Tasty Rocks: salt and friends

Salt — that stuff that melts the ice on sidewalks and makes popcorn taste so yummy — salt is a rock! Well, the kind in your salt shaker is rock-y. There's also salt dissolved in the oceans. It is dissolved rock! A mineral, actually. 

Salt is mined just like rocks too! It takes huge mining equipment like front loader shown in the photo of a salt mine below. 

Is salt the only rock that is tasty?

Big machinery cuts salt out of Iran's gigantic salt mine on the Silk Road in Semnan province.

Well, many rocks do have a taste. OG geologists used to use their taste buds to help identify rocks. Like, for instance, they could ID a rock because it tasted more bitter than its lookalike. Like halite does vs natural sodium chloride (table salt). Of course, tasting rocks is a bit of a gross way to identify them. It's not always safe, either! Some very hard substances can hurt you.

Lead is a harmful but useful rock-like substance. It was used in things like weights, pencils, and even paints. It tastes a little sweet. In fact, one of the old names for lead is "sugar of lead"! Problem is, lead causes brain damage that makes it harder to think. It is not safe to lick lead!

Lead isn't used in paints or pencils anymore. It hurt too many people and animals. Lead isn't used in fishing weights either, now. When people have to work with lead to build things today, they wear a lot of safety equipment to make sure that no lead gets on their skin or in their lungs. (See the lead safety instructions.)

Besides salt, gypsum is a rock we eat. You might know it as drywall, the sheets that make the walls in your house and school. That white crumbly gypsum is used in making beer, flour, ice cream and cheese! It tastes like — well‚ it tastes like drywall!

Here are some other rocky substances that have their very own flavour:

Borax — sweet but works as a cleaner, it is not a food

Chalcanthite — sweet but poisonous

Epsomite — bitter

Glauberite — salty and bitter

Hanksite — salty

Melanterite — sweet, puckery and metallic

Sylvite — bitter

Ulexite — alkaline (more soapy)

The Cold Truth about Ice

You know a lot about water already because it’s such a big part of your life! Ice is what we call water when becomes a solid, and it’s a really important part of life on Earth. 

Three truths everyone knows about solid ice water

• it solidifies at 0°C, and is the basis for the temperature scale 
• its solid floats just above its liquid, with 90% below the surface 
• it expands as it solidifies, unlike most every other substance

The water in this drink burst the can when it solidified.

Seven things you know about water but may not have thought about 

• water colder than 0°C continues to run as liquid in rivers 
• ice is bendable 
• ice can be clear or opaque 
• salt lowers the freezing temperature, that’s why salt melts ice, but the salty oceans still form sea ice! 
• the calorie and joule measures are also based on water’s properties 
• ice takes the shape of its container, but 18 different shapes can be found inside that ice —most often, ice particles are shaped in hexagons

• ice can make shapes like feathers, sheets, columns, caps, bergs, balls (like hail), snowflakes, and many more!

Ten totally cool things about solid water

• ice can form straight from gas, without going through the liquid phase—snowflakes can form this way 
• water can stay liquid below freezing, especially if it’s under pressure, moving, has air blown through it by a “bubbler” near boats, or even if it’s very still 
• “supercooled” liquid water will freeze right before your eyes with the slightest vibration

• 
  the salt in sea ice collects in pockets that melt and drain, so the salt content of sea ice is much lower than the water it came from 
• ice reflects 90% of the sunlight and can give you a sunburn in winter!
• the oldest ice on Earth today (under the Antarctica ice sheet) is about one million years old! That’s about 12 500 human lifetimes, or 40 000 polar bear lifetimes! 
• ice traps air when it forms, so by examining old ice, scientists can learn things about the old air and other climate details 
• ice can get thick enough to drive on, and some towns way up north use ice roads to drive goods to their stores 
• one of the oldest sailing clubs in Canada actually started as an ice-boating club! 
• ice was harvested from lakes and rivers in winter for use all year until the late 1800s—it’s still harvested today to make sculptures

One lie about ice

Dry ice isn't ice at all. It's made from frozen carbon dioxide (that's CO2, like you breathe out), not water! And breathing in too much of it can be deadly.

