A Big Book about Really Small Things

A couple weeks ago I reviewed a book about infinity. This week I focus on something a lot smaller - something we can get our hands on (if we want to).

Micro Mania: A Really Close-Up Look at Bacteria, Bedbugs, & the Zillions of Other Gross Little Creatures That Live In, On & All Around You!

By Jordan D. Brown

80 pages, ages 9 and up

Imagine Publishing, 2011

“Try not to panic,” writes Jordan Brown, “but there are billions of tiny creatures crawling all over your skin.” And that’s just outside your body; trillions more of these itty-bitty things – called microbes – live inside your body.

What does that mean? First: you’re never alone. Second: that bacteria, protozoans, viruses, yeasts and other tiny creatures play a vital role in our environment. They break down dead plants and animals, help bread rise, and gobble oil spills. But they can also cause diseases and some, in particular fleas and bed bugs, can be very itchy.

Micro Mania is a big book about very small things. Brown discusses pet pests, creatures in the kitchen, germy sponges, and even the tiny tardigrades that survived a recent trip into space. He also mentions nano-robots that could, in the future, help repair human cells or explore toxic environments. This book is chock-full of great close-up photos, things to try (such as making a plankton net) and informative sidebars, such as how to avoid lyme-disease causing ticks.

For more science resources check out STEM Friday.

Wordless Wednesday

Not the End of the World After All

Sun Dagger, Fajada Butte, Chaco Canyon

Today is December 21, Winter Solstice. If you stand atop Fajada Butte in northwest New Mexico at noon and look through the slits created by three slabs of stone, you will see the sun daggers bracket a spiral chiseled into a sandstone cliff.

Winter Solstice may be just another Friday on our calendar, but for many ancient people it marked a beginning – the return of longer days and a “reset” of the agricultural calendar for the year. This year’s Winter Solstice also marks a new beginning to the “long count” Mayan calendar. Kind of like when you hit Dec. 31 and take the old calendar down and hang a new one. Or like moving into the new millennium which, despite the Y2K scares, seemed to transition well enough.

Still, for the past few weeks NASA scientists have been trying to calm fears about the predicted “end of the world” which, according to some folks, should be happening any time now.

“Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years,” says NASA, “and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.” Asteroids plummeting towards the earth? Nope – though one did pass by pretty close a couple weeks ago.

What about planet alignments? Nope, says NASA. No planetaryalignments scheduled for the next few decades… “and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible.” Major planetary alignments occurred in 1962, 1982, and 2000, and nothing happened then. No Dark Rift, solar flares, or magnetic field reversals either.

As for the Mayan Calendar… chalk it up to a cosmic confusion between the Aztec and Mayan cultures that lived 500 years apart and far from each other.  Dates on the Maya Calendar combine at least two calendars - one covering 365 days and the other 260 days – and reset every 52 years. It also uses a "long count" system that adds a numeral at the end of a cycle to keep a constant count of years.

For the Maya, today is just another Friday. It just so happens to also be a year when several of their calendars reset.Check out more STEM Friday resources here.