 How does a virus cause a disease? A virus is not a complete living thing. It is like a free-floating nucleus of cell. It doesn’t “grow” but under certain conditions it can make a copy of itself or reproduce. It invades the cells of other living things to use the internal structure of the host cells to reproduce. At a certain point, the number of new viruses in a cell is so large that the cell ruptures and dies, spilling out newly made viruses to continue the invasion to other uninfected cells. One virus we understand very well is chicken pox. Chicken pox is a very contagious disease that enters the body through the air and affects mostly children. When I was young almost every kid got chicken pox but, since 1995, there has been a vaccine, which makes you immune and protects the spread of the disease to others. Is there another way to explain how this virus works? Suppose I imagine a virus could think, which it can’t. But, imagination gives me the freedom to think differently. So I wrote a poem about an army of chicken pox viruses as they are about to attack a human being, maybe you, my reader. A “battle hymm” is a chant or a song to rally the troups just before an attack. The Battle Hymn of the Chicken Pox Troopers  Charge forward, fellow viruses! Invade a cell or two Then let us join together And make a chicken pox on you.  Let cells try to fight us No matter what they do Red spots of our graffiti Make a chicken pox on you  We make the top skin separate And fill the space with goo, Small, itchy blisters are a stage Of chicken pox on you.  And when the blisters break, my friend You think perhaps we’re through But no. Now there is a scab For each chicken pox on you  Scratch a scab so it comes off Baring skin that’s raw and new, A scar forever marks the spot Of that chicken pox on you.  The source? Chicken with fowl pox To the battle, fellow viruses! We’re more noteworthy than flu They just make you feel sick We make our chicken pox on you!  Meet your personal superheroes - your body's cells Superhero cells rally together to battle common childhood ailments in this series in which Vicki Cobb explains how your amazing human body heals itself and fights off intruders. Here's her book on yet another virus: Your Body Battles a Cold.
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 You can’t play tennis unless you know where the ball will be after it bounces. You can’t pass a basketball unless you understand how to angle a bounce so that it goes where you want it to go. As long as the court surface is smooth and flat, a ball’s bounce is very predictable. Its path depends on gravity and on the strength and direction of the force that sets the ball in motion. Thanks to high speed photography we can get a closer look at a bouncing ball. This is a multiple exposure photograph of a bouncing ball. It was taken in complete darkness with the camera shutter open while a high-speed flashing light, called a stroboscope or strobe, flashed 30 times a second. Each flash produced an image. Here’s what you can learn from this photo: The ball is moving fastest where the images are farthest apart and slowest where they are closest together. When the ball is falling, it speeds up. After it bounces and moves opposite the pull of gravity, it slows down at exactly the same rate as it sped up when it was falling until it stops for an instant and starts falling again. Each time it collides with the ground, some energy is lost. That’s why each bounce loses altitude. If the bounce were perfect, no energy would be lost, every bounce would be as high as the last and the ball would bounce forever. A strobe also captures the split second when a tennis ball is struck by a racket. The collision flattens the ball, and stretches the strings and distorts the frame of the racket, all in .005 seconds. If these objects kept their distorted shapes, most of the force of the collision would be absorbed. But they are elastic—they restore themselves to their original shapes after they collide. This restoring force is transferred to the ball to change its direction and help add to the speed of the athlete’s swing. The fastest serve leaves a racket at 130 miles an hour. In a rally, a ball-racket collision changes direction of the ball so it is not as fast as a serve, maybe 70 miles per hour. Since the distance between images made by a strobe tells how fast an object is moving, strobes are part of the instruments used to measure the speed of balls from a tennis racket and a baseball pitcher.  Photo credit: C. E. Miller, MIT In this MIT YouTube, a ball is dropped in front of a meter stick and lit by a strobe light. A long exposure photograph captures the position of the ball at each evenly spaced flash of light. The acceleration of the ball can then be measured from the photo.  Would you believe that you could throw an egg across the room without breaking it? Burn a candle underwater? Vicki Cobb's We Dare You! is a gigantic collection of irresistible, easy-to-perform science experiments, tricks, bets, and games kids can do at home with everyday household objects. Thanks to the principles of gravity, mechanics, fluids, logic, geometry, energy, and perception, kids will find countless hours of fun with the selections included in this book. If you would like to make a We Dare You Video, 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. "A Bouncing Ball Like You've Never Seen." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 5 Feb. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ a-bouncing-ball-like-you've-never-seen.  
