Kid Scientist

We went to the beach last weekend and got a sunburn on a spot we missed with sunscreen. What causes sunburn, and how does sunscreen help stop sunburns from happening?

When you’re outside, your skin is exposed to ultraviolet radiation (sometimes called UV radiation) from the sun’s rays. Even on cloudy days! Covering up your skin with long sleeves or a hat can help protect it from UV radiation and sunburn. Sunburns can be really painful, and can cause some types of skin cancer if you get too many of them in your lifetime. Some of the more common effects of a sunburn are redness, itchiness, and peeling skin. Your skin literally dries up and peels off! (EW!) Really bad sunburns, like other kinds of burns, can give you blisters on your skin.

Your skin has melanin, or pigment, that gives it color and protects it. You notice that the color of the skin on your arms is different from your friends, or even your brothers and sisters and mom or dad. If you have very pale skin, especially if you have freckles, you will be more likely to get a sunburn when you’re out in the sun. People with darker skin have more melanin. When they’re in the sun their skin may get a little darker and they’ll get a suntan. Many doctors say that even a little suntan is too much, and advise you to always wear sunscreen and a hat when you’re going to be in the sun for long periods.

Sunscreen coats your skin and blocks out the ultraviolet rays of the sun. Your bottle of sunscreen probably lists its “SPF” or “Sun Protection Factor”. The higher the SPF, the more protection it gives. Many sunscreens for kids have an SPF of 50 or higher. You need to apply more sunscreen after you’ve been swimming or if you’re sweating a lot. Staying out of the sun between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. will reduce your risk of sunburn.

Tags: skin sunburn

We love the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. It has a planetarium, an indoor rain forest, and a wonderful underground aquarium with fish from all over the world.

The living fish exhibits are terrific, but this display really got our attention.
It shows the contents of a tiger shark’s stomach. There are turtle shells, a shoe, a license plate, an unopened can of Spam (not that a shark could open a can of Spam if he tried), and even two Barbie dolls!

Most sharks go after food that is easiest to catch, like slow, weak or dying marine animals. Sharks use their teeth to grab and tear their prey, but they don’t chew it up and usually swallow it almost whole. Many species of shark are bottom feeders, meaning they literally scoop up food from the bottom of the ocean. According to Seaworld.org, tiger sharks are the “garbage cans of the sea” because they will eat whatever is available. From the looks of this picture, we’d say that was a good description!

From our friends at Boston.com’s “The Big Picture” come these awesome photos of an undersea volcano erupting.

This eruption took place this week and was accompanied by a strong earthquake. It happened near the island nation of Tonga, located in the South Pacific.

Our class went on a field trip to our local Science Center. We got to see lots of nature displays, but our favorite was the one about owl pellets. We even got to take some owl pellets home.

Owls are birds of prey, which means they hunt and eat small animals like mice. Owls can’t chew, though. They have to tear their prey into smaller pieces with their beaks and talons (claws) before they swallow them. One part of the owl’s stomach is called the proventriculus, or glandular stomach. That’s the part of the stomach that digests the parts of the prey the owl uses as food. The parts of the prey that the owl can’t digest, like bones, teeth, and fur, stay in the owl’s gizzard, or muscular stomach.

An owl pellet is the compressed (smooshed together) bones, teeth and fur of its prey. The owl regurgitates the pellet. It’s not like throwing up, though. The owl does this regularly, and the pellet just drops out of its beak.

We dissected owl pellets at the science center, and this is what we saw. It’s a little fuzzy, but you can see a bone, some teeth, and some fur. A little icky, but definitely interesting. Owls have to eat, too, you know.

Not long ago, we had to have a vaccination for chicken pox. Another word for vaccination is immunization. It is usually given to you by your doctor in a needle (also called a shot), and we were a little scared. It helped to know why we needed the shot.

A vaccine is usually a weak form of a virus, like chicken pox or measles. When your body detects the virus your body’s immune system learns how to fight it off, so if you’re exposed to the disease later you don’t catch it and get sick. Your body has already fought it off!

Chicken pox is one of a number of diseases that used to be common childhood diseases. Even a mild case would make you feverish and itchy for days and days. We definitely wouldn’t want to go through that! Vaccinations have helped eliminate diseases like polio, which used to be common and were very dangerous.

We think the way a vaccination works to help your body fight off disease sounds a lot like a boxer training for a fight. A boxer starts training by working out and punching a punching bag, and pretty soon he is strong enough to knock out another boxer with one punch!

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

From Appendages to Zombies, this set of alphabet blocks is just the thing for the aspiring mad scientist.

From the Daily Mail comes a story of some British kids who sent their teddy bears on a trip on a weather balloon.

The weather balloon went 20 miles (32 kilometers) into the air, which is just at the edge of space. The trip lasted about two hours. The kids made space suits for the teddy bears to protect them because it’s very cold at that altitude.

Why would you ask for a 30-gallon air compressor and a pressure washer for Christmas? To build your own backyard snowmaking machine, just like 10-year-old Forest Pearson of West Linn Oregon did.

Good gravy this looks like a lot of fun. (From katu.com)

People like you and I need a few things to live — we need healthy food, we need water, and we need air. Plants, though, are a little different than you and me. They need food and water, but they also need sunlight to live. Plants use sunlight as a way to make energy to grow.

Plants and animals, including people like you and me, breathe in air. But plants use a different part of the air than you or I do. We breathe in a part of the air called oxygen. We use the oxygen that we breathe in the air to feed the blood in our bodies. Plants use a different part of the air, a gas called carbon dioxide. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Plants do just the opposite — plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. So the oxgyen you’re breathing now probably came from a plant. Thanks, plants!

Plants also get food from the soil. To live, they need a certain chemical that you can find in the soil. This chemical is called nitrogen. You have nitrogen in your body, too, but your body can’t use it. So when you get nitrogen in your body, your body gets rid of it. How does it do this? It leaves your body through pee and poo. All the stuff in pee and poo is stuff that your body can’t use. That’s why pee and poo is sometimes called “waste” — because it’s something leftover that you can’t use.

But because pee and poo are full of nitrogen, plants love it! If you’re a tree and a dog pees on you, are you happy or sad? You’re happy, because that pee is full of nitrogen that you can use to eat. The same is true with poo. In fact, farmers take poo from their cows and spread it across their fields to make the plants in their fields grow better. This is called “fertilization” — the farmer is using cow poo to make it easier for plants to grow in the field.

This morning we made eggs for breakfast. We cracked them open and wondered, where did the chicks go?

The eggs you buy in the supermarket are unfertilized. That means a rooster has not fertilized the chicken’s eggs. Without fertilization, an egg will not produce a chick. What you see inside an egg are the yolk (the yellow part) and albumen (the egg white). The yolk and egg white provide nutrition for the chick when it is developing. This is different from the way human babies get nutrition when they’re developing in the womb. Human babies get their nutrition from an umbilical cord attached to their bellies.

That’s how you got your belly button!