Kid Scientist

What to do with your Christmas tree after the holidays are over? These guys turned theirs into a rocket.

Last weekend we were looking at the steeple of a church. It was sort of a green mottled color. We found out it was made of copper. Pennies are made of copper too—why is the penny a brownish-reddish color and the church steeple is green?

The Statue of Liberty

When copper is exposed to oxygen in the air, there is a chemical reaction that turns it green. It takes years for the copper to turn from the coppery metallic color to the greenish-bluish color. Did you know that the Statue of Liberty is made of copper?

So why don’t pennies turn green? Well, being in people’s pockets, change purses, and in people’s hands, rather than exposed to the air like the church steeple helps. And pennies aren’t pure copper. Pennies are made from an alloy (mixture) of copper and zinc.

Copper is an element. Elements are the basic building blocks of… well, everything! Combined together, elements form chemical compounds. This video from our new favorite album “Here Comes Science” is about the periodic table, which lists all the elements:

After switching lunchboxes, we kind of forgot the old one for a while. And the half of a bagel with cream cheese that was inside. Oops.

Opening up the old lunchbox, we saw a lot of green fuzzy stuff—mold – had grown on the outside of the bagel.

What makes mold grow? What is mold, anyway?

Mold is a living microorganism that is part of the Fungi kingdom. Fungi aren’t plants, and they aren’t animals. Yeasts (used to make bread rise) and mushrooms are fungi, too. Fungi “eat” by releasing enzymes that break down their food into a form the fungi can absorb.

How did the mold get on the bagel? Mold reproduces by releasing tiny spores. These spores are so small that they can float in the air, from food source to food source. Mold grows well in moist conditions, which is why some foods, like fruit, attract it more than others. Molds come in many different colors, from black to blue to green.

Mold may look gross, it may be hard to clean up, and it may even cause allergies and breathing problems in some people, but mold isn’t all bad. There are quite a few medicines made from mold, including penicillin, which is used to treat illnesses like strep throat. Mold is even used to produce some kinds of food, like soy sauce and certain types of cheese. Fungi of all sorts are important in helping decompose (break down) organic matter.

Speaking of fungi, here’s an unscientific* joke for you:

Q: Why did all the girl mushrooms want to date the guy mushroom?
A. Because they knew that he was a fungi! (Get it? A fun guy!)

*This joke is unscientific because we know that fungi are asexual—there are no girl and no boy mushrooms!

Here’s a video clip for parents and teachers that gives a good insight into what we’re all about here at Kid Scientist:

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is closed this weekend for a major project, part of the seismic upgrade of the bridge. This will make the bridge safer in case of a major earthquake.

In 1989, the Loma Prieta Earthquake damaged a 50-foot section of the upper deck on the Eastern side, making it collapse onto the lower deck. This weekend’s project is part of a major construction project that will eventually replace the Eastern span of the bridge, scheduled for completion in 2013.

We’re watching the construction crews in action on the construction cams. There’s a cool computer simulation of the work that is being done this weekend, and when the job is done, all the video that is being shot will be available in a time-lapse video on http://baybridgeinfo.org.

Tags: bay_bridge construction computer_simulation

Here’s another video from the upcoming They Might Be Giants CD/DVD “Here Comes Science:” Science is Real. It’s only viewable on Amazon.com for now (click on the link to view it).

We love space and rockets, but we’ve been following this week’s planned Space Shuttle launch more carefully because one of the astronauts speaks both English and Spanish. He’s been posting short messages in both languages on Twitter using the name @Astro_Jose. If you know English or Spanish (or both) it’s fun to see what he has to say about the process of going into space.

Jose attended graduate school at UC Santa Barbara; the alumni magazine has an article on alumni astronauts, including Astro_Jose.

Hooray! We’ve been waiting for the new They Might Be Giants CD/DVD, Here Comes Science, to come out. Today they posted the first video from the collection, “Electric Car”.

We can’t stop thinking about an episode of the PBS show “Nova” we watched a couple weeks ago called “Musical Minds”. Oliver Sacks is a famous neurologist, a doctor who specializes in treating the body’s brain and nervous system. In “Musical Minds”, he talked with a young autistic man who is a brilliant piano player, a man with Tourette Syndrome whose symptoms stop when he plays the drums, and a woman who just heard noise when someone played music for her. The coolest story was about the man who got hit by lightning and suddenly was able to play beautiful music for the first time in his life.

You can watch a video clip, read a transcript of the show, and see Dr. Sacks’ answers to viewer questions on PBS.org, a great site for kid scientists to get information!

Photo credit: Mars Hill Church Seattle

One of our favorite shows is Mythbusters on The Discovery Channel. If you haven’t seen it, the guys (and Kari!) test a few urban myths and legends each week (like, would a house full of exploding popcorn make the windows bust out?) and proclaim them “Confirmed” or “Busted”. If you don’t get The Discovery Channel, you can see some videos here.

As big Mythbusters fans, we really had fun reading Geek Dad’s “Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned from Mythbusters“. “If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Overdoing” sounds pretty familiar to us!

We got to see Adam and Jamie in San Francisco a couple of years ago, which is where the picture above was taken.