Try It Yourself! Become an Ice Bender 

Next time there's a thin layer of ice on a pond or lake, skim a small rock out onto the surface. Keep skimming rocks out until the weight of them starts to bend the ice down, but not break it. How much will it bend? Don't walk on that ice!

Beaver Buddies

These fuzzy vegan chonkers are full of personality and vital to the ongoing health and diversity of forests and waterways. Their forestry and dam building efforts filter water, create wetlands, and make room for the next-in-line trees and bushes. All of that encourages more types of animals to come.

Though the beaver in this picture was so chill that it popped up to check out my kayak, most of the time the only notice of a beaver is the sound of its big flat tail slapping the water in warning as it dives to be alone.

Bonch o' Beaver Facts

• 2 to 4 babies (kits) each year
• live in family colonies until at least 2 years old
• grow to 3 ft long and 40 lbs on average
• orange teeth because of iron in the enamel covering
• teeth never stop growing
• hold breath 15 minutes underwater
• webbed feet help them swim up to 8 km/h
• vegan diet includes bark as well as water plants like lily pads and cattails
• tireless builders, they seem motivated to stop the sound of running water
• see-through eyelids help them see underwater
• closeable nostrils and ears keep water out, as well as lips behind their teeth!
• very important in the fur trade that was key in founding Canada
• build enormous dams that can be many meters tall — the longest found is 850 m, and it's right here in Canada!
• live up to 12 years in nature
• home is a lodge pile of sticks and mud that can keep at 10°C even in the coldest –40°C of winter
• like scritches, just like a cat

The Plant You See Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

When you look at an iceberg floating on the ocean, you see just the top bit. Tucked beneath the water lies the other 90% of it—the hidden behemoth. Would you believe that looking at a plant could be the same? It's hard to imagine that when looking at house plants. Their pots are so tiny! But out in the wild, the root system of a plant can extend for metres and metres—as tall as you are— even though the leaves and stems and flowers may be only a few centimetres high.

This plant, liverwort or "church steeples," stretches 51 cm above ground—barely brushing an adult's kneecaps. That's the part you see. But under the earth, it extends its roots down three times that far, and out 69 cm in every direction!

In folklore from different countries, this common agrimony was said to ward off witchcraft or to make someone sleep as long as it was beneath their pillow.

Three researchers in Austria literally unearthed these findings over the last 40 years by digging out the fragile roots of plants with a tiny jeweller's tool a lot like what a dentist's hygenist uses to clean teeth. 

Imagine spending 40 years digging in the dirt with these fine "scribers".

Below is the researcher's drawing of a liverwort's roots beneath the earth. The 1000 drawings they created showing the incredible reach of a plant's roots can be seen online in the seven volumes of the Wurzel atlas. 

Illustration of Agrimonia eupatoria's root system reaching 155 cm into the ground and 69 cm out from the centre.

To explore all 1000 of the root drawings, visit the online collection.

Did You Know! The same is true of mushrooms and other fungi too: what we see is just the tip of their iceberg. Check out this earlier article on the blog.

by Adrienne Montgomerie 

Seagulls Don't Exist

That white and grey bird with yellow legs, squawking for your French fries? Not a seagull.

The patch of birds on the pier, chiming "Mine! Mine!" Not seagulls.

The majestic bird, diving head first for a fish: not a seagull.

If you aren't near the sea, you might as well call them baygulls because even though everyone talks about "seagulls," they're not a type of bird—not a genus, family, order, or class of birds—they simply don't exist. What we're actually seeing are several kinds of birds in the order Larus. In any one place, you're probably looking at a dozen different species! Some of them aren't gulls at all, but terns whose squawking flocks can seat terror in your chest. 

How Many Not-Seagulls Are There?

