Celebrate STEM at Science Rendezvous!

by L. E. Carmichael, PhD

This Saturday, May 13, is Science Rendezvous! If you're not familiar, Science Rendezvous is a national STEM festival that aims to bring science out of the lab and into the streets. Hosted by universities across campus, it's a unique opportunity for people of all ages to meet scientists and explore real-life science.

And it's 100% free!

This year, I'll be at Science Rendezvous Kingston with three other children's science writers: Helaine Becker, Rochelle Strauss, and Ishta Mercurio. In addition to wowing visitors with STEM displays and activities, we'll be giving readings of our brand new books: mine is Polar: Wildlife at the Ends of the Earth. Visitors will be able to borrow copies from the public library booths that are on site; or, you can buy signed copies of all our books from indie bookstore Novel Idea, which is just a few blocks away.

Can't make it? No problem! Download our free STEM At Home Activity Guide here.

Not near Kingston? Also no problem! Visit the Science Rendezvous website for details of events happening near you.

We can't wait to share our love of STEM with all of you!

Book Awards for Helaine Becker!

One of our own authors on Sci/Why blog, Helaine Becker, announced today (June 16) on Facebook good news about two of her books. She reports:

Forest of Reading awards are being given out today. Thrilled that SLOTH AT THE ZOOM was chosen as a Blue Spruce Honour Book, and COUNTING ON KATHERINE as a Silver Birch Express Honour Book. Thanks , OLA!!!

Glad to hear the Ontario Library Association moved their Forest of Reading awards to an online event, when the pandemic made it impossible to gather in person to celebrate these and other fine books. Ask at your library and local bookstore for books on science and more by Canadian author Helaine Becker.

Congratulations, Helaine!

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)

Some Pleasing Embellishment

By Claire Eamer

Last fall, my sister visited the Galileo Museum of Science in Florence and sent me a photo of a plaque that hangs on its wall. (Of course, I'd rather she had just sent me a ticket to fly over and join her, but I suppose you can't have everything.)

The plaque carries a quotation from Eusebio Sguario, who wrote the first book in Italian about the science of electricity. It was published in 1746 -- and I presume this quote is taken from it:

"In this century of ours, it is an iniquitous crime... to treat matters that bore us to tears. Hence science... should receive from the industrious ingenuity of the writer some pleasing embellishment and entertaining discourse."

Leave aside, for the moment, the slightly archaic phrasing and think about this: almost 300 years ago, someone said that science deserves to be explored and expressed just as gracefully and entertainingly and with just as much artistry as any other subject. And that to give science less than its due is "an iniquitous crime."

(I actually quite like the idea of charging writers of boring science texts with Criminal Iniquity, but I probably won't get much support in Parliament for adding that to the legal code.)

In some ways, Sguario's time was not too different from our own. Science was blossoming, coming up with new information and new approaches to understanding almost faster than people could absorb them. Astronomers were peering at the heavens through better and better telescopes. Naturalists were exploring, sorting, and cataloguing the natural world. Microscopists were staring in wonder at living things so tiny that no one had suspected they existed. And people like Sguario were applying the still-revolutionary ideas of Sir Isaac Newton to the physical world.

Much of that new knowledge was unsettling. It challenged people's understanding of their world and humans' place in it. For some, that was thrilling. For others, terrifying. But information, facts, knowledge -- they're all hard to get rid of once they've been released into the wild. So it's better, as Sguario said, to use a bit of industrious ingenuity to convey that knowledge in a way that pleases and entertains as well as informs.
___________________________________________________

For some excellent science writing for adults, take a look at:

• Hakai Magazine -- a free online magazine with beautifully illustrated and beautifully written stories about the world's coasts.
• Ed Yong's online science stories in The Atlantic -- well-researched and always entertainingly written.
• Richard Flanagan's moving lament in The Guardian for Tasmania's transformation under climate change.

___________________________________________________

Today, scientists are producing information even more prodigiously than were the scholars of Sguario's day. Much of that information is vital to the future of the world as we know it -- perhaps even to our survival as a species. How much more important is it, then, to employ all the industrious ingenuity we writers can muster and spread scientific knowledge through entertaining discourse and with pleasing embellishment, so that everyone can understand the forces that will determine our future? We owe it to science and -- more importantly -- to the world.

