I really like vultures. Sure, they’re ugly and they eat nasty dead things. But those are not necessarily bad characteristics. First let’s deal with “ugly.” Vultures’ bald heads are what make them seem ugly to most people. But think about why they’re bald. Imagine thrusting your head inside the carcass of a white-tailed deer to reach the meat. A feathered head might capture bits of flesh, blood and gore and you end up with a face full bacteria and flies. Scientists believe that one reason vultures have evolved featherless heads is to aid in hygiene. A bald head stays clean and any remaining germs or bacteria are baked off by the sun. Vultures have also found that a bald head can help with temperature regulation. When it gets cold they can tuck their heads down to keep their neck covered with feathers. When it’s hot, vultures can extend their neck to expose bare skin. Their bald heads work so well that I wrote a poem about them. Naked Head It’s best to have no feathers, When you stick your head in guts, That way you don’t go walkin’ round, Your noggin dripping schmutz. Moving on to “eating nasty dead things,” the next time you see vultures eating a dead animal on the side of the road, be thankful! That carcass might be dead from rabies or contaminated with other harmful diseases. Vultures have the amazing ability to consume rotting and diseased flesh and stay healthy. It’s all in the stomach. Vultures possess very powerful stomach acids that destroy most bacteria and deadly viruses. In fact, vulture stomach acid is so strong it can dissolve metal! Except if that metal is lead shot -- many turkey vultures are killed every year by consuming shot that they encounter in dead deer. Vultures are the world’s natural “sanitation workers,” helping to stop the spread of disease. I’m so appreciative of the work they do, I even wrote a poem about eating dead things: Dead Meat I like my meat dead, It’s best if it’s not moving. Don’t want to see one final twitch, I prefer it oozing So, the next time you see a vulture circling in the noonday sky, think about the valuable and important clean up service this bird provides to us and to the environment. Maybe I’ll write a poem about that….
 My friends the black vultures didn't kill this deer. They are just going to be cleaning up the carcass. Wikipedia commons. Photo by Nathaniel Paluga.  Steve Swinburne is a science writer, but as you can see from this Minute, he likes to write poetry too. In his book Ocean Soup, he offers verses in the voices of tide-pool animals, including the barnacle, sea urchin, sculpin, mussel, starfish, hermit crab, anemone, and lobster. For more about Steve's poetry, click here. Steve Swinburne is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through FieldTripZoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Swinburne, Stephen R. "In Praise of Vultures." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 8 Dec. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/ In-Praise-Of-Vultures. 
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How well do you handle spicy food? Do you find food with a “kick” eye-watering and difficult to swallow? Or are you a real “fire eater;” nothing can be too hot?
A scientist, named Wilbur Scoville, figured out how to rank spicy food for hotness in 1912. The “heat” from peppers comes from a chemical called capsaicin (cap-say-sin). Pure capsaicin registers 16 million heat units on the Scoville scale. Zero is a sweet green, red or yellow pepper. A fresh, green Jalapeño (ha-la-pen-yo) is rated 2,500-8,000 units, a lot less hot than pure capsaicin. The fact is that you don’t “taste” the heat. The sensation of heat comes from nerve endings in your tongue that respond to pain. Of course, these nerve endings are not just in your tongue. They are all over your body. So a good scientific question is: Can you “taste” hot sauce with, say, your wrist? Check it out. Rub the inside of your wrist with a cut Jalapeño pepper or some hot sauce. Wait a few minutes. Feel the burn? Rinse off your wrist well with cool water. Your tongue, of course, is much more sensitive than your wrist to many chemicals because it is always wet. Capsaicin, like a lot of other chemicals dissolves in water and reaches those nerve endings more quickly. Another liquid that triggers your pain nerves in your tongue is soda. The carbon dioxide in the bubbles reacts with an enzyme in your mouth to form a weak chemical called carbonic acid. This acid fires the pain nerve endings in your tongue giving soda its “bite.” How well can you tolerate this pain? Stick your tongue into a freshly opened glass of soda and hold it there. See how long you can keep it in the drink. One minute? Two minutes? Most people can’t last a minute. But maybe you’re tougher than that. Some Mexican parents give their kids mixtures of sugar and red chili powder when they’re little to build up their tolerance for spicy foods. Do you think that people who love spicy food could also be champions at keeping their tongues immersed in soda? Design an experiment to find out at your next party. Hot Stuff from Vicki Cobb on Vimeo. atonguelashing from Vicki Cobb on Vimeo. 
These videos were made from Vicki Cobb’s book We Dare You! She invites you to join her video project and make your own videos from her book and post them on the www.wedareyouvideos.com website. Vicki Cobb 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
Cobb, Vicki. "Some Painful Truth." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 17 Oct. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/some-painful-truth. 
Ever taste a stale potato chip? If not, here’s how to make one:
Take a close look at an opened bag of potato chips. It is foil-lined to make it light proof. An unopened bag is very puffy because it is filled with a gas. This puffiness protects the chips from breaking. But the gas in the bag is not air, which is a mixture of about 20% oxygen and 79% nitrogen. It is air without the oxygen, so it’s mostly nitrogen. You can prove this. Oxygen is needed for fire to burn. If the air around a flame is flooded with nitrogen, the flame goes out. So you can use the gas in a bag of potato chips to put out a candle. Here’s how:
Now go educate some grown-up.
