Almost every spring an amazing event in nature happens in parts of the United States. Huge numbers of insects called periodical cicadas emerge from the soil. For a few weeks they fill the days with loud buzzing calls. Every summer you can hear the calls of some kinds of cicadas, but periodical cicadas are different. They exist only in the eastern two-thirds of the United States, and have the longest of all insect lives. Some periodical cicadas live 13 years, others 17 years, with nearly all of that time spent underground. Young cicadas, called nymphs, sip water and nutrients from tree roots. The nymphs count the years, probably by sensing changes in tree sap, as it is affected by the seasons of each year. When their countdown ends and soil warms in the spring, millions of cicada nymphs dig out. They climb posts, bushes, and trees, and cling there. Their nymph "skins" split open and adult cicadas wriggle free. Finally, after many years underground, they are out in the sunshine. They can fly, and the buzzing noises of males attract females. It is a noisy and hectic time in their lives. They have just a few weeks to mate and produce the next generation. Once females lay eggs in tree twigs, all of the adults die. Soon after, tiny nymphs hatch from the eggs. They drop to the soil, borrow in, and begin to sip juices from tree roots. The nymphs grow slowly, counting the years until they will have their own time in the sun. Nearly every year, one or more populations, called broods, of periodical cicadas emerge. Seventeen year cicadas live mostly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Thirteen year cicadas are most common in the South and Lower Midwest. Some broods emerge in parts of just a few states. Some years, a more widespread brood emerges in parts of fifteen states. Notice that I say "parts" of states. These cicadas don't roam around. The nymphs go underground in the same places where their parents emerged. You will find them in one town but not another, in one neighborhood but not another. Some people call cicadas "locusts," but locusts are a kind of grasshopper that eats plants. Cicadas do not chew on plants. They are harmless, fascinating creatures. And, once in a great while, they give us a rare and awe-inspiring animal spectacle.
 Visit the great website, Cicadamania, which has high praise for this book: "Definitely the best cicada book for kids. Adults will appreciate it as well, as it is well written, factually accurate, and beautifully illustrated." You can read more about Larry's fascination for these creatures on his website. MLA 8 Citation Pringle, Laurence. "Here Come the Cicadas." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 23 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ Here-Come-the-Cicadas. 
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Who doesn’t like penguins? Their waddling gait is fun to watch. They have little fear of humans so it’s easy to get next to them. Penguin movies such as Happy Feet and The Penguins of Madagascar are box office hits.
World Penguin Day on April 25 focuses attention on these loveable flightless fowl. Some people dress up in black and white clothing. Many read books about penguins or watch penguin movies. I was fortunate to get up close and personal to thousands of penguins during a trip to Antarctica. As our ship neared the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula—the closest point to the southern tip of South America which had been our departure point—we marveled at how effortlessly they skimmed through the water beside us. Soon we marveled at another characteristic. We were at least two or three miles offshore when the harsh odor of the poop generated by all those penguins wafted over the ship. We relished the opportunity to go ashore and wander through their rookeries. There were lots of juveniles, covered with gray fuzz that would eventually fall off and be replaced by their characteristic black and white plumage. None of them seemed to mind our presence. But we had several harsh reminders that we weren’t in a zoo. Several century-old stone huts provided shelter for explorers who slaughtered hundreds of penguins to eat during the long, harsh Antarctic winters. Skuas, nasty predatory birds, routinely feed on penguin chicks. We saw the discarded remains of several skua meals. Danger can also come from the depths. A couple of times we observed large seals relaxing on ice floes with bright red stains next to them. The saddest sight came one afternoon when we took a Zodiac inflatable boat to shore. A penguin stood forlornly on top of a small ice floe, a leopard seal thrashing the water next to it. We asked our guide if we could rescue the doomed bird. He shook his head. “The water is too rough,” he said. “Too much chance of falling in if anyone tried to step out onto the floe. And you don’t want to be anywhere near an angry half-ton leopard seal that feels his dinner is being taken away from him.” On our way back to the ship, there was no sign of the lone penguin. We had to accept that we couldn’t interfere in the natural course of things.
Greenpeace invites you to celebrate World Penguin Day and also to join the campaign towards its protection. You can learn more by visiting this website: ttp://act.gp/wpd2013.
All images ©Jen Goode
Jim Whiting has written more than 100 titles and edited another 150 or so, with subjects ranging from authors to zoologists and including classical musicians and contemporary pop icons, saints and scientists, emperors and explorers. Many of his books have received glowing reviews.
He's also ventured into a number of classrooms and served as a presenter at writers' conferences, conveying the enthusiasm for writing and for a good story that still animates him. Check out his work here.
MLA 8 Citation
Whiting, Jim. "World Penguin Day." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 25 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/World-Penguin-Day. 