So what's that got to do with writing about science for kids, you ask? After all, that's what this blog is about. Well, kids' science writers, like the ones who write for this blog, are all about entertaining discourse and pleasing embellishment. We write about science in ways that are funny, exciting, tantalizing, often gross, and sometimes beautiful. And we apply our industrious ingenuity to presenting science as accurately as possible -- even if we're presenting it to pre-schoolers.

__________________________________________________

If you think pre-schoolers aren't ready for the great ideas of science, check out:

• Elin Kelsey's picture book, You Are Stardust, with delicate artwork by Soyeon Kim.
• Jan Thornhill's charming Kyle Goes Alone, which teaches kids about both sloths and themselves.
• Helaine Becker's Counting on Katherine, a picture book biography that is hitting all the science writing awards lists this year.

__________________________________________________

We are all very aware that our readers are the adults of the future, and that the knowledge we can give them now -- and, more importantly, the sense that science is something they can enjoy, understand, and maybe do -- will contribute to ensuring they, and we collectively, have a future.

That sounds a bit grand, doesn't it? And I guess it's a bit of a rant. But good science writing is worth ranting about. As Sguario said, it's a crime to bore your readers to tears. Iniquitous!

Brand New School Year, Brand New Books!

by L. E. Carmichael

Forget January, for me, September is the start of the new year - the year of learning new things! September is also Read a New Book Month, and we at Sci/Why are here to help you with that task. Discover a new favourite with our freshly-updated-for-2018 Science Book List. Here are some hot-off-the-presses choices for you and your favourite junior scientist. Captions link direct to Amazon.

Bus to the Badlands

Cats

Erupt!

Do Frogs Drink Hot Chocolate?

Hubots

Hungry for Science

Counting on Katherine

Out of the Ice

Solve This!

The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow

Stories in the Clouds

Wild Buildings and Bridges

Celebrate with the Sci/Why Crew!

With such a diverse - and productive - crew of writers here at Sci/Why, it's no surprise we have a lot to celebrate! Here's what our members have been up to:

Joan Marie Galat

Dark Matters, Nature's Reaction to Light Pollution is one of three shortlisted titles for the Canadian Authors Association (Alberta Branch) Exporting Alberta Award

Joan's new book is Solve This! Wild and Wacky Challenges for the Genius Engineer in You (National Geographic Kids). It was the number one new title on the Amazon.ca list: Children's How Things Work Books.

Claire Eamer

What a Waste! Where Does Garbage Go? Has been racking up award nods:

• Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Youth Book Award, shortlist
• Green Book Festival Award, second place 
• Canadian Children’s Literature Roundtables Information Book Awards, finalist 
• Silver Birch Award nomination, Ontario Library Association 
• American Association for the Advancement of Science SB&F Prize nomination 

So has Inside Your Insides:

• 2018 - AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prizes for Excellence in Science Books - Middle Grade Category, shortlisted. More than 4000 copies of a special edition will be distributed to American schools by Subaru!
• 2018 - Prairie Pasque Children’s Book Award, shortlist
• 2016 - Youth Book Award, Canadian Science Writers' Association, shortlist
• 2016 - Lane Anderson Award, Fitzhenry Family Foundation, shortlist 

Claire's non-science picture book, Underneath the Sidewalk, has also been shortlisted for the 2018 Shining Willow Award (Saskatchewan Young Readers' Choice).

Paula Johanson

Paula is celebrating two new releases from Crabtree Publishing: Supercharged Sports and Tech Industry. Catch her at the When Worlds Collide festival in Calgary this August for all the details!

She's also edited three collections of articles for Greenhaven Publishing: Online Filter Bubbles, Student Loans and the Cost of College, and The Armenian Genocide, and completed a practicum at the University of Victoria's Electronic Textual Cultures Lab.

Margriet Ruurs

Margriet will be visiting an international school in Egypt and is looking forward to visiting mummies and pyramids. We hope she blogs all about it!