 Vicki Cobb’s best known book is Science Experiments You Can Eat. This is the new third revision published in 2016. Vicki Cobb 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 Cobb, Vicki. "How to Extinguish a Fire with a Bag of Potato Chips." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 2 Oct. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/how-to-extinguish-a-fire-with-a-bag-of-potato-chips. 
 During the Middle Ages, “going to the bathroom” or “relieving oneself” meant using a privy. A privy typically consisted of a raised board with one or more openings cut in the middle where the users would sit. Their fecal matter would plop into large holes called cesspits beneath them. Over time, the cesspits would fill up and start overflowing. When that happened, gong farmers had to empty them. “Gong” came from a word that means “going.” And the farmers “harvested” the accumulation of months or even years of “going.” To make sure all the foul material was removed, the workers would hop down into the pits, where the feces came up their waists or even higher. Because of the relative ease of getting them in and out, small boys were often employed. The cesspool contents were dumped into carts and taken to larger dump sites on the edge of town, where more conventional farmers would use it as fertilizer. People in the Middle Ages rarely bathed. So gong farmers stunk. Really. Stunk. Because of their horrible stench, they were often restricted in where they could live. They were allowed to work only at night to spare their fellow citizens from seeing and smelling them. Besides the horrible smell and probable lack of friends, gong farmers encountered specific occupational hazards. Decaying fecal matter could produce poisonous gases. At least one gong farmer stumbled into a cesspool he was cleaning and drowned. Violators of the rules for collecting the refuse and disposing of it were submerged in barrels up to their necks and placed on public display for hours on end. On the other hand, gong farmers were well paid, often earning in a day what other workers might make in a week. They had another potential source of income as well. Careless crappers occasionally dropped rings or coins into the cesspits. Enterprising gong farmers combed through the mess with their bare hands in search of those treasures. The advent of better sanitary methods in the 19th century ended gong farmers in many countries. However, it is still practiced in some areas of the world.  With only rats for company, a gong farmer empties his cart into the community pit
You can learn more about Jim Whiting with a visit to his website. He is an interesting fellow with an interest in music and sports and has written lots of books in both fields. MLA 8 Citation Whiting, Jim. "Gong Farmers: Their Crop Was ...Crap." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 15 Dec. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/Gong-Farmers. 
In spring 1665 a college student named Isaac Newton studied natural philosophy, what we call “science.” Back then, a good student could learn everything to know about the natural world. But plague, the Black Death, came to England. Cambridge University closed. Isaac went home to Woolsthorpe. For two years Isaac thought about his studies during four years at university. He’d always been thoughtful—not the best at games, making friends, or minding sheep. But everybody knew Isaac Newton liked to think. Folks told time by the sundial he’d drawn on a wall. Home at Woolsthorpe, Isaac’s learning about science and math bubbled up in his head like yeast rising in a loaf of bread. So... Newton unplugged. His mind roamed like that of an artist or composer. He was driven by the need to create—not paintings or symphonies, but questions. “Why do things always fall down?” “Why does the earth move around the sun? “Why doesn’t the moon fall onto the earth?” “Does everything ‘up there” work like things work ‘down here?’” Isaac Newton answered his questions with three science rules, Newton’s Laws of Motion. At Woolsthorpe, Newton grappled with the concept of moving objects. He worked out the math to find the area under curves. He called this math fluxions. Today we call this calculus, useful for launching rockets or tracking TV signals. Once back at Cambridge, Newton said nothing until he read someone else’s paper on fluxions. Newton published a better paper. Soon he was Cambridge’s top math professor. Isaac Newton wondered another twenty years. He played with prisms in a dark room and theorized that white light comprises the visible spectrum of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. He practiced alchemy and chemistry, looking for the legendary philosopher’s stone to turn base metals to gold. In 1687, Newton published our most important science book, the Principia. In the Principia, Newton showed how laws of gravity and motion work the same at great distances—far off in space, or in your classroom. We accept these ideas, but in 1687 many still had medieval beliefs that sun, moon, planets, and stars all traveled in their own crystal spheres. Yes, Newton wondered about A LOT:
 Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, theologian, author and physicist who is widely recognized as one of the most influential scientists of all time and a key figure in the scientific revolution. Based on a portrait by Godfrey Kneller, 1702, via Wikimedia Commons  Sir Isaac Newton's own first edition copy of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica with his handwritten corrections for the twentieth edition. Photograph Andrew Dunn via Wikimedia Commons  Trinity College, the part of the University of Cambridge where Newton worked and lived. Library of Congress  This statue of the young Isaac Newton stands at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Look carefully around his feet for a hint on what he is wondering about. If you can’t figure it out, then read about Newton and gravity. Wikimedia Commons  Featuring 21 hands-on projects that explore the scientific concepts Isaac Newton developed, Kerrie Logan Hollihan's Isaac Newton and Physics for Kids paints a rich portrait of the brilliant and complex man and provides readers with a hands-on understanding of astronomy, physics, and mathematics. A time line, excerpts from Newton's own writings, online resources, and a reading list enhance this unique activity book. MLA 8 Citation Hollihan, Kerrie Logan. "Isaac Newton's Wonder Years." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 21 Feb. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ isaac-newtons-wonder years.  |
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For Vicki Cobb's BLOG (nonfiction book reviews, info on education, more), click here: Vicki's Blog *NEWSFLASH *
The NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Committee is pleased to inform you that 30 People Who Changed the World has been selected for Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People 2018, a cooperative project of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) & the Children’s Book Council Categories
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