a taste of the amazing things we've learned about whales. If we can avoid harming them further with noise, pollution, fishing gear entanglement, ship strikes, habitat destruction, and all the other dangers we have created for them, we could learn so much more.

5 Apr 2018

Science Humour both profound and practical

There was a new Bloom County comic put out this week on Twitter and Facebook by cartoonist Berkeley Breathe. One of his characters, young Oliver Wendell Jones, is a science fan. The kid makes a nice contrast to the central character of Opus the penguin. This comic managed to have a blend of science humour that was both profound and practical. Inventions are wonderful things! You can check out the image here at this link.