Helaine Becker

Helaine's Monster Science was a finalist for the Silver Birch Nonfiction award. She's also looking forward to launching Counting on Katherine on June 23 at the Ontario Science Centre.

L. E. Carmichael

Lindsey is thrilled to be working on her first science book for Kids Can Press! She's also recently returned from Hawaii, where she had a great time swimming with endangered sea turtles, learning about Hawaiian ethnobotany (traditional uses of food and medicine plants), and avoiding angry volcanoes.

How Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Saved Lives

by L. E. Carmichael

One of the coolest things about fiction (especially science fiction) is how it inspires scientific discovery in real life. Cell phones - inspired by Star Trek communicators - are a classic example. Edmond Locard is another. Locard was a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes novels, in which the great detective solves crimes using the tiniest of clues. The books were one of the reasons that Locard became a forensic scientist. He not only pioneered the field of trace evidence - microscopic clues - but defined Locard's Principle, "every contact leaves a trace." Meaning that during a crime, physical evidence transfers between the crime scene and the criminal, this Principle the cornerstone of modern forensics.

One of my favourite examples is a case where science inspired art which then turned around and inspired science.

It began during the Scientific Revolution - the era of scientists like Newton and Boyle (who, in addition to defining Boyle's Law, invented the lab report). During a frog dissection around 1780, Luigi Galvani's assistant touched a nerve cell with his scalpel, and the frog's leg jumped. Galvani believed nerve cells conducted electricity - could electricity be the spark of life? Electric shocks couldn't save drowning victims, but they did cause the corpse of a murderer at Newgate Prison to sit straight up.

Mary Shelley was well-educated and fascinated by science, so she probably knew about these experiments. So it's probably not surprising that, when a group of her friends challenged each other to write scary stories, she came up with Frankenstein.

Here's the cool part.

In the early 1930s - golden age of Hollywood monster movies - 9-year-old Earl Bakken saw Frankenstein for the first time. He loved it so much, he went back over and over again, fascinated by the way electricity brought dead tissue back to life. Bakken also loved to tinker with mechanical devices, and once he got his engineering degree, opened a medical technology company in his garage. He repaired equipment for the local hospital and made friends with a lot of the staff, including Dr. Wilton Lillehei.

Lillehei was a pioneer in the field of open heart surgery. After the procedures, about 10% of the patients, many children, needed pacemakers to keep their hearts beating until they healed enough to beat on their own. At the time, pacemakers were so big, they had to be pushed around on carts. They also had to be plugged into the wall. As a result, one of Lillehei's child patients died during a power outage in 1957.

Lillehei asked Bakken to come up with something better. Bakken designed a 4 inch square, wearable pacemaker powered by a 9 volt battery. Bakken tested it on a dog and the very next day, Lillehei connected the wires to a little girl's heart. She not only survived the surgery, her heart grew strong enough that she didn't need the device anymore. Today, Bakken's company, Medtronic, is the largest manufacturer of (implantable) pacemakers in the world.

For more cool stories about medical innovations, check out my children's book, Innovations in Health. And for more on Frankenstein, vampires, werewolves, and sea monsters, check out Monster Science, by Sci/Why blogger Helaine Becker.

New Books, New Awards, New Ways to Get Pumped About Science

by L. E. Carmichael

It's spring and the Sci/Why writers are celebrating. Check out these latest and award-winning books by our team of bloggers!

Simon Shapiro

Simon's book, Faster Higher Smarter (Annick Press) just won the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Youth Book Award! It takes a lot of talent, skill, and hard work to become a world-class athlete. But it takes even more to make a sport better: it takes smarts! And whether innovators are aware of it or not, it takes an understanding of physics, mechanics, and aerodynamics to come up with better techniques and equipment. From swimming, soccer, and basketball to skateboarding and wheelchair sports, Faster Higher Smarter looks at the hard science behind many inventions and improvements in sports.

Claire Eamer

Claire's book Inside Your Insides (Kids Can Press) was shortlisted for the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Youth Book Award!

Her latest, What a Waste! Where Does Garbage Go? (Annick Press) came out in March. It's the history, sociology, science, past, present, and future of human garbage (and even some pre-human garbage). 

