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!

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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.

So You Want to Work with Animals.....

Post by Helaine Becker

A lot of kids love the idea of a career working with animals. Who can blame them?Animals are cute, cuddly, funny, fascinating. But they're also hard to take care of!

For my recent book, Worms for Breakfast: How to Feed a Zoo,  I got the chance to interview several people who do work with animals, every day. They told me what their favorite parts of their jobs were, what they liked least, and how they got the job in the first place. While most agreed that their jobs had lots of hard bits, they all agreed that working with animals was everything they'd imagined it would be: challenging, exciting and rewarding.

Dr. Deb Schmidt, a Nutritionist at the St. Louis Zoo, had this to say, "The fun part of being an animal nutritionist is helping to solve problems. I like to figure out what nutrients animals need and at what levels. Sometimes, domestic animals (like cows, horses, chickens, dogs and cats) give us clues about what wild animals similar to them may need. But the diets of other animals (such as apes and reptiles) can be harder to figure out."

Dr. Schmidt went on to say that if you want to become a zoo nutritionist, you should be good at math and science. A strong background in biology or biochemistry wouldn't hurt!

You can find out more about careers that involve science and working with animals, check out Worms for Breakfast.  But also check out Sci-Why's very own giant list of super science resources (click the tab, above). You'll find a listing there specifically for Careers in Science.

Another Book Birthday!

Have you ever wondered what to feed a platypus? Or how to keep a lion from getting bored with a never-changing menu of antelope, antelope, antelope? Zookeepers certainly have, and for them it's literally a matter of life and death.

Keeping hundreds of different animals fed and healthy is a mammoth job. And I wanted to know how they did it. Do zoos have boxes of index cards with favorite recipes? And if so, what are they?

The answer is yes, they do, and all last year I chatted with animal nutritionists at zoos all over the world to find out their go-to recipes and secret ingredients. I also found out more about the issues zoos are facing:  about whether or not animals should be kept in captivity, and what to do for animals whose habitats are disappearing. I learned about best practices in animal and habitat conservation, breeding and more.

For example, do you know how  - or why - it is important to hand-rear flamingo chicks in captivity?
You'll find the answer, and a recipe for a yummers smoothie here! You'll also find out why pandas get birthday cakes and tigers get popsicles ---really.

Worms for Breakfast: How to Feed a Zoo is published by Owlkids Books and is a Junior Library Guild selection. You can find the book at your favorite bookseller anywhere in North America.

Hockey Science

Today's post is just for kids.
It's the playoffs for Lord Stanley's cup and even though my hockey team was knocked out in the first round, it doesn't mean I've given up on the game.

My writing partner, Leslie Johnstone and I have a new book on Hockey Science, soon to be published by Scholastic Canada.  The book has 25 really cool experiments but some activities which we thought we terrific were cut by the editor.  We aren't complaining, but this was one activity which we really liked. So- rather than lose an experiment, we thought we would share it with you. 

The image above is the cover for the book. Great job by a fabulous illustrator.


Tasty Ratios
You may not have thought about this, but hockey involves a great deal of math. Anytime you quote a player’s statistics or recite win/loss percentages you are using math. Here’s a tasty way to think about advantages when a team is short a player.

NOTE: If you have a food allergy check with a parent before using any of the ingredients

You Will Need

4 pieces of round pita bread or small round tortillas
Peanut butter or almond butter (do not use if you have nut allergies)
Honey
Butter knife

What To Do

1 Spread peanut butter or almond butter over the pita or tortilla and drizzle a bit of honey over it.
2.  Use a knife to divide two of the pitas into 3 equal sections. Cut the pita and set aside 4 of the 6 sections.
3.  Use a knife to divide the other two pitas into 4 equal sections. Cut the pita and set aside 5  of the 8 sections. Which gave you the greatest servings of pita- the one cut into thirds or the one cut into fourths?
4.  Eat the pita hockey snacks.

What Happened?

You have two pies. Someone offers you 4/3 of the pies or 5/4 of the pies. Which offer would you choose to receive the greatest serving of the pies? You discovered that 4/3 is greater than 5/4. But what does that mean for hockey? Consider power plays: If a team is playing 4 against 3, it means they have a greater advantage than if they were playing 5 against 4.

Did You Know?

You also created a great science snack. The pita provided a carbohydrate and the peanut butter gave you a protein. 

 Your body needs carbohydrates and proteins after a strenuous workout. In fact, nutritionists recommend that you have some kind of carbohydrate such as fruit, or juice shortly after exercising. This gives you more energy and helps to restore your levels of glycogen, the chemical your body makes to store carbohydrates for later use. Proteins from foods such as nuts, meat or milk give your muscles the amino acids they need to not only recover from the workout but also to rebuild.  It is recommended that you consume both carbohydrates and protein within 30 minutes of a strenuous workout. If you wait longer than that period of time your body will take in or absorb less glycogen.