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. Some birds that live near saltwater secrete an oily tear for the same reason.

So they could cry if they wanted to, and since birds are dinosaurs, dinosaurs have the ability to cry too. Even Blue.

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 this website, you can talk to an expert in whatever field interests your family. This is not a lecture. The scientist you skype will answer your questions in real-time. How cool is that?

This is also a great way for kids today to see possibilities. When I was a kid, the only scientists I saw were Mr. Wizard or in the movies (I’m sure Christopher Lloyd’s character in Back to the Future was a role model for budding scientists.) Nowadays scientists come in all shapes and sizes and really want to share their work.

I hope you will try out Skype a Scientist. It can turn staying-at-home into a virtual field trip.

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 to report that you feel healthy as well as sick, so everyone should go to the site.

I feel fine, so I don’t know what questions are asked if you don’t feel good, but I hope this collection of data can help people make the best policy decisions possible. Please take a moment and go to covidnearyou.org.

Thanks.

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 ended up using a nice, safe bronze, and I think he turned out well. But it made me wonder how professional artists know what color to make their dinosaurs.

For the most part, artists rely on modern animals for inspiration. Dinosaurs who lived in forests might have been a similar color to animals that live in forests today. But that still leaves a great deal of variety.  Think of all the different birds (dinosaurs living today) out there. Non-avian dinosaurs might have been just as colorful.

New research has uncovered some answers. Some fossil feathers and skin have melanosomes, and these small organelles carry pigment. Modern birds also have these, so scientists know that these pigments come in black, grey, or red. By comparing the melanosomes on modern birds with those on fossil feathers, some dinosaurs show their true colors.

However, fossil feathers are very rare, and bones do not have melanosomes, so without time travel, we make never know the actual color of most dinosaurs. However, the more fossils we study, the more we will learn. Perhaps someday I’ll know the real color of the brontosaurus I colored. Until then, the bronze I chose looks good.

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 all sorts of fun pi facts. Have you ever wanted to learn more digits of pi? Me neither. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy a song about it.

Check out this video by ASAP Science, where they sing one hundred digits of pi. I have this song on my phone, and no matter how often I listen to it, I can’t sing it. However, it’s a catchy and fun song. Today is the perfect day to share it with your friends.

Eat some pie, sing a pi song, and learn a few more digits of this infinitely interesting number. And remember pi are square, not round.

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. Made sense to me.

An article I read reduces that number quite a bit. A new theory proposes that the Earth formed not slowly with rocks smashing together, but quickly with dust becoming planets. This process would have taken only five million years.

If the history of the Earth was a 24-hour day, the formation of the Earth would be five to fifteen minutes in the old theory and a minute and a half in the new one. That’s a lot faster.

If you want to learn the science behind these dates, the article goes into more detail.

What I found interesting was the conclusion. If it takes so little time to make a planet, then perhaps the number of exoplanets out there is higher than we first thought. And the more exoplanets there are, the better chance one of them has life, or even better, intelligent life. And wouldn’t it be cool if we found it?

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 about how far and how fast birds go. The farthest run I’ve done this year is 5 miles. I guess I’m not a very good bird.

Bird Migrating Facts: 

• Around 4,000 species of birds migrate, or about 40% of all the birds in the world
• Bar-headed geese can reach an altitude of five and a half miles while flying over the Himalayas
• In 1975, a Ruppel’s griffon vulture once collided with a plane at 37,000 feet
• Arctic terns hold the record for the longest bird migration. They fly more than 49,700 roundtrip miles in a year going from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back
• The northern wheatear only weighs an ounce but travels 18,000 roundtrip miles between the Arctic and Africa
• The great snipe flies over 4,200 miles while traveling up to 60 mph
• The bar-tailed godwit has the longest recorded non-stop flight, 7,000 miles without stopping

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 reminds us of something important. We have total eclipses right now because the Moon is the perfect distance from both the Earth and the Sun.

If the Moon is moving away from us, then in the past, it was much closer. When there was an eclipse back then, the Moon would have covered the Sun completely, and the sky would have gone dark without anything to study.

Imagine our earliest ancestors a million years ago, watching the sky go dark and the Sun completely disappearing. That must have been distressing. We are lucky that we live today and can experience the Moon covering the Sun just enough so scientists can learn from the event.

Like I said, none of us are concerned with what will happen 600 million years from now, but for the planet, it’s hardly anything. Think of it this way,  To the Earth, 600 million years is the same as six years to humans. It’s not any time at all.

I wonder what our descendants will think. Hopefully, they’ll have remarkable eclipses on whatever planet or moon they live on.

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, daily, scienced-based, NPR podcast, not much different than my podcast (except sponsored by NPR, so the podcasters get paid.) Both podcasts encourage people to feed their curiosity, and each episode is on a different topic.

If you think cats are the best, take a listen to this episode of Short Wave. If you believe dogs rule and cats drool, you still might like this episode because some of the hosts are dog people.

And of course, if you like Short Wave, you should try the Footle and Grok Podcast. I’ll have to do a cat episode someday.

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 baking challenges. On Earth, the hot air in an oven moves around and heats the dough. This doesn’t happen in zero gravity. Likewise, gravity makes the cookies spread out and flatten, so a cookie in space would look different without a lot of baking changes.

Last November, these issues were tested. A tin of DoubleTree (the hotel) cookie dough and a zero-gravity oven were used on the ISS to bake cookies. (Here is a short video about what the oven looks like.) It was an interesting experiment.

First of all, they baked five cookies, one at a time. Each one was cooked at a different time and temperature. The first one was undercooked; the other four smelled like baked cookies. Unfortunately, the astronauts couldn’t eat the cookies. They were put in individual containers and sent back to Earth for testing.

Here is the answer to our opening question. The cookies on the ISS were baked between 70 and 130 minutes at 300 and 325 degrees. The best looking cookies were numbers 4 and 5 that baked for 120 and 130 minutes. Two hours!!!

This may seem like a frivolous experiment, but if we are going to have colonies on the Moon and Mars, it will help to have real food, including cookies. Plus, a fresh-baked cookie is better then one that’s been in a box for months, especially if you have a bag of milk with a straw to go with it.