Science, My Father and Me

Posted by Vivien Bowers

As a child I spent summers in the BC Okanagan, where my physicist/astronomer father worked at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory while we kids swam in the lake. On weekends when nobody else was around he’d let us climb the ladder high up to the gigantic dish antenna, where we’d perch while Dad in the control room slowly turned the dish to listen to another part of the mysterious universe.

You’d think I might have developed an affinity for science from my father, but no. My degree was in English literature, and science was a bit of a foreign land.

Yet these days I often write about science. I contribute to a school publication called “What in the World?” and often get handed the monthly science and technology story. Nuclear meltdown in Japan. Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Internet bandwidth hogs. Space trash.

I find joy in nailing these science stories, though they are a stretch for me. I peer into pockets of scientific knowledge and challenge my brain to grasp the unfamiliar concepts. Then I write about them, and why they matter, in a way that I hope captures the attention of a Grade 8 audience.

Recently my topic was dendritic cells and their role in our body’s immune system. Canadian-born medical researcher Ralph Steinman won the Nobel prize for discovering these cells. And I learned about them too, one morning, and was almost as thrilled.

The hardest story? The Large Hadron Collider at the CERN Institute in Switzerland. My research took me into the heart of dark matter, anti-matter, string theory… my father’s familiar haunts. Fortunately CERN has a very helpful website. That story has become my benchmark – if I can write about particle physics, I can write about anything.

My father died more than a decade ago, but I feel closer to him as I tackle these stories. I’m no scientist but I’ve realized that I share his intellectual curiosity, rational mind and enthusiasm for new discoveries. I remember the day he told us about black holes – hands gesturing wildly and blue eyes shining. And how, after visiting a neurologist who told him he had an inoperable brain tumour, he demonstrated to us with real fascination how the changes in brain functioning were affecting his body’s movements.

Being a scientist – someone passionate about the how and why of this mysterious universe – gave my father a sense of perspective on his impending death, and some comfort. As for me, I’m grateful to have inherited more than just his blue eyes.

Very, Very Fishy

Posted by Vivien Bowers

In late September, I’m off to the salmon spawning creeks along the west coast of Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands). For the third year in a row, I get to tag along with a fish biologist who is walking the streams to count the returning fish.

F-words
Fishy. Fecund. Fetid. The first time I walked these salmon spawning creeks I dredged up vocabulary I’d never used before. The moist air stinks of rotting fish, bear musk, bird droppings and compost. Hundreds of eviscerated salmon carcasses (which must also be counted) litter the banks. The bears sometimes just tear out the rich fish brains, leaving the rest to scavengers. Crows peck out the eyes, before the eagles chase them off. I’ve seen seagulls so glutted on fish they can hardly take off.

One little, two little, three little salmon...
I scramble after my biologist friend as he makes his way up the creek, eyes alert to shifting underwater shapes and shadows. He tosses a leaf onto the surface of a deep pool, and fish boil to the surface. In amongst the bigger chum there are fleeting dark silhouettes of coho. He uses his little hand-held clicker to record the count.

The rocks in the creek are slippery and scummy. Some of these watersheds have never been logged and we clamber over an obstacle course of moss-covered giant spruce deadfalls. Wading from one bank to another through tannin-brown water, I feel salmon bumping up against my legs.

Do-si-do with Bear
Bears and salmon go together. A researcher on Haida Gwaii found that a single bear will take about 1600 kilograms of salmon from a creek in one season. It will eat only about one half of what it catches; much of the rest decomposes on the forest floor. That’s how bears transfer massive amounts of nutrients from the ocean to the land. They are handy that way.

I appreciate the bears’ important niche in this ecosystem, but it’s a bit unnerving how many of them we meet. Haida Gwaii bears are particularly big. Last year I was on my own, counting fish in a tributary stream, when I came across a large bear scooping fish out of the water. I stomped on a dead branch, hoping to sound like a REALLY BIG bear and scare him off. Instead, the bear was curious and headed towards my noise. Quickly changing strategies, I stood up with a loud, “Hey bear!” He looked startled and fled. I continued upstream, following the salmon's journey deep into the primeval forest.

Vivien Bowers is the author of Wow Canada!, Crime Scene and other books for children. The cartoon panels are from "Swimming Upstream," an episode of the 'WebVoyagers' comic strip, written by Bowers and illustrated by Mike Cope, that appears in each issue of The Canadian Reader, published by LesPlan Educational Services Ltd. Vivien Bowers lives in Nelson, BC.

