Messing about with empathy
Blue, the velociraptor in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, shed a tear. My hubby said that dinosaurs don’t cry. I disagreed, and then he asked if birds cried. I didn’t know but wanted to find out. As with all answers, it is complicated. Birds do have tear ducts, and they make tears to protect their eyes.…
I learned something cool today. I was listening to the Shortwave podcast and they talked about an online program called Skype a Scientist. It was originally designed for classrooms but they have added a way for families to participate. Is your daughter dinosaur crazy, or does your son want to know everything about caterpillars? Through…
I was listening to 60-Second Science and learned about a helpful website. Covidnearyou.org is a way for everyone to help map the disease. It is run by the Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. All you have to do is click whether you feel good or bad. It is just as vital for you…
I was coloring a dinosaur yesterday. Thanks to my cats, I finally opened my new box of 152 Crayola crayons. Since then, I’ve been doing a lot of coloring. Yesterday, it was a dinosaur scene. Coloring the sky, sun, trees was easy, but I wondered for a moment what color to make the brontosaurus. I…
Happy Pi Day!!! I’m running 5 miles today, but if I had planned it better, I’d run 3.14 miles. Darn, training plan. However, I’ll celebrate in other ways, like making Irish soda bread (it has a circumference!) If you listened to the Footle and Grok podcast yesterday (I’d love for you to subscribe), you learned…
I love learning about old science, preferably billions of years old. However, I never really thought much about the beginning of the Earth. My textbooks showed lots of small rocks smashing together to become bigger rocks. They eventually became planetoids and then planets. This took 10-15 million years, which is pretty fast in geologic time.…
The birds are coming! The birds are coming! Spring is not here yet, but in my corner of the world birds are returning. I hope they haven’t jumped the gun, but it’s nice to hear them as I run each morning. When it comes to migration, birds are the masters. Here are some mind-blowing numbers…
We live in a remarkable time. The Moon is moving away from the Earth at a rate of 1.5 inches per year. That means that in 600 million years, there won’t be any more solar eclipses. What a bummer. This may seem unimportant since humans won’t probably be around in 600 million years. But it…
I love all animals, but I am glad that I only have cats. My hubby used to be a dog person, like an “all cats should die” dog person. Now he is a cat person! So when he heard about a podcast discussing cat behavior, he sent it to me. Short Wave is a ten-minute,…
How long does it take to bake a cookie in space? This is not an easy question to answer. First of all, you can’t just make cookie dough on the International Space Station (ISS) because flour and sugar in zero gravity would just float around and not stay in the bowl. There would also be…