Movable books -- science at work and playby Gillian O'Reilly The term "movable books" (including lift-the-flap, pull the tab and pop-up books) evokes images of diverting children's books or grand paper constructions of Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter or Star Wars scenes. The roots of these books, however, lie in astronomy and medicine and their pedigree is centuries old. We can look back nearly 900 years to the first known lift-the-flap manuscript, the Liber Floridus…

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Slippery, slimy, oozy slugs; what’s not to love? Slugs can be small and slugs can be as long as your arm! Slugs can be sausage shaped and brown, or they can have leaves, legs, and lots of rainbow colours! They can live anywhere wet, and lots live under the sea. Salty Samples Sea slugs are a family of boneless animals that contain a particularly fancy looking molluscs called nudibranchs. Usually they’re small enough to fit on your…

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 Wow! We just finished a terrific panel discussion at a virtual convention. Several writers from Sci/Why were attending When Words Collide, a literary festival that has gone all-online for this year's event. We held a panel discussion on Sunday August 16 with the title Writing Science Books for Youth.If you've come to our website to learn more about writing, put a comment after this post or another recent post and one of us will be…

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By Claire EamerThe default image of a scientist used to be a white man -- usually with more fly-away white hair than was strictly necessary. Maybe a bit like the dude on the right...Of course, we all know now that the image was never really accurate. After all, Crick and Watson's discovery of the nature of the DNA molecule owed a great deal to the remarkable work of Rosalind Franklin.Our current awareness of the dangers…

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by Joan Marie GalatA comet, often called a dirty snowball, is a frozen collection of rock, dust, and gases that orbits the Sun. When a comet approaches the Sun, heat causes the comet's shape to change. Frozen gases thaw, creating a tail that can stretch millions of kilometres into space. Now the comet looks like another one of its nicknames—a long-haired star!    Night sky observers have been aware of comets for a very long time.…

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On Thursday July 30, NASA will be launching their newest probe with a mission on Mars! There are a terrific assortment of social media activities during the countdown, and lots of free materials to find online about this probe named Perseverance. The Perseverance mission is bringing along a tiny helicopter named Integrity, which will be the first helicopter to fly on Mars, when they get there in February 2021.Here's a link to the NASA website…

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by Paula JohansonAre you interested in studying the lives of people from the Stone Age? Whether you're a scientist or just interested in learning something about archaeology, there are LOTS of ways to study the traces left by these people and their lives.The best one I've found this week is a virtual tour of a cave in France called Chauvet. It's near the famous Lascaux cave, and like Lascaux it has astonishing images painted on…

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by Paula JohansonWhen I was a child, I watched every Apollo launch. Each of the moon landings was celebrated in my home. If (like me) you've ever wished you could be an astronaut, there are lots of things to do with that dream. One way I connect with my inner astronaut is to go to this NASA website, Ryugu Trek.Ryugu is an asteroid that has been visited by a space