Digging Up Those Juicy Bones

By Vivien Bowers

 
A few years ago a publisher suggested that for my next book, I should ask kids what they wanted to know. Thus began Crazy About Canada!: Amazing Things Kids Want to Know (Maple Tree Press, 2006), a book that answers questions posed by real-live, squirmy kids from across the country. Some of their queries, like “What is slug slime made of?” or “Why are there no penguins at the North Pole?” just required some deft Internet trolling on my part - although I did have to chase down a penguin sighted off the coast of British Columbia, but it was an escapee from a nearby zoo.

Others questions - the really fun ones - were a lot tougher.

Ever seen a dog sniffing out some really smelly treat? That was me, tracking Scientific Truths. I would dig up the name of some expert on mosquitoes, glaciers or food chemistry (“Why are Saskatoon berries blue?”), track them down and enlist their help.

People loved the idea of the book and were happy to help - whether it was polar bear expert Ian Stirling (“Do polar bears ever freeze?”) or Newfoundland iceberg expert Stephen Bruneau, who told me about lassoing icebergs to divert them from oil rigs, or the various entomologists who confirmed that yes, Canada does have the world’s biggest mosquitoes.

“What is the hairy thing underneath a moose’s chin for?” took me to the Moose Foundation, where I was informed that a moose’s dewlap or bell served no scientific purpose. “Nonsense!” retorted Canada’s moose guru Vince Crichton, professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He proceeded to give me an X-rated explanation about how, during the rut, bull moose make a hollow, pee in it, and then splash the urine onto their antlers and dewlap, the hairs of which stand out so that the stuff can really get in there. The urine then gives off an ‘eau de moose’ smell that drives cow moose crazy. The good professor also sent me his very own CD of bellowing and grunting “Moose Music” which doesn’t bear repeated listenings.

“What are the most important archaeological discoveries in Canada?” Good question - but I couldn’t find any kind of ranked list. I contacted the head of the Archaeological Survey of Canada in the Museum of Civilization. He kindly canvassed his colleagues over coffee break and came up with their list of top picks, which included L’Anse Aux Meadows, Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo Jump and the Bluefish Caves in the Yukon.

"Why is water wet?” This one turned my eyebrows into knots. Where to even start? I used the question as a conversation opener with everyone I met: “Hi! How are you? Why is water wet?” A friend thought maybe it had something to do with chemical bonds, which led me to consult another friend who is a chemist (writers would be nowhere without their friends), who soon had me tangling with dipole-dipole interactions. I discovered that water makes your hands wet because the water molecules cling to them. But water molecules don’t cling to, say, a freshly waxed car or waterproof fabrics. Ingenious. There’s even a liquid that doesn’t make things wet. If you immersed a book in a bucket of this stuff, and pulled it out again, the book would be dry. That’s why it’s used to douse fires that break out in libraries full of valuable books and documents that shouldn’t get wet.

“How do scientists capture neutrinos at the Sudbury Neutrino observatory?” Neutrinos? Unlike many of the bloggers on this site, I have little background in science (the science writing gig sort of happened by accident). Who knew that billions of these neutrinos - tiny solar particles - pass through our bodies each second? Or that two kilometers down in a Sudbury mine there’s an immense geodesic dome filled with heavy water surrounded by almost 10,000 light sensors where scientists from several countries do indeed “capture” neutrinos.

Isn’t life grand?

Vivien Bowers
www.vivienbowers.com
Author of Wow Canada!, Crazy About Canada!, Crime Scene and other non-fiction books for kids. Hey, Canada! will be published by Tundra Books in Spring 2012.

Book Review: Crime Scene by Vivien Bowers

By L. E. Carmichael

Title: Crime Scene: How Investigators Use Science to Track Down the Bad Guys
Author: Vivien Bowers
Publisher: Maple Tree Press
ISBN: 9781897066560
Book Source: library

There are a ton of children's forensic books on the market - including "bookstore" books and those produced for school libraries, over 100.

I've read more than 30 of them.

Many of the books available are clearly written, well laid out, and accessible to kids.  Many contain enough gruesome details to capture the attention of even the most videogame-jaded twelve-year-old.  Many of them are scientifically accurate.  Many of them read like they've used each other as primary reference sources.

That's why Vivien Bowers' Crime Scene was so refreshing to me.  It's got lots of sidebars to help pull readers into the text.  It's got both illustrations and photos, including some rather creepy step-by-step pictures of a facial reconstruction.  It's error free, and it's full of information I didn't find anywhere else, particularly in the extensive "Computers and Crime" chapter.

Other topics include:

• trace and toolmarks
• forgeries
• fingerprints and DNA
• forensic dentistry and anthropology
• entomology 

The book is detailed enough to serve as a reference in report writing, but lively enough to read for fun.  It's even got activities and mysteries kids can solve, using the techniques outlined in the text.  This one gets a definite recommend.

Vivien is one of our contributors - look for her first post next week!

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Cross-posted at Ten Stories Up.