Point to a seagull and you might be misnaming a

• herring gull
• ring-billed gull
• tern
• kittiwake

Search online for "types of gulls" and you'll see pictures of dozens of different kinds. There are 58 species and subspecies in all.

Seagull Sorting Tips

If you're keen to give a gull its proper name, there are tips for identifying them: size, beak colour or pattern, eye patches, and the colour of their wing-tips are key clues. But don't get too confident! Alts happen between individuals just like they happen between humans, and head and leg colour depend on age, winter vs summer, and whether or not they're breeding right then.

Where you are in the world can help narrow down which types of gulls you're probably looking at, but that doesn't stop birds from passing through unusual areas because they're migrating, blown off course, adjusting to changing climate, or maybe just curious. Your quest will be a long one!

Gull ID is something birders either avoid or get really caught up in. Even a book called Gulls Simplified is 208 pages long! Maybe that's why we call them all seagulls.

Salty Slug Love

Slippery, slimy, oozy slugs; what’s not to love? Slugs can be small and slugs can be as long as your arm! Slugs can be sausage shaped and brown, or they can have leaves, legs, and lots of rainbow colours! They can live anywhere wet, and lots live under the sea. 

Salty Samples 

Sea slugs are a family of boneless animals that contain a particularly fancy looking molluscs called nudibranchs. Usually they’re small enough to fit on your hand, but they can be as long as a sheet of binder paper. Their shapes and colours result in names like “dragon” and “orange peel,” or “sea bunny,” “dancer” and “clown.” Start an image search and you could browse pictures of fanciful nudibranchs all day. There are more than 3000 kinds! 

Pantry Paint Packs 

Like flamingoes get their pink colour from their food, nudibranchs get their colour from their diet too. Check out this little creature that looks like a sheep that rolled in cut grass! It’s the leafy sheeps’ algae diet that makes them green. They store the chloroplasts from their food and that means photosynthesis happens inside their bodies like it does in plants. 

Nudibranch Brunch 

Nudibranchs are carnivorous! They eat algae, sponges, and even other sea slugs. Some also eat coral and even stinging jellyfish, and that makes them a bit toxic. Like the leafy sheep keeps some chloroplasts from its food, the jellyfish eating “blue dragon” keeps some of the stinging cells from its food. Like a lot of colourful things in nature, the bright hues warn us that they can hurt. Touching them can sting. 

Making Nudibranchs 

Any two nudibranchs can make babies together, because they all have both sex organs. They’re hermaphrodites, just like earthworms and most snails are. About 5 of every 100 animal species are hermaphroditic.

A gooey ribbon of fertilized eggs will hatch into nudibranchs that look just like their parents but smaller. Depending on the type, there can be 2 eggs or 25 million! Once they leave the nest, they’ll live just a few weeks to a year. 

Notice Nudibranchs 

To see a nudibranch in person, you’ll have to go out into the ocean because they don’t survive captivity for long. But you’ll find some of these saltwater slugs along every ocean coast — except in the Arctic and Antarctic circles. They love coral reefs. You will find nudibranchs in shallow water and way down in the deep. Look on the bottom, and remember they’re usually very small. Most photos of these creatures are taken with a close-up macro lens.

Fade to ... blue?

Back when the canoe was purple.

Fading: it sure can make things look old. Red patio umbrellas fade to pink; posters fade to monochrome; and twenty years after I bought my purple canoe, I found it was still shiny, but now it was blue! It totally changed colour. How is that possible?

Not all colours fade at the same speed. Red is the least stable, and blue seems to last longest. Why is that?

What Makes Colour & What Makes it Fade

Colour comes from pigment either naturally or by adding it. (Tulip colour is natural and paint has colour pigment added to it.) Air and sunlight break down the chemicals in that pigment colour, though, and so can the other substances the pigment is mixed with, like plastic. Sometimes a reaction creates oxygen, and that bleaches the colour too. Heat and humidity can speed this up; they tend to speed up all reactions.

Colour Wavelengths Matter

The longer the wavelength of absorbed light is (which causes the colour we see), the faster it will break down. Even the longest colour wave is stupendously small; you could fit almost 1600 wavelengths of red light into the width of a human hair.

