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"The Science Should Not Stand in the Way"

17/7/2020

Cook Children's Health Care System, Fort Worth TX

At yesterday's White House press conference, Kayleigh McEnany said that "The science should not stand in the way.." when it comes to opening all schools all over the country, as fully as if Covid had never happened. That is Trump's policy because "children and parents are dying from that trauma, too." [Staying home from school.] This lack of comprehension about science in the Trump administration is dangerous. Did "the science get in the way" when we put men on the moon?

I am also distressed over the order to send all data about Covid to Alex Azar's Department of Health and Human Services instead of the CDC, the agency designed to read such data. We are being set up to receive fudged data, if we see any data at all. I hope there is a work-around so the public can be fully informed of the dreadful numbers of Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths that are the outcome of the laissez-faire attitudes of Trump followers who have thoughtlessly swallowed his Kool Aid.

What is the value of education if not to enable people to understand the value of science? If you listen carefully to Dr. Fauci, you see he chooses his words carefully. He tells us that we are still in the process of learning about this novel coronavirus. And until we understand it well enough to create a safe and effective vaccine we must practice age-old behaviors to protect ourselves and society from the spread of this disease. I live in New York where we had the leadership of Governor Andrew Cuomo. Here's our current chart of daily and projected corona virus deaths in NYS.

Every day, during the worst of the pandemic here, Andrew Cuomo gave a PowerPoint news conference explaining the numbers, and emphasizing the values for New York; that we were tough, strong, and loving. Maybe that sounds cheesy but my friends in NYC and my family in western NY are immensely proud of our state. We were blindsided by the infection landing in our international airports, Kennedy and Newark.

We really sacrificed in lock-down and are timorous about abusing the easing up of restrictions because we don't want to lose what we have gained. Cuomo says that we can open up our schools with some restrictions if we keep Covid at bay. All the answers for our state and cities are on that web site.

If we deny the numbers and the science, science tells us that the numbers of infections, hospitalizations and deaths will rise. Exponentially. Wait and see.

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Kids 5-8 bored with COVID? Watch This!

6/7/2020

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My latest book, Why Do I Dry Off?, has just been published. It completes my STEM Play series for parents and kids to do together. Good for children as young as four. My m. o. is to integrate questions about the natural environment of a child's life with simple activities that explore phenomena so that children make discoveries, often non-intuitive. My books exemplify the way scientists think and act. I try to have my readers come to understand why scientists love science.

Most professional scientists have discovered science by fourth grade. I have a scientist son, Josh, who also has a scientist son, Jonny. (My other son, Theo, is an artist, I was once that, too. He drew my logo.)

Here's the link to the three titles:
Why Can I Suck Through a Straw?
Why Do I Dry Off?
Why Does My Ice Cream Melt?

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Survival at a Mountain Top

16/6/2020

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Have you ever heard of a pika? It was a new animal to me. It lives in mountains at 10,000 feet and, as a skier, I have been to its habitat many times but didn't know where or how to look for it.
Thanks to Pika Country: Climate Change at the Top of the World by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent & Marlo Garnsworthy, I am now enlightened. The pika, also know as a rock rabbit, is yet another version of a canary in a coal mine. It requires cool summer temperatures to forage for food, (mostly grasses that dry to become hay) and stockpile enough to stay alive all winter.

"Pikas are specially adapted to live in the chilly alpine environment among
the rocks and plants.
"In fact, pikas are usually only found in the mountains where the temperatures
  are cool. In temperatures warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius), pikas quickly overheat and die."

Pika Country, illustrated with photographs by skilled nature photographer Dan Hartman, is a picture book with intimate images of the pika barking, leaping, squeezing into a small rock crevasse, and carrying a mouthful of vegetation. How did he ever get those shots? Obviously, he had to be there, be ready and be patient.

The poor pika is prey to mountain mammals, like the weasel and fox and raptors, including the golden eagle and the prairie falcon. Added to its woes, its habitat is shrinking due to climate change. Where can you go when you're at the top of the hill and there's no more "up" to go?

The authors are exceptionally good at explaining the predicament by including many other alpine animals and trees that will be wiped out when mountain tops warm up.

They also include an excellent explanation of climate change and what kids (and caring adults) can do to slow down climate change. Maybe it will also create the demise of the winter olympics?

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A Picture of the Coronavirus at Work

16/6/2020

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- CDC/ Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM / Public domain

Above is the familiar, iconic electron micrograph of the corona virus that causes the disease COVID-19. Here's what we can learn from the picture. First, it is a scanning electron micrograph (SEM) that shows the three-dimensional surface of the virus. It is a sphere that is extremely small, 1000 times smaller than the cells it invades. We cannot see it under an ordinary microscope that uses visible light, because it is smaller than the shortest wavelength of visible light. It is one thousandth the size of an ordinary cell.

Under an electron microscope the image is all gray, (like the background) no color. It is colorized later by people who are trained to recognized structures distinct from a gray background so that that average viewer can easily see them. Viruses have no color because the wavelengths of all the colors of the rainbow (visible light) are longer than the virus. So the color of a structure is chosen to stand out by the colorer. We know its size from the magnification of the electron microscope. An electron micrograph captures an image of a specially prepared specimen in a vacuum. It cannot show us a living cell, only a frozen snapshot.

Colored SEM of cells in alveolus of the lung Credit: Prof. Arnold Brody/Science Photo Library

This is a scanning electron micrograph of the healthy cells lining an air sac (alveolus) of the human lung. At the center left and top are two type-two cells typically attacked by the novel coronavirus. They are covered with hair-like structures (microvilli) and secrete a substance that that reduces surface tension in the air sac and prevent it from collapsing. The magnification is x 5,100 at the photograph's 6 x 4.5 cm size.

