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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

It’s Chemical!

By Adrienne Montgomerie

In advertising and in popular writing, especially about health concerns, chemical is used to mean harmful. As science writers and science-literate people, we know that chemical isn’t a synonym for harmful. Not all chemicals are harmful, and besides, everything is a chemical. So how can we, as science communicators, help readers understand the message by using more accurate language?

What writers mean by chemical

When we read chemical, the writer often means

• harmful
• unnatural
• artificial

The truth about artificial chemicals

Some chemicals are good and some are harmful. And some are good because they are harmful. Think of chlorine bleach, for example. It is deadly in large doses, and that’s what makes it useful for disinfecting drinking water. Chlorine bleach (sodium hypochlorite) is an artificial chemical.

There is a common perception that artificial or manufactured chemicals are more toxic than natural ones. You don’t have to look beyond the periodic table to find natural chemicals (or elements, in this case) that are highly toxic: lead, plutonium, and mercury, for example.

The truth about natural chemicals

Yes, natural substances are chemicals. Everything is a chemical! Water is dihydrogen oxide and salt is sodium chloride. The difference between an artificial chemical and a natural one is that the natural one can be found in nature, without anyone making it.

To those who tell me “It’s natural, so it can’t hurt you” (I swear, people really say this to me) I respond, “You mean like poison ivy and peanuts?”

Of course they know that these natural things are quite harmful to some people. But they’ve gotten caught up in some rhetoric and need a little nudge to remember the truth they know.

Even arsenic is a natural chemical. It’s made in Earth’s crust and often makes its way to the surface because of mining operations. Arsenic is a deadly natural chemical. So is the botulism toxin. In fact, botulism is more than a million times more toxic than arsenic.

Synthetic forms of natural chemicals

What! Enter the grey area: chemicals we find in nature but that are manufactured in larger quantities than it would be reasonable to get from the natural sources. Vitamin C comes to mind. So does alcohol. Most synthetics are chemically identical to the natural form.

Some synthetic forms are actually safer than the natural form because of the natural source is prone to being bound up with some less desirable “by-products.”

Better terms

When we are writing or editing, let’s steer toward using terms that promote a better understanding of science, and of the world around us. Avoid using chemical when synthetic or harmful are the intended meaning.

BREAKING NEWS: Sci/Why Bloggers Shortlisted for Major Award

Three of Sci/Why's regular bloggers have books shortlisted for the Canadian Science Writers' Association's 2017 Youth Books Award. The books and authors are:

• Faster Higher Smarter, by Simon Shapiro. Published by Annick Press.
• Inside Your Insides, by Claire Eamer. Published by Kids Can Press.
• Monster Science, by Helaine Becker. Published by Kids Can Press.

The other nominees are To Burp or Not to Burp: A Guide to Your Body in Space by Dr. Dave Williams and Loredana Cunti (Annick Press) and Dinosaurs of the Deep by Larry Verstraete (Turnstone Press).

Living or Non-Living, There Is No Once-Living

As educators, we pay close attention to common misconceptions of our students and readers, and are prepared to correct them. Being human, we ourselves are equally susceptible to misconceptions and errors of logic. This particular one has popped up from more than one source, so I’m going to explain it here.

Readability is very important to educators, and particularly to children’s writers. We try to use vocabulary that students won't get stuck on, preventing them from concentrating on the concepts that are being explained. For this reason, we often use categories of living and non-living when describing the biotic/abiotic dichotomy in science. Biotic means living, and abiotic means non-living.

However, this language sometimes leads into a misconception of associating living with the state of being alive. Dead stuff is still biotic, or living if we’re using simplified language. Lacking signs of life does not make something abiotic. (Texting teenagers, for example, may not appear alive but still remain classified as biotic.)

This becomes less problematic if we apply the categories to groups, rather than to individuals. Lumber doesn’t resemble a tree, but it is still biotic. Trees are biotic components of the world. Similarly, an infertile individual does not get classified as non-living (abiotic). They are classified along with their whole species, as biotic.

Neither is there is a third, “once-living” category—no “once-biotic.” Sedimentary rocks were formed from the remains of living things millions of years ago. In that sense, the components of rocks were once living, but rocks are classified as non-living.

Biotic: things that reproduce, grow, and die, and the waste from these things

• plants
• animals
• microorganisms

Abiotic: not derived from biotic things

• air
• water
• sunlight
• rocks
• etc.

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Photo via US Dept Agriculture, used under CC BY-2.0 license.