Blue is in the 400 nm range of wavelength and red has much longer, weaker waves up in the 700 nm range. Red fades much faster than blue.

Grab your crayons or your paints and you will find that mixing blue and red makes purple. That is what my canoe builder did; she told me she mixed red and blue paint to create purple that could not be bought. Since the red part of the mixed paint degraded faster than the blue part, it resulted in a 20-year-old canoe that is blue.

The red faded from my purple canoe, leaving behind only the blue in the mixture after 20 years. The purple underneath peeks out after sanding.

Colour to Last 

If you were making something to sit outside in the sun for a long time, what colour would you make it? Look around you: Does it look like makers tried that? What colour are tarps? How about tents or sail covers?

To preserve cave paintings, we limit their exposure to light, heat, and humidity by limiting how many people can visit them. People bring heat with their bodies and humidity with their breath, as well as lights to view the paintings.

Colour to Go 

What if you wanted to get rid of colour? How could you use what you know about light and oxygen to bleach something?

How are colour fading facts being used to get this laundry bright white?

Virus VS Bacteria — Know your enemy

Viruses and bacteria are the typical things that make us sick. But what are they? The first thing to know is that you can’t see them without a microscope. The second thing to know is that they find a great home in our bodies, where they can grow, reproduce, and spread to new hosts. But in the process, most of them make us very, very sick. Bacteria rots our food, too.

What do viruses and bacteria look like?

Viruses are different from bacteria in many ways, and not all viruses look alike. Bacteria don’t all look the same either. Here are some things that make them different.

	Virus	Bacteria
Size	Smaller: 20–400 nm Need an electron microscope to see them	Larger: 200–1000 nm See them with a school microscope
Structure	Protein coat only, no cell	Single cell with a wall
Living/Non-Living	Between living and non-	Living organism
Reproduction	Forces host cell to reproduce its DNA	Reproduces on its own by splitting (fission)
Prevention	Fight with vaccines and hand washing	Fight with hand washing
Recovery from infection	Heal with antiviral medications	Heal with antibiotics

Images by Arek Socha from Pixabay.

How do you fight an infection of virus vs bacteria?

Viruses and bacteria that make a home in your body can make you sick. The solution for each is found right in the name: Anti-biotics fight the biotic, living bacteria. Anti-virals fight the viral infection caused by viruses. But not every virus and bacteria has a medicine to fight it.

An antibiotic cannot fight a virus, and vice versa.

Not all bacteria are killed by the same antibiotic medications.

Not all viruses are killed by the same antiviral medicines. Medicine has to be matched to the specific problem.

Amazing fact: Bacteria can catch a virus!

Some viruses can be prevented by taking a vaccine before you are exposed to the virus! Each vaccine fights a specific virus. Flu vaccines change every year to match the particular type of flu that is spreading that year, since flu (influenza) is a whole family of viruses. In Canada, most people take a group of vaccines when they are children, to prevent once-common deadly illnesses like chickenpox, measles, and mumps. When we travel to foreign places, we can take vaccines to prevent picking up viruses that are widespread there; hepatitis and malaria are common viruses that travellers get vaccinated against.

Animals get vaccinated against viruses such as rabies. Viruses and bacteria make animals sick too, but not always the same ones that make humans sick.

Your doctor will determine whether it is a virus or bacteria that is making you sick. Or it may be a different illness! They will prescribe the right medicine for the job, if that is an option.

Amazing fact: Some kinds of bacteria are good for you! Probiotics are an example of bacteria that are helpful in your stomach.

Eat like a bird? Better get started!

If you ate like a bird, you'd take in more than 16 kg (35 lbs) of food every day!
Saying someone "eats like a bird" is supposed to mean they eat very little, but that's based on a mistake: birds actually eat a huge amount. Up to half their body weight every single day! While you may see birds take one seed at a time from the bird feeder, they come back often, and keep eating all day. That adds up.
What would it look like if you ate half your body weight? Let's look at the choices for a typical 32 kg (70 lb) 10-year-old:
1.5 large bags of potatoes
13 boxes of Foot Loops
20 heads of lettuce
67 Big Macs
235 scoops of ice cream
So, if you're going to "eat like a bird", you'd better start eating!