In October, 1891, 23-year-old Manya Sklowdowska arrived in Paris to attend the Sorbonne, France’s great university. She had saved money, working as a governess to get there. She was determined to make the most of her studies in science and math. Right away she was noticed partly because she was Polish, although she had changed her first name to a French version, Marie, to fit in better. She always sat in the front row of all her classes because her French was not yet fluent and she didn’t want to miss anything. She also was one of only a few female students. In a university full of smart people, she worked hard to excel. She ultimately finished first in her class and went on to make major scientific discoveries. What made Marie so single-minded and determined? Behind it all was a great love for science, a love she shared with her husband, Pierre Curie, whom she met in 1894. At that time, science was uncovering unimaginable truths in chemistry and physics. New discoveries were being made at a breath-taking pace. Science was like a game and it attracted many players. Why? 1. There was a Nobel Prize for winners, those who discovered a big idea about the natural world. There was only one nature to discover but people came at it from many directions. 2. It was collaborative—scientists shared their discoveries by publishing papers. 3. It was competitive—the papers described procedures so that scientists could check each other’s work. It kept everyone honest. The best work got the most attention. 4. The discoveries could be applied to solve problems for people. X-rays, light bulbs, phonographs, photographs, movies, and telephones would not have been possible without science. 5. The biggest prize was the idea of the atom and its structure. Many scientists contributed to modern atomic theory, including Marie. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize twice for her work. At a time when women didn't even have the right to vote, she was a working mother of two daughters, a single mother after she was widowed in 1906, the founder of the Radium Institute for research and she brought the x-ray to the battlefield in WWI. She believed that science could save the world, that scientific discoveries belonged to everyone. And she refused to benefit financially from her discoveries. She lived by the highest principles of honesty and integrity. She was a true champion of the science game.
 DK Biography: Marie Curie tells the story of the discoverer of radium, from her childhood in Warsaw, to her experiments with radioactivity in Paris, to her recognition as one of the preeminent scientists of her time. Filled with archival photographs and amazing fact boxes, this biography paints Marie Curie as the brave and brilliant scientist that she was. 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. "Marie Curie: An Elite Player in the Science Game." Nonfiction Minute`, iNK Think Tank, 30 Jan. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-nonfiction-minute/Marie Curie-An-Elite-Player-in-the-Science-Game.  