Helaine Becker

Helaine's Monster Science (Kids Can Press) was also shortlisted for the Science Writers and Communicators of Canada Youth Book Award! She's also got two new books out: You Can Read (Orca) and Lines, Bars and Circles: How William Playfair Invented Graphs (Kids Can Press).

Paula Johanson

Paula's latest is Critical Perspectives on Vaccinations, a book for high school students from Enslow Publishers. It's a collection of published articles from doctors and experts, as well as court documents and personal viewpoints of ordinary citizens. Stay tuned for Critical Perspectives on the Opioid Epidemic, as well as two kids books on technology in sports and in industry!

Anita Miettunen 

Our newest blogger is also a newly published author! In January 2017, Red Deer Press published Anita's Big Blue Forever. This is a photo-based information book, inspired by the true story of how a blue whale skeleton, buried for over twenty years in PEI, was shipped cross country and reassembled for permanent display at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver, BC. This story is complemented with intriguing facts about blue whales and their environment, and the fascinating process that museums go through to uncover, prepare, and reassemble skeletons for display and study. Big Blue Forever can be purchased through your local independent!

L. E. Carmichael

Lindsey has two new forensic science books for middle readers. Discover Forensic Science (Lerner) starts with crime-fighting cadaver dogs and ends with cutting edge technology in forensics - like a camera that ages blood stains based on their colour. Forensics in the Real World (ABDO) explores careers in forensics, inspiring future Locards... and Sherlocks!

Of Truth and Lies and Getting It Right

By Claire Eamer

In June 2016, a Scottish Facebook site posted a couple of photographs of the gory remains of some strange animal sprawled on a beach. The post text read: "A dog walker out on the shores of Loch Ness has just stumbled across this. Has Nessy been found? Or someone playing a fascinating prank?"

That original post was shared 1,468 times, spreading it far across the Internet. A thousand or more comments piled up below the post. Some people thought it was proof that the Loch Ness monster existed, some spent time and energy pointing out why it wasn't the Loch Ness monster, some got into arguments about the photographs, and lots of people came away from the discussion frustrated and even angry. Some doubtless still believe that the corpse of a mythical monster washed up on that Scottish beach.

A model of Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, gets a scrub.
This Nessie floats in a pond beside a Loch Ness hotel.
Claire Eamer photo

It didn't. The tireless fact checkers at Snopes.com (a great place for hoax-busting) investigated and reported that the monster on the beach was created for a television program. In fact, the original poster admitted as much in the comment thread, but too late. Bad information - essentially, a lie - had already been spread.

The Nessy-on-the-beach post wasn't made maliciously - but this kind of misinformation has consequences. People who want to believe in Nessy won't be deterred by the Snopes explanation or the decades of scientific research that have failed to find any evidence of monsters in Loch Ness. In fact, they're likely to think the photos and text are reasons not to trust science.

And most of those people were almost certainly adults. Plenty of grown-ups have trouble separating fact from fancy, so imagine how hard it is for kids. They don't have years of experience and accumulated knowledge to help them sort it out.

We at Sci/Why are very aware of how important it is to tell kids the truth, to give them facts, to provide information as accurate and understandable as we can make it. That's the information that will help them figure out, now and in the future, what is true and what is not.

We not only think about getting it right. We write about it too - especially now, when the news is full of people debating issues of truth and lies. Here are links to some of our thoughts.

Lindsey Carmichael, Sci/Why's favourite fox-fancier, is both a scientist and a science writer. Recently, on her own blog, she wrote a post - Where Do Facts Come From? - describing the lengthy process scientists go through to discover new information and tell the world about it. Several years earlier, Lindsey wrote another post - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Does Not Apply to Research - this time on how science writers (rather than scientists) tackle getting the information right.

Our resident fungus-enthusiast, award-winning author Jan Thornhill wrote a post about how easy it is to absorb wrong information and how you can go about finding the truth - The Truth, the Internet, and the Number of Bacteria on Your Body.

That bit of wrong information almost made it into my own book on the human microbiome - Inside Your Insides: A Guide to the Microbes That Call You Home. Fortunately, the article Jan refers to was published just as my book reached the final design stage, and I was able to sneak in a correction. Publishers don't like making changes that late in the process, but Kids Can Press didn't even quibble. Children's publishers care just as much as we do about getting it right for the kids.

