Science Made Cool

Review: Mad Science

When it comes to science projects, I’m hardly a shrinking violet. Testing parabolic motion with ball bearings in high school was boring: why not roll a bowling ball out a second story window instead?  I was sequencing DNA in college before PCR and automation made it easy, and by grad school I’d graduated to designing and building my own experimental equipment. And since I’ve had kids, I’ve made maple syrup in my backyard (4 days to boil down; tasted like woodsmoke), soldered together robots and built a catapult (tho’ just a small one). But I’m not about to try most of the projects in Theodore Gray’s new book, Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do At Home, But Probably Shouldn’t (Black Dog and Leventhal).

Nitpicks: Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed

As a biologist, I have to take issue with three things in Mo Willems’ new picture book Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed.

(1) Naked mole rats are not “a little bit rat” and “a little bit mole.” They are members of the Bathyergidae, a family of burrowing rodents found only in Africa. It’s true that rats are rodents, but they’re in a different family (the Muridae). Moles, on the other hand, are part of an entirely different order of mammals: the Insectivora. Naked mole-rats are more closely related to porcupines and chinchillas than they are to rats.

(2) There is no wise and benevolent Grand-pah Mole-Rat making the decisions in a naked mole-rat colony. Naked mole-rats are eusocial: they live in large colonies led by one large breeding female – the queen. The queen keeps a few males around to mate with but suppresses reproduction in the other members of the colony. Most of the colony – workers, both male and female – guard the colony, collect food, and care for the queen and her pups.

(3) Naked mole-rats never wear clothing.

But the book is funny anyway.

The Importance of Being Visual

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but only because humans are acutely visual animals. Large portions of our brains are devoted to making sense of the information we pick up with our eyes, processing changes in light and shadow, movement, and finding faces in everything we look at. (For more on that, here’s an interesting video from the MIT Museum -- Nancy Kanwisher talking about her research on human visual processing.) Visuals become particularly important in the sciences, where a well-drawn figure can be the difference between clarity and a confusing morass of conflicting data.

Amazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery and Howtoons: The Possibilities are Endless! are two books that are all about the figures.

And in Other News...

Jim's new short story, "Balancing Accounts," appears in the
current (February '08) issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Actually, it's the cover story.

John Joseph Adams interviewed Jim about it, and it's been getting a good reception from readers. Check it out if you get the chance!

Which Ones Were the Animals, Again?

When I picked up Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, I expected a book full of stories about African wildlife, kind of like Wild Kingdom or the National Geographic Channel in print. What I got was better: a light memoir by Peter Allison about the experience of being an African safari guide, warts and all. Although Allison shares plenty of stories about animals, the real f ocus is on the people he met while guiding, from the “bird nerds” who wanted to stop to look at every bird on the drive into camp, to the camera-toting Japanese guests annoyed by the animals’ inability to follow instructions. Sometimes poignant, sometimes outrageously funny, but always entertaining, this book is a quick and rewarding read.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide
Peter Allison
2007
Lyons Press

Wild about...

Some years ago, I had this idea for a children’s alphabet book about endangered animals. I researched it for a while, but I eventually abandoned the project because I couldn’t figure out how to make the book rigorous but not depressing. I’m glad to say that David McLimans manages to do both in Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet.

Friday Parasite #34: A Parasite Book By Dr. Zuk

As the Zygote Games Science Guru, it was my job to pore through piles of scientific papers and technical books looking for juicy details to incorporate into Parasites Unleashed. And most of the books and papers I read through were, to put it mildly, dry. So it was fun to pick up Marlene Zuk’s lively new book, Riddled With Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are (Harcourt, 2007).

A Lifetime of Identification

It’s just the start of the summer, but my kids are already bringing me the insects they find in the yard and demanding to know what they are. Some things are easy – fireflies, ladybugs, or stinkbugs, for example – but if they show up with a larva, or so-help-me a leaf with an egg on it, I’m usually at a loss. And most of the guidebooks in our house are no help, either. They’re great for identifying adult stages, but they usually don’t include egg or larval forms. This is the problem that The Life Cycles of Butterflies by Judy Burris and Wayne Richards (2006, Storey Publishing) solves, at least for a few of the butterfly species you’re most likely to find in your yard.

Curious Footprints

Despite its title, Curious Footprints: Professor Hitchcock’s Dinosaur Tracks & Other Natural History Treasures at Amherst College is not a traditional exhibit-by-exhibit guidebook for Amherst College’s Museum of Natural History. Instead, it’s a companion book that gives the reader a tiny taste of the museum’s long history and its behind-the-scenes contents.

Take a Book to Lunch

Today marks the 207th anniversary of the establishment of the U.S. Library of Congress.  On April 24, 1800, President John Adams approved legislation providing $5000 to purchase books for the use of Members of Congress, as part of the infant U.S. government's move to its permanent seat in Washington D.C.

The first collection was burned by the raiding British during the War of 1812, but Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement -- and more than doubling the size of the library in the process.

Jefferson's spirit still provides the Library's guiding philosophy:  nothing is outside the purview of the Library of Congress.  It collects books about everything.  Nowadays it adds about 10,000 items per day to the collection.