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.
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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.  
I’m often asked where I get my ideas for books. Let me give you an example: The other day, when I was walking in a neighborhood park, there was a man doing whole-body lifts on a piece of exercise equipment with a huge, brilliantly–colored parrot on his shoulder. It was so unusual that, without thinking, I called out: “What a beautiful bird! May I take your picture?” I was full of questions so we chatted for a while. Me: “What kind of bird is that?” Scotty, the parrot-man: “She’s a green-winged macaw.” Me: “What’s her name? How old is she?” Scotty: “Her name is Lucky. She’s 2 ½ years old but she can live more than 60 years. She’s a vegetarian, like me. Her beak is a nut-cracker. ” Lucky repeatedly kissed Scotty on the lips with her giant hooked beak as he turned to talk to her. She had been an expensive gift to him—they cost about $1500 at Bird Jungle, our local bird store. She couldn’t fly because he kept her wings clipped; it’s dangerous for a 2 ½ pound bird to be able to fly around the house. He had given her a bath that morning. She had communicated that she wanted one by putting her head under the faucet and looking at him. “Why did she want a bath?” I asked. “Was she dirty?” Scotty wasn’t sure why, except that it rains every day in her natural habitat—the rain forest. Then he pointed out a new feather on her neck. It was encased in a white sheath. A bath makes the sheath fall off and the feather fluffs up. Maybe that feels like undoing a pony tail This is often how I get ideas for books. I find something interesting and start asking questions. Of course, I paid a visit to Bird Jungle. What a noisy store! There I found more people to interview. It’s amazing how much you can learn from people who are experts. After a while I ran out of questions. That’s because I didn’t know enough to keep going. How can I remedy that? Go read a book or two about green-winged macaws and other rain forest birds. It could lead to a book idea about the rain forest like: This Place Is Wet. When I write, I don’t write just about content. I write what interests me about content. There’s a big difference.
 Does Vicki's story make you want to visit a store like Bird Jungle to meet a green-winged macaw?  Vicki made a trip to the Amazon rain forest with her good friend, Alaskan artist, Barbara Lavallee. You can find out what they learned there by reading This Place Is Wet. For more information about the book, click here. Vicki Cobb 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 Cobb, Vicki. "I Met a Man about a Parrot." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 18 Dec. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ I-Met-a-Man-About-a-Parrot. Accessed 18 Dec. 2017.  
No one wants to mess with someone who is super strong! Even if you’re undersized, especially if you’re undersized, you’ve got to try the two tricks in this Minute .
Here’s the first challenge: Bet another person can’t remove your hand from the top of your head. The challenge-taker must try to remove your hand according to your rules. Otherwise, it’s cheating. Sit on the floor. Place your hand with your fingers spread apart firmly on the top of your head. Have your friend grasp your lower arm next to your elbow. Now let him/her pull upward, trying to lift your hand from the top of your head. Chances are excellent that you’ll be lifted off the ground before your palm parts from its perch. Why is this so? If you’ve studied simple machines you may have learned about a mechanical advantage. That’s how a simple machine such as a lever can multiply your strength or speed. In this case, you’re putting your friend at a mechanical disadvantage. Your arm is a lever. In order to move your hand from the top of your head, you need an upward force near your hand. If that force is delivered as far away from your hand as possible, it loses its power. It’s easy to remove your hand if you deliver an upward force near your wrist. But at your elbow? No way! Got it? Here’s another trick with the secret sauce of physics. Bet you can keep ten people from shoving you into a wall. Place your hands against a wall with your fingers spread and your arms outstretched. Have ten people line up behind you, hands on the shoulders of the person in front of them. At the count of three, have everyone push on the person in front of them as hard as they can. I mean, really lean in. You, hero of the day, can hold them all off and not bend your elbows. Why? Actually, each person absorbs the force of the person behind them so that you are not experiencing the cumulative force of ten people, only the force of the person directly behind you. So pick someone smaller than you to be that first person. If you’re not super strong, you can still be super smart. If you don’t want to try this yourself, look at my videos of other people doing the challenges. Maybe you’ll change your mind. 
If you like these bets, check out Vicki Cobb’s new release of We Dare You! You might want to join her We Dare You! National Video Project and make more videos yourself from her book. Learn more about it here.
Vicki Cobb is a member of iNK’s Authors on Call. You can invite her to your class through the magic of videoconferencing. Learn more about it here.
MLA 8 Citation
Cobb, Vicki. "How to Make Your Friends Think You're Super Strong." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 23 Mar. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-nonfiction-minute/How-to-Make-Your-Friends-Think-Youre-Super-Strong. 
 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.  |
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