Finally, the alarmingly prolific Helaine Becker wrote a post - On Books - and "Real Books" - about how the "facts" you know might not be facts at all. And what to do about it.

If you want to know whether a fact is truly a fact, just follow Helaine's example. And Lindsey's. And Jan's. Then we can all get it right, for the kids and for ourselves.

Sci/Why's Book and Website Picks for 2016

By Duncan.co (CC)

Just in time for the holidays! Sci/Why is carrying on the tradition of presenting our best science book and website picks for your holiday reading pleasure.

Here's the latest news and notes from the authors here at Sci/Why:

Claire Eamer says: "Here’s my current fascination: An online interactive map, using data from NASA, that will show you the impact of sea level rise anywhere in the world. You can pick a level from 0 (current conditions) up to 9 metres in 1-metre increments, and then in larger increments up to +60 metres. It’s fascinating to see what even a 1-metre rise in sea level does to areas like the Netherlands or even Delta, BC – especially since that amount of sea level rise could happen within decades if climate change continues at the current pace. The site is at http://flood.firetree.net/."
Claire Eamer's latest science book is INSIDE YOUR INSIDES: A GUIDE TO THE MICROBES THAT CALL YOU HOME (Kids Can Press, 2016), and she has two more books coming out in a couple of months: WHAT A WASTE! WHERE DOES GARBAGE GO? (Annick Press) and a decidedly unscientific picture book, UNDERNEATH THE SIDEWALK (Scholastic Canada)

Helen Mason sent this: "My favourite web site is http://www.sciencemag.org/. Not only does the site have news, science papers, and podcasts, you can sign up for a regular newsletter that puts links to fascinating articles in your Inbox. My favourite book so far this year is The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk by Jan Thornhill. Thornhill's detailed artwork will attract many readers, as will the engrossing but unhappy tale. I particularly like the ghosts of the Great Auks on the final spread."
Helen Mason has authored 34 books, most of them for young readers. Crabtree will publish her A Refugee's Journey from Syria and A Refugee's Journey from Afghanistan in early 2017.

L. E. Carmichael says: "I highly recommend the adult-level science book Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier, by Jeffrey A. Lockwood. Part history, part ecological mystery, the book explains how an insect species that swarmed in the trillions went extinct in a few short decades. The events in the book happened over a century ago, but as we’re currently in the midst of a mass extinction event, the concepts are both contemporary and relevant. Plus, anyone who read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s On the Banks of Plum Creek as a kid will love learning more about the species that devastated her family’s farm."
L. E. Carmichael published 5 children’s science books in 2016: How Can We Reduce Agricultural Pollution?, The Science Behind Gymnastics, Discover Forensic Science, Innovations in Health, and Innovations in Entertainment. Her 21st book, Forensics in the Real World, releases in January. For more info, visit www.lecarmichael.ca.

Joan Marie Galat recently launched her newest astronomy book "literally" in a rocket at the Telus World of Science in Edmonton. Dot to Dot in the Sky, Stories of the Aurora reached 175 metres (nearly 600 feet)! She says, "If you want to launch a book in a rocket, you need to understand thrust, aerodynamics, and other forces. If you want to get your book back, you need to understand ejection and recovery systems! This NASA Model Rocket website is a good place to start."
As well as trying to get her book closer to space, Joan invited Canadian Astronaut, Dr. Dave Williams, to read Stories of the Aurora. He provided this back cover comment: "Having watched the aurora from space, I’ve known the unique thrill of seeing the lights swirl over the planet. Joan Marie Galat captures the science and remarkable folklore of the aurora in Stories of the Aurora, an inspirational collection of tales that makes the reader want to experience their beauty first hand." You can watch the rocket blast off and see book trailers on Joan's YouTube channel.