Image credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases.

This is a colorized scanning electron micrograph of a lung cell infected with the virus the causes COVID-19. They are the yellow dots on the surface of the cell. You can see how small they are compared to the cell, which has many projections to increase its surface area for the exchange of gases (oxygen for carbon dioxide), the crucial job of the lungs to keep us alive.

The spikes on the surface of a COVID -19 coronavirus (you see in the first picture) are proteins that fit like a piece of jig-saw puzzle to receptor proteins on the surface of the host cell. This fools the cell into inviting the infectious enemy through its membrane. Once inside, the coronavirus finds a ribosome,  a small organelle that makes proteins from RNA codes specific to the organism. (RNA is a single strand of nucleotides with the same sequence as the organism's DNA) . The coronavirus, which is basically RNA with a protein protective coating, is able to use the replicating machinery of a ribosome to make copies of itself. In the process, it interferes with the functioning of the lung cell to provide us with oxygen.  The newly minted coronaviruses then squeeze through the cell membrane like tiny buds.

Meanwhile lots more of the virus are being replicated inside the cell. Upon re-emerging outside the cell, each virus particle is now free to infect other cells in the body and be shed from the person in tiny drops of moisture from speaking, sneezing and coughing.

Self-replication is an essential activity of all living things. Is a virus a living thing? Are there any free-living viruses? All it can do is replicate itself in the cells of a living host, which range from the smallest bacteria to us. It doesn't have metabolism, so it doesn't "eat." As long as it doesn't come across an outside environment strong enough to destroy is complicated molecular structure, it will exist (not "live") as long as it needs to exist until it encounters a receptive host.

It's amazing to see the magnitude of the infection in the microscopic world of a single sick cell.

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The Birds.....and the Bees

25/5/2020

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At a time when nature is attacking the human species, it makes sense to look at two other species that have been under attack for many years. First, The Turtle Dove' s Journey: A Story of Migration by Madeleine Dunphy, is a tale of the month-long trip of one small individual turtle dove from his home near London who travels 4,000 miles to winter over in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the back matter, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSBP) began tracking European turtle doves by satellite since 1980, when their population in Europe had dropped by 78% and are still at it, since 1994, with a further decrease to 93%.

The Turtle Dove's Journey is a picture book, illustrated with quietly stunning art by Marlo Garnsworthy. We see the travels of a single, lone bird as he embarks from Suffolk, England in the fall and flies due south arriving at Mali a month later with stops along the way.

"When migrating, the turtle dove flies at night because it is safer. If he traveled
during the day, predators like falcons and hawks could easily see him. But at night time these predators are asleep."

Thus, the reader is invested in the fate of a single bird, as opposed to a traditional dispassionate description of the migration of many. It is this point of view that gives the story its power. A map of the flight path serves as an index of double-page illustrations depicting and acclaiming the turtle dove's rest stops.

The publisher, Web of Life Children's Books, is dedicated to stories of the fragile ecological dependencies of life on earth. They also published Dorothy Patent's At Home with the Beaver, which I also reviewed.

There have been five extinctions of life over the past 3.5 million years. We are now in the sixth. Survival of the web of life is under constant attack. A Turtle Dove's Journey brings Madeleine Dunphy's focus on a lovely, seed eating bird, who routinely travels great distances for seasonal comforts in home territories 4,000 miles apart.

And now for the bees.  Honeybee:The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera is a picture book written by Candace Fleming and illustrated by Eric Rohman, created especially for people that don't think of insects as warm, fuzzy, strong, loving and essential workers. (Yes, I'm channeling Andrew Cuomo.) The essential worker part, in the back matter of this biography of a worker bee Apis, was revealed in 2006 when there was a collapse of honeybee colonies, both wild and domestic all over the world-- a pandemic for bees! It impacted "one out of every three mouthfuls of food in the American diet [that] is, in some way, a product of honeybee pollination--from fruits to nuts to vegetables."

A honeybee colony is an intricate cooperative society that is chronicled in the life of a single female worker bee whose job changes every couple of days. Candace Fleming's lyrical prose leading up to a job that involves the act of flying (which we anthropomorphically think of as worthy of aspiration) doesn't happen immediately. The intense, extremely active, slightly-longer-than-a month lifetime of Apis begins with a struggle to get through the wax cap of the cell in which she developed. "Hmmmmm!" hums Fleming's words. "Now what?" the reader wonders.

Flying is delayed for days as Apis cleans up after her "birth," starts gaining strength by eating a lot of stored pollen, taking care of developing bees in the hive's nursery, tending the queen bee, building the comb for the reception of honey, processing incoming nectar from other bees until she is 18 days old and ready to start flying to collect nectar and spread pollen herself. Her first flight is rightfully celebrated with a double page spread featuring Apis, a lone bee over a field of wild flowers.

Her nectar collection and pollen spreading career lasts about two weeks. During this time:
"She has flown back and forth between nest and blossoms, five hundred miles in all.
"She has visited thirty thousand flowers.
She has collected enough nectar to make one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey."
In the natural order of things, she dies but is replaced by a new worker bee struggling our of her wax cell.

Both Fleming and Rohman are to be commended on this distillation of enormous amounts of meticulous research into lyrical prose and vivid, detailed art that pays homage to an insect whose colonies contribute mightily and essentially to the web of life.

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"The Science Should Not Stand in the Way"

Kids 5-8 bored with COVID? Watch This!

Survival at a Mountain Top

A Picture of the Coronavirus at Work

The Birds.....and the Bees

Vicki Cobb

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"The Science Should Not Stand in the Way"

Kids 5-8 bored with COVID? Watch This!

Survival at a Mountain Top

A Picture of the Coronavirus at Work

The Birds.....and the Bees

Vicki Cobb

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​Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives

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