 April 22 (Earth Day) to April 26 2019 the iNK authors are taking time to smell the flowers. Hope you do so as well. See you with a new crop of Minutes on Saturday, April 27
 While helping to win his country’s independence from Great Britain, Captain C. W. Peale painted General George Washington’s portrait. Cleveland Museum of Art via Wikimedia It was December 24, 1801, when bundled-up Philadelphians bought their 25¢ tickets and entered Peale’s Museum on Fifth Street. Once inside, they saw the owner’s paintings. And I’ll bet you have too—even if you’ve never heard of Charles Willson Peale. This one, for instance, of his fellow Revolutionary War soldier: Visitors to the museum had seen Peale’s collections of butterflies, too, and other nature specimens, such as the fossilized teeth of mysterious beasts. (Who knew then that animals went extinct? Hardly anybody!) But on this extra-special Christmas Eve, people probably hurried past Peale’s handmade dioramas, with the lifelike bodies of birds and mammals that he’d stuffed and posed. Today, Mr. C.W. Peale himself was introducing his NEW ATTRACTION. People had paid an extra 50¢ just to see it! Now they looked up, up, UP at it, and were astonished. What animal’s skeleton was eleven feet tall? Seventeen and a half feet from its bony tail to the tips of its giant, curving tusks? It was a mastodon.  It was not clear, in 1801, that mastodons weren’t the same as wooly mammoths. Wikimedia No one had seen a live mastodon in more than ten thousand years. So how did one’s bones get to Philadelphia? Mr. Peale and other naturalists such as Thomas Jefferson, the new President-elect, wrote to one another about their studies, collections, and the latest discoveries, such as like these huge, mysterious bones in southern New York state. Some of North America’s long-gone mastodons ended up there, by the Hudson River. As soon as he heard about them, Peale hurried to see them. Then he not only figured a way to dig up the bones, but he also painted a picture of the huge excavation!  In Peale’s painting “Exhumation of the Mastodon,” he shows some of his children (He had seventeen!) and how he had to pump water out of the beast’s muddy grave. Wikimedia Peale’s son, Rembrandt helped to draw and assemble the bones:  Rembrandt Peale drew the mastodon skeleton that he’d helped his dad to assemble. C.W. taught his many children – seventeen in all, many named after artists and scientists he admired – to draw, study, and help with his nature exhibits. Wikimedia For years, people paid to marvel at the enormous, sensational skeleton. Later on, after Mr. Peale’s death in 1827, his museum slowly went broke. P.T. Barnum, the circus showman, bought a lot of his exhibits. Later still, they were destroyed in a fire. And the mighty bones of the mastodon wound up lost for a hundred years, until the skeleton turned up in Germany, where you can see it today.  Mr. Peale painted himself in his marvelous museum, where people could marvel at and learn from the works of Nature. Wikimedia
 In Thomas Jefferson, her sixth presidential biography for National Geographic, Cheryl Harness illuminates the many sides of Thomas Jefferson: scientist, lawyer, farmer, architect, diplomat, inventor, musician, philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia, and third president of the United States. Readers meet this extraordinary man of contradictions: a genius who proclaimed that "All men are created equal" and championed the rights of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," while at the same time living a life that depended on the enforced labor of slaves. MLA 8 Citation Harness, Cheryl. "The Big Deal in Mr. Peale's Museum." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 18 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ The-Big-Deal-in Mr-Peales-Museum.  
 The polar jet stream can travel at speeds greater than 100 miles per hour (160 km/h). Here, the fastest winds are colored red; slower winds are blue. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center No one can honestly deny that our climate has been changing in recent years. Before the winter of 2018-2019, California had only a year’s water supply stored in its reservoirs. Wildfires have become an annual threat throughout much of the west, while the Midwest and East Coast have experienced record-setting winters. These problems are due to complex interactions among temperature, winds, and water currents. A major change is the warming of the atmosphere. The earth’s atmosphere has been getting warmer since the late 1800s, when factories started spewing out carbon dioxide. Because natural variations also affect the temperature, a graph showing the temperature over time is a jagged line. But the trend is consistently upward and follows the graph of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activities. That’s strong enough evidence that we are at least a large part of the problem, and the vast majority of climate scientists are urging countries of the world to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. A major player in the world’s weather is the jet stream, which helps circulate the atmosphere around the world about every two weeks. This flow of fast-moving air speeds across North America from west to east, separating cold arctic air from warmer, more southerly air. The jet stream used to run in a fairly direct arc across the northern United States. But in recent years it has become less stable, dipping southward in the eastern U.S. to bring frigid winters to the Northeast while arching northward in the West, carrying warm, dry air there. Scientists believe that the rapid melting of the Arctic ice brought about by global warming is part of the cause for the jet stream’s instability. However, climate trends are controlled more by the oceans. Scientists estimate 95% of the heat from global warming is being stored in the oceans, increasing water temperatures even into the depths. As global warming continues, so will climate change. The melting of sea ice and glaciers is already raising the sea level. While scientists don’t blame climate change for devastating Hurricane Sandy, Sandy’s extreme coastal flooding was made worse by the increase in sea level that’s already occurred. As time goes on, coastal cities around the world will be at increasing risk for more severe storm damage. Because warm air holds more moisture than cold air, storms are becoming more severe, increasing blizzards and flooding storms. Some agricultural regions that depend on reliable rainfall may soon be unable to grow crops, disrupting the food supply. Climate change is complicated, but because it affects us all, we need to learn about it. The Environment Protection Agency has questions and answers about climate change.
 Calculations of global warming prepared in or before 2001 from a range of climate models. The projections assume no action is taken to reduce emissions.  Yellowstone National Park’s majestic geologic wonders and remarkable wildlife draw millions of visitors each year. But there was a time when these natural treasures were in great danger, all because after years of unrestricted hunting, one key piece of the puzzle had been eliminated—the wolf. Now, more than a decade after scientists realized the wolves’ essential role and returned them to Yellowstone, the park’s natural balance is gradually being restored. Dorothy Hinshaw Patent's text supplemented by spectacular full-color photographs show the wolves in the natural habitat that was almost lost without them. Click here to find out more. Dorothy Hinshaw Patent is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw. "Climate Change: The Facts and the Consequences." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 17 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ Climate-Change-The-Facts-and-the-Consequences.  |
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