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.
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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. 
Dr. Hugh Willoughby, of Florida International University, was one of the first meteorologists to ever fly into the eye of a hurricane. Now the job is done by the Hurricane Hunters—a team of pilots, navigators and meteorologists who fly into these dangerous storms to help keep us safe. Here’s what I learned when I interviewed Hugh Willoughby: What is a hurricane eye? Hurricanes are circular storms so the wind blows around in a circle. The eye is the center of a hurricane. If a circular storm doesn’t have an eye, it is not a hurricane—it’s a tropical storm. The eye is surrounded by a ring of clouds called the eyewall. Within the eye, there is a calm area that is cloudless all the way up to space. The winds are strongest just at the inner edge of the eyewall, which is composed of violent thunderstorms with strong updrafts and downdrafts. The hurricane pinwheels out from the eyewall as spiral bands of wind and rain, which stretch for miles. When a hurricane’s eye passes over land, the storm suddenly stops and the sun comes out. But the relief is short-lived as the other side of the storm soon slams into the area. How do Hurricane Hunters help us? Hurricane Hunters fly into the eye of hurricanes that are heading towards our shores to help predict where the storm will make landfall. On every mission they must find the center of the storm at least twice and at most four times over a period of several hours because the change in position of the center of the eye tells us the direction the storm is moving and how fast it is moving. They also drop packages called dropsondes that contain measuring instruments for air pressure, humidity, and wind speed at the eyewall. These measurements tell us the destructive power of the storm or its “category.” During a hurricane season (from June 1 to November 30) the Hurricane Hunters and their fleet of ten airplanes can get data on three storms, twice a day. So flying into a hurricane’s eye is pretty routine for them. Is it dangerous? The planes can easily handle changes in air pressure and wind speeds that create “bumps” and it can be pretty bumpy going through the eyewall. But, in more than sixty years there have been only four accidents. All on board agree that the view of the eyewall from inside the eye is worth it! The plane has transported them inside nature’s most magnificent amphitheater. (c) Vicki Cobb 2014 Harvey and Irma have alerted everyone to the dangers of a hurricane. We can predict the course of a hurricane by flying into a hurricane and repeatedly measuring wind speed, humidity, air pressure, and temperature. Here's a video that will give you a taste of what it looks like as you approach an eye wall. It is filmed from a plane penetrating Hurricane Katrina. 
 MLA 8 Citation Cobb, Vicki. "Flying into the Eye of a Storm." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 18 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ flying-into-the-eye-of-a-storm. 
Just the thought of Malala Yousafzai brings tears to my eyes. If you don’t know who she is, you should. In 2015, at the age of seventeen, she was the youngest person to ever receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
From the time she was eleven, she had a single purpose: to fight for the right to an education for every girl and boy on the planet. As a Pakistani, where women live life in the shadows, she has faced many obstacles in expressing her beliefs. In October of 2012, when she was fifteen, she was shot in the head on her school bus, the target of assassination. The Taliban claimed credit for this diabolical act. Miraculously, she survived without serious impairment. But the brutality of the Taliban did not stop her; neither did an earthquake, a flood, or the lack of financial resources. She continued to speak out on behalf of education for all. I’ve read her memoir, I Am Malala. She is like the child in the fable The Emperor’s New Clothes who speaks unvarnished truth with the impeccable logic of the child who does not understand political correctness. “If the [the Taliban] come, what would you do Malala? ...If you hit a Talib with your shoe, then there will be no difference between you and the Talib. You must not treat others...with cruelty...you must fight others but through peace, through dialogue and through education...then I’ll tell him [the Talib] how important education is and that I even want education for your children as well... that’s what I want to tell you, now do what you want.” Like the, Diary of Ann Frank, you cannot escape the voice of a young girl who cares about her hopes and dreams for her future and that of the troubled world. “I speak not for myself but for those without voice... those who have fought for their rights... their right to live in peace, their right to be treated with dignity, their right to equality of opportunity, their right to be educated.” How can we motivate students to fight for their own interests in acquiring an education? How can we inspire them to do the hard work needed? Maybe they need to hear Malala speak. Here, in the United States we have both the right and the availability to education, yet so many kids don't take advantage of it to make something of themselves. What lesson can we all take away from Malala?
Vicki Cobb's classic book, Science Experiments You Can Eat has been updated and enlarged and was released in July of 2016. You can also see Vicki's new winking caricature on her website. 
Ever notice people wearing headsets to keep out noise? Check out the workers on the tarmac of airports, or gardeners with their leaf blowers, or road workers breaking up blacktop with a pneumatic drill. They wear these headsets to protect their ears from damage caused by persistent loud noise. Loudness is measured in decibels, dB for short. Complete silence is 0 dB, a whisper is 10 dB, normal conversation is 60 dB or about 10,000 times louder than a whisper. A lawnmower is 90 dB, about 1,000 times louder than a conversation and a jet engine is 120 dB about 1,000,000 times louder than a conversation. Anything over 85 dB does damage to our ears. That’s because sound traveling through air is a force beating against delicate eardrums. Yes, rock concerts damage ears. Performing musicians often have tiny earpieces in their ears. This way the sound engineers can send them the sounds of their own voices or instruments, so that they can hear themselves over the other musicians. Those pieces are not for protection. So the dB level of rock concerts can affect those musicians’ hearing. There is even a name for it: Noise Induced Hearing Loss or NIHL. Rock musicians are the top profession to suffer NIHL later in life. But there is a new threat to hearing loss—the earbuds people use to listen to music from their electronic devices. They are fine if you keep the volume down. But if you’re hooked on loudness that invades all your senses so that you can’t “hear yourself think” and you listen for several hours a day, you’ll pay the price down the road. Your ability to hear high tones is the first to go. Here’s a quick and easy hearing test you can use on yourself and your family: Turn on the TV and hit the “mute” button or turn the volume all the way down. Lean over the back of the set and listen for a very soft, high-pitched whine. If you can hear it, you are listening to the highest sound the human ear can hear. (Dogs, of course, can hear much higher sounds, hence the dog whistle, which people can’t hear but dogs can.) Walk away from the set to find the distance when you can no longer hear it. Do the same test with your parents. Bet your hearing is better than theirs. Try listening to some old-fashioned, melodic, soft popular music that came before rock and roll. You just might like it.  Listening to her own soft music, or just blocking out your loud music? Either way, her hearing is better than yours. Photo by Alexandra Siy  From School Library Journal-- "Fun!" comes through loud and clear in this energetic exploration of hearing and auditory perception. Cobb gets the anatomy lesson out of the way, then moves on to a series of simple activities to help kids experiment with their own sense of hearing. Students investigate sound conduction, perception of pitch, echolocation, and range of hearing by doing such things as sticking fingers in their ears while they talk." Available for download at the i-Tunes store -- click here. 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. "Banging on the Ear Drum." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 30 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/Banging-on-the-Ear-Drum.  |
NEW!
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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