Just be glad you're not a pygmy shrew. They have to eat 1.25 times their weight every single day!

Photo by Andrew via CC BY-2.0

Image of cardinal by GeorgeB2 from Pixabay

Are You Taller Than Your Mother? Was She, Too?

“I hate holidays. Everyone always asks me how tall I am,” my son said, looking down at me. At only 13, he could already reach the top kitchen shelf without a step ladder.

“Well why don’t you ask it back?” I said. “Ask if they’re taller than their mom.”

We got great stories from the aunts and uncles that Christmas. And we discovered a surprising thing: even the shortest of the aunts and uncles were taller than their parents!

x

How can kids keep on growing taller than their parents? Where will it end? Will doorways become hobbit holes? Will humans end up being giants!?

By some measures, we are getting taller and taller. By other measures, average height hasn’t changed much since the Stone Age (well over 8000 years ago). Back then, the average European adult (that we have unearthed) was 168 cm tall. That's only 2 cm shorter than today.

Some of the height humans have gained comes from eating better. Nutrition is getting better understood over time, and it has gotten much easier to get a variety of good foods all year ‘round. Kids are also less often, thanks to sanitation and vaccination, so their growth isn't stunted. That makes the biggest difference before age 2, when a body’s pretty much decides how tall it can get.

In the last 200 years, average height has been creeping up. A full 10 cm more for the average adult Earthling in just the last 100 years. (That's confusing, if you remember Stone Age people were only 2 cm shorter than us. But we've only been able to measure about 80 people who lived in the Stone Age.) The data show that this change might be slowing down. The areas on Earth where we find the tallest adults, those people are not gaining height as fast as they used to. In fact, they're practically not getting taller at all. The human body may simply not be able to take in enough nutrients to make us a race of giants.

Even among healthy, well fed people today, adults are a lot of different sizes. Variety is normal; height isn’t a way to know for sure if one person grew up healthy. Genetics has such a big affect on height that where someone is born — their parents’ genetics — makes a bigger difference than their health. 

Sweden is where you'll find the tallest people, and Canadians are only a couple centimetres shorter. Even location differences are not steady: South Asian women have been getting taller much faster than women from anywhere else in the world. 

Women are usually shorter than men. A full smartphone length shorter, on average. This may change too. In some places on Earth, women’s average height is growing faster than men’s. 

Are you going to be taller than your parents? Probably. But the data shows that may be more about them shrinking than the boundless potential for you to be a giant. We'll talk about the incredible shrinking ancestors in another post.

We're Almost Out of Sand

By Adrienne Montgomerie

Windows, concrete, silicone chips, and even water filtration systems have one thing in common, and it’s getting harder and harder to find: it’s sand.

Can you believe that? The stuff between your toes at the beach, in your bathing suit, in your bag… the stuff that is so hard to get rid of, that sticks everywhere. That sand is running out. It’s getting so hard to find that people are even stealing it, turning the sand business into a crime: a “sand mafia” that will kill to protect their sand supply.
“But what about the desert?” you ask. Well, there are two reasons desert sand can’t be used to make modern products:

1. Desert sand is too round and smooth. River sand, worn down by water has the best shape for making all those products.
2. Deserts are too far from factories. Sand is very heavy; just one cubic meter weighs a ton. That’s as much as small car. And that means the only way it’s affordable to make things from sand is if it comes from nearby — less than 100 km away. 

There is still sand to be mined, but the easy-to-get sand is almost gone. What does this mean for the future? “Sand is actually the most important solid substance on Earth,” says Vince Beiser author of The World in a Grain. “It’s the literal foundation of modern civilization.” Modern life relies very heavily on glass, concrete, and electronics. Reinforced concrete is what made high rise buildings possible. Bridges and huge dams too. Glass is needed for all our smartphones as well as for our solar panels.