 At left in the back is a fresh spinach leaf that has been treated with trehalose, frozen and defrosted.. The droopy one has been frozen and defrosted without trehalose. It's what is giving us hope that we may soon be able to defrost a salad. When it comes to preserving a fresh taste in food to be eaten at some later time, nothing beats freezing it. That was the discovery made by Clarence Birdseye in 1924. He had been working in northern Canada and noticed that fish caught by the native Canadian Inuits froze almost instantly in the frigid winter air. It was just as delicious when cooked and eaten months later as it was on the day it was fresh. Birdseye figured that if food was frozen quickly at very cold temperatures, large ice crystals couldn’t form to damage the food and make it mushy. His flash-freezing process made him very rich. The problem isn’t so much the freezing of food as what happens when it’s defrosted. See for yourself. Stick a stalk of celery in your freezer. The next day defrost it. Want to eat it? Compare it to a fresh unfrozen stalk. The perky structure of fresh celery is destroyed by ice. Water has the very unusual property of expanding and taking up more space when it changes into ice than when in a liquid state. That’s why ice cubes float and frozen unopened soda cans bulge. Expanding ice crystals destroy the cell walls of plants. Quickly freezing fresh food keeps the ice crystals smaller than slower freezing, but they are still large enough to destroy the cell walls of delicate vegetables like spinach or lettuce. But if you defrost frozen spinach from the supermarket it is beyond limp. So a salad you can defrost and serve as if it were fresh has seemed like an impossible dream. Federico Gomez, a Swedish scientist, is working to change this. Like Birdseye he took a close look at nature, specifically at plants that stay alive in very cold climates. He discovered that they contain a sugar called trehalose (tree-HAL-ose) that works like a natural antifreeze. Could he find a way to get trehalose into spinach leaves? If so, would the trehalose protect the structure of the spinach and keep it crisp after defrosting? This picture shows the results. The leaf on the left was treated with trehalose. The one on the right was untreated. He froze and defrosted both. The treated leaf is as crisp as if it had never been frozen! Just because there is success in a lab doesn’t mean a defrosted salad will show up on your dinner plate any time soon. But these results are enough to keep the research going. Move over Clarence Birdseye!
 Cobb has revised her classic book, Science Experiments You Can Eat. While doing her research, she came across this work of Frederico Gomez. She bought trehalose on line and soaked some slices of parsnip and zucchini in a trehalose solution, hoping that the sugar would be absorbed by the plant cells. But when she froze them and defrosted them, it didn't work. Dr. Gomez got the sugar inside the plant cells by removing some water from between the cells in a vacuum chamber, soaking the leaves in a trehalose solution (which moved the sugar into the spaces outside the cells) and then exposing the leaves with a mild electric shock to get the sugar through the cell walls. Vicki didn't have the equipment to do all this but she tried anyway. The book was 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. "Why You Can't Defrost a Salad...Yet." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 11 01 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ Why-You-Can't-Defrost-a-Salad-Yet.  
Think you might like to be a helicopter pilot? If so, here’s what the U.S. Flight Aptitude Selection Test for helicopter pilots says: “Helicopter pilots must pass some of the most demanding physical tests of any job in the military. To be accepted for pilot training, applicants must have excellent vision and be in top physical condition. They must have very good eye-hand-foot coordination and have quick reflexes.” A sense of balance is also extremely important because sometimes instruments alone are not enough to keep a helicopter oriented properly in the air. Pilots may have to make very subtle corrections. So here’s a test for balance. Be forewarned. Not many people can do this, maybe one in twenty. 1. Stand at attention. 2. Make two fists and extend your arms straight down by your sides. Point your index fingers to the ground. 3. Close your eyes. 4. Bend one leg back at the knee so that your lower leg is parallel to the floor and you are standing on one foot. Don’t let your foot droop. You must maintain your knee at a right angle. 5. Keep your eyes closed and hold this position for ninety seconds. 6. Try not to shake. I learned about this from a Scotsman who told me about this test to qualify for the British Royal Air Force. He couldn't pass it, nor could I. In fact, no one I knew could rise to the helicopter pilot challenge except a Navy pilot in my family. He held the position perfectly for two minutes. Solid like a rock. No problem. It’s clear that when it comes to certain skills not everyone is equal. Some people are not even close. So very few people are in the running to become helicopter pilots. You're probably not one of them but this may change with training.  This young man is an athlete who actually wants to be a helicopter pilot. He passed the test and is holding the correct position. Not sure if the bare feet helped. Photo credit: Alexandra Siy  Vicki Cobb is a former science teacher with a M.A. in secondary school science. She is also the founder and president of iNK Think Tank, the group that is producing The Nonfiction Minute. Thanks, Vicki! Check out How Could We Harness a Hurricane?. To find out more about this book and other books that Vicki has written, 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. "Take the Helicopter Pilot Challenge." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 4 Jan. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/ Take-the-Helicopter-Pilot-Challenge.  |
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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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