Try this from Jan Thornhill: "Here’s my website pick: the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature has digitalized 6,000 old children’s books! These include 495 natural history books. Fabulous site to suck hours out of the universe!"
Jan Thornhill has two new books out this year: The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk (Groundwood) and I Am Josephine - and I Am a Living Thing (Owlkids). She hopes to have her website www.janthornhill.com updated this spring. She also continues to write about the really weird and interesting fungi she finds on her blog: https://weirdandwonderfulwildmushrooms.blogspot.ca

Helaine Becker says she's hoping to announce a new science book soon! And she does have a few books coming out this year. A science/math one: Lines, Bars, and Circles: How William Playfair Invented Graphs (picture book, KCP) and You Can Read! (picture book, Orca), which is "a pretty darn funny thumbs up to literacy." We'd expect nothing less!

Adrienne Montgomerie is totally geeky about knowing how things work, whether they're animals or machines or Earth or the universe! What she likes to hear most is "Can I read that when you're done writing?!" <scieditor.ca>
Adrienne sent this recommendation: "My favourite science book is Packing for Mars, by Mary Roach, because it is funny as well as informative, and it talks about a lot of the routine things that make up the bulk of life but that don't get talked about much. It's not all rocket telemetry and innovative fuels — sometimes it's just about how to brush your teeth."

Paula Johanson says, "This week, my favourite citizen science website is The Christmas Bird Count in Victoria: http://www.vicnhs.bc.ca/?page_id=1425. They even have a form that can be filled out by people at home watching the birds at a bird feeder. My plans for Boxing Day just got made. That's the day of the Christmas Bird Count for my town, Sooke.
In August, Paula's science book The Paleolithic Revolution from Rosen Publishing's series The First Humans and Early Civilizations was released. And also this fall release of two non-science books: The Spanish-American War, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a biography from Five Rivers Publishing's series on Canadian Prime Ministers. In January she has two more books coming out: Critical Perspectives on Vaccinations from Enslow Publishing, which is another science book (yay!), as well as Women Writers from the Enslow series Defying Convention: Women Who Changed The Rules.


And my turn: My book recommendation this year is Cattail Moonshine and Milkweed Medicine: The Curious Stories of 43 Amazing North American Native Plants by Tammi Hartung. Not only does this book give you the scientific names of these common plants, but she gives the details of their pre-contact and modern uses as medicine, food, and decor. And my favourite website comes from Claire Eamer's Sci/Why post "Over, Under, and On the Arctic Sea Ice." The Inuit Situ (Sea Ice) Atlas combines cutting-edge science with Inuit traditional knowledge on one of the most important environmental topics of our time.
And for my update: I'm just revamping my website at www.mariepowell.ca with the addition of 16 new books for young readers this fall. With another eight early- and middle-grade books coming out this fall, I should top 40 books in 2017.

What's your favourite science book or website this year? Enjoy these top picks from our Sci/Why authors bunker -- and please leave a comment!

Falalalala -- lala - la - LAAAA!

Posted by Marie Powell

Truth, the Internet, and the Number of Bacteria on Your Body

by Jan Thornhill

Before I started writing and illustrating kids' books, I did a weekly cartoon for Toronto's Now Magazine. I mined what I thought were entertaining factoids out of whatever I was reading or whoever I was listening to at the time, and illustrated these "truths" in scratchboard. I even called it, for a while, "True Stuff." 

Truth be told, I sometimes accepted as truth anecdotes told to me by other people, or things that came from dodgy sources such as supermarket tabloids. I admit, too, that I sometimes even made up some of what I drew. The above cartoon, however, was supposed to be one of the honest-to-gosh fact-based truths I'd come across and copied into my notebook. Perhaps you've heard or read something similar, something like "bacteria in the human body outnumber the body's own cells by 10:1."

Tasha Sturm, a college microbiology tech, got her young son to gently
press his hand on a petri dish full of agar after he had been outside.
This is the fabulous collection of bacteria that grew! (photo: Tasha Sturm)

When I first came across this "teacupful" tidbit back in 1985, without the luxury of having everything at my internet-connected fingertips like I do today (even in the woods, even in the middle of the night, even a hundred miles from the closest big city), my fact-finding abilities were heavily reliant on what I read in books, newspapers, and magazines. Back then, I had to trust what I read, mostly because it was so very difficult to question the veracity of the printed word. How, back then, if I had questioned the trustworthiness my source, would I have been able to verify if it was true? I mean, even if something like the above statement about "a teacupful" of bacteria was sourced from, say, a research paper in an obscure journal, how would I, a non-academic, have been able to access such a thing back then? 