We now use more sand each year than we did in the past 100 years, total. “We’re adding the equivalent of eight New York Cities to the world every single year,” Beiser said in an episode of 99% Invisible.

As we search for new sources of sand, we have to look in less easy places, and that means big environmental impacts. Because water’s force shapes the best sand, finding new sand means doing a lot of damage to rivers, lakes, and marshes.

Are there alternatives? Could we use bamboo or recycled materials to make concrete instead? Maybe you will be the materials scientist who finds out.

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Learn more:

“The World is Running Out of Sand,” New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/29/the-world-is-running-out-of-sand

“Build on Sand,” 99% Invisible podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/99-invisible/id394775318?i=1000444077857

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Photo of cell phone on sidewalk by olle svensson used under CC BY-2.0 license.
Photo of sand by Ian Strain used under CC BY-NC-ND-2.0 license.

The Surprising Truth About a 100-Year Flood

The surprising thing about 100-year events is that they can happen year after year, not just once every 100 years. That's because the term 100-year event is about chance (probability), not a schedule. It’s a statistical term that means a 100-year event has a 1 in 100 chance of happening each year.

It's One in a Hundred, Every Year

Think about flipping a coin. There's a 50/50 chance of getting heads each time you flip the coin. But you might actually get heads three times in a row. Or 50 times!
Each year, a river may flood or not. The chance of it flooding to a certain height is 1 in 100, or 1%. But the river may have flooded that high three years in a row. Or more!

Thousand Year Event 

Up on the Rouge River in Quebec, just north of the Ottawa River, there is so much flooding right now that it's a 1000-year event. Such a high water level is 10 times less likely to happen than a 100-year flood. Each year on the Rouge River, there is a 1 in 1000 chance that the water will rise this high — a 0.1% chance of it happening.

Figuring Out the Chances

How do we figure out the chances of an event happening? Meteorologists (weather scientists) need at least 10 years of data to math out the chances. The more data they have (say, 30 years’ worth, for example) the more accurate their calculations are. As climate change brings us more and more wacky weather, they’ll have to keep recalculating the chances. What was once a 1000-year event may now be 10 times more likely to happen. New calculations will tell us; and they’ll have to keep redoing those calculations as the data changes.

Not Just for Flooding

The terms 100-year event or 1000-year event can apply to anything: storms, cleaning you room, or having chocolate cake for dinner in the bathtub. Though that last thing might be a 1-millennium event, maybe you can make it happen this year and next.

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Want to learn more? There’s a thorough but a bit complex explanation on the USGS (“geological service” that studies our planet) website.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
Story by Adrienne Montgomerie 

Happy Birthday to Us... Almost

By Claire Eamer

Last week, I was delving around in old Sci/Why blog posts, looking for a dinosaur photo to illustrate L. E. Carmichael's post on the enormous Tyrannosaurus rex unearthed in southern Saskatchewan, Move Over SUE, There's a New T. rex in Town. A few years ago, I had visited the fossil's home museum in Eastend, a small town set among the low, rolling hills of southwestern Saskatchewan's shortgrass prairie. I knew I had written a blog post about it, but I couldn't remember when.

Well, I found it. And it was longer ago than I realized. In fact, that post, Seeing the Real McCoy... er, McDino, appeared in Sci/Why's first summer, 2011. I also realized we're about to have a birthday. Sci/Why was launched in April 2011. We're about to turn eight years old! There should be cake, shouldn't there?

Not many blogs will show you this, but Sci/Why will. That is dinosaur poo!
Specifically, it's fossilized T.rex poo -- a coprolite, in polite company -- and it's the
first T.rex coprolite ever found. Here it rests safe in a display case at the museum
in Eastend, Saskatchewan. Claire Eamer photo 

The website intro (just over there on the right and up a bit) credits me with the idea for Sci/Why, but the truth is, it started because I'm lazy. A handful of us kids' science writers were at a conference when one of us said, "I think someone should set up a blog about Canadian science writing for kids." Because, you see, there's a lot of it, and it's actually very good. But a blog sounded like a lot of work -- and I'm definitely not in favour of a lot of work -- so I said, as quickly as possible, "Group blog. It should be a group blog!" (You see what I did there, eh? It's the Tom Sawyer you-will-love-painting-this-fence-for-me thing.)

And we did. And it's still going. What you are reading right now is Sci/Why blog post #436. As I write this, our all-time total page views number 436,724.

Want a few more stats? Of course you do!

Our most popular column ever, which also came out that first summer, is How big can an earthquake be? by Craig Saunders. So far it has garnered 40,586 page views, and it's in the top five columns almost every week -- especially if there are earthquakes in the news.

Another biggie from that first year is Joan Marie Galat's post, Why constellations and astronomy are important, from October 20, 2011. It has received 19,885 page views (as of this moment), and it too shows up regularly in the top five.

Both those posts address topics that turn up again and again in the news and in the school curriculum. But Shar Levine's piece on the Eleanor of Aquitaine Sundial is a bit more off the beaten track. Still, it has earned 9,393 page views and counting. And Helaine Becker's rant about American children's publishers shying away from the topic of evolution, A Call to Arms -- and Flippers, Too, has almost as many page views. In fairness, Helaine in full rant is always entertaining.

The big hitters in the page-view stats are the older columns, since they've had time to be discovered again and again. But some of our more recent posts are doing very well indeed. Adrienne Montgomerie's Iceman CSI: Tales from a 5300-year-old man, which dates from October 2016, has more than 2000 page views. So do several of Jan Thornhill's immaculately researched and beautifully illustrated posts. Check out her Colourful Wood: Spalting Fungi from last year to see what I mean.

Over the past eight years, we've had writers come and go as their interests and time constraints changed. Usually there are about eight or nine regular contributors, and a few more people who send in a blog post when they have time. We try to update the blog every Friday -- but we remind ourselves that the world won't end because we've missed a Friday. This should be fun -- for us and for you. We hope it is and continues to be. Happy Blog Birthday to all of us!

Yours fondly, Claire (and the rest of the Sci/Why crew)

An Iceberg of Women in Science

Grace Lockhart was the first woman in the whole British Empire to graduate from a university. It was 1874 when she got a science degree up at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, but it was almost another 50 years before all women got the right to graduate or even to attend classes in Canada (and the UK). Nicaragua started allowing women in university about 100 years before that and Italy started about 700 years earlier. Once women could graduate, they still usually didn’t get credit for their discoveries and inventions. But that didn’t stop some of the brightest female minds from contributing to human knowledge and technology.

We hear little bits now, often in form of stories about the wives who innovated beside their husbands, brothers, and employers, did the field work, catalogued all the specimens, built the telescopes, designed the experiments, or crunched the data. The information is coming out now. Slowly.

Blockbuster films like Hidden Figures, memes that give credit where it is due, and announcements of “all female firsts” like the space walk this month led by Kristen Facciol,

a female flight controller from the Canadian Space Agency give us the sense that there is a whole iceberg of information waiting to be revealed about female scientists throughout history.

scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"

— Robby Kraft (@RobbyKraft) May 3, 2016

My high school science teacher 30 years ago taught me about Madame Curie’s experiments with radiation, but that was the only thing I’d ever heard about a woman doing science. It’s getting easier to learn more about women doing science throughout history: buy books about them; watch movies about them; ask questions about them at the science centre; ask teachers about them. The more interest we show, the more answers will get shared.

Search this blog for “women” and you’ll find several posts. A Mighty Girl regularly posts stories and cool posters about female scientists and inventors and all kinds of other interesting women, both old and current. Brain Pickings has great stories about women in science, as does scientificwomen.net, and you’ll find great summaries on YouTube, too. Take a look around, then tell others the cool things you learned.

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by Adrienne Montgomerie
photo from Pixabay