A close-up of the large flower-shaped colony from the above photo
that is probably made up of several million bacteria (Tasha Sturm)

My point is that back then, in the olden days before the internet, I had an excuse to repeat things that were sometimes untrue. Or at least more of an excuse than I have now. (I also seemed to have a heck of a lot more spare time back then, precisely because I didn't have easy access to so many of the scientific papers I now read—but that's a different story.) 

Back to the number of microbes on and inside a human body. I would never have fished out this old cartoon if I hadn't recently come across the following headline (on the internet, of course!): "Scientists bust myth that our bodies have more bacteria than human cells."

Artist Rogan Brown's amazingly beautiful (and intricate!)
hand-cut paper sculpture of a bacterium  (Rogan Brown)

Here's the gist of what's come to light. This 10:1 bacteria-to-human-cell statistic, which gets almost nine thousand pre-2016 hits on Google, is based on a statement published in a review in 1977, a statement which had, in turn, been based on an earlier unsubstantiated calculation taken from a 1972 article. A group of researchers in Israel and Canada now say the ratio is more likely to be, on average, closer to one-to-one. Some people might have double that number of bacteria, some only half. And everyone loses almost their entire microbial load on a daily basis—at least they do if they're "regular," since the vast majority of human's bacteria reside in the colon. So the ten-to-one ratio is actually an academic urban legend.

But there's the rub: I haven't actually read the new study, nor have I read either the journal article or the review from the 1970s that I've cited in this post. Am I lazy, or is it reasonable for me to trust the distilled versions of the paper that have been published on the websites of the journal Nature, the National Geographic, and Scientific American, among others? I can't answer that. All I know is that it's getting harder and harder to figure out what is believable, not just on the internet, but also in contemporary books since so many are now based on internet research. I just hope I rehashed the gist of what I've been reading about the current research without garbling it too much—because I'm obviously as capable as anyone else of modifying what I've read when I rehash it.

Artist Elin Thomas uses felt and crochet to create petri
dishes packed with "moulds" and "bacteria." (Elin Thomas)

Take that original teacupful of bacteria "fact" I riffed off of all those years ago. Even with the mighty internet I cannot find a specific reference anywhere to "a teacupful" of bacteria on the human body. What I have found, though, are two separate references to the mass of all those trillions of bacteria found in humans equalling that of "a teacup Yorkie" or as being "roughly the same weight as a teacup chihuahua." Perhaps I was guilty way back then of dropping a qualifier in my copying down of this cool little factoid! 

More Academic Urban Legends:

If you think spinach is a rich source of iron, read this entertaining paper: 

Rekdal, Ole Bjørn. Academicurban legends, Social Studies ofScience August 2014 vol. 44 no. 4 638-654

Check out our very own Helaine Becker's UBC article that highlights an academic urban legend about how pearls are formed! And if you happen to meet Helaine, ask her about Mendel's Peas.

More Information:

Directions for making a bacteria handprint in agar are contained in the Comments section of Tasha Sturm's original post on Microbeworld.org (N.B. Once the plates are grown they should NEVER be opened!!!!! The colonies on the plate can represent millions of bacteria that could potentially make someone sick. Mold also contains spores that could be inhaled causing serious problems as well.)

Rogan Brown's website with more dazzling cut-paper microbe art

Rogan discusses his science-based art in a short video

More of Elin Thomas's work on Flickr and on Etsy 

And if you want to know all about microbes and the human body, pre-order Inside Your Insides: A Guide to the Microbes That Call You Home, the latest book written by Sci/Why's own Claire Eamer (illustrated by Marie-Eve Tremblay)!

References

Scientists bust myth that our bodies have more bacteria than human cells on Nature.com

Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs, Ron Milo. Are We Really Vastly Outnumbered? Revisiting the Ratio of Bacterial to Host Cells in Humans. Cell, 2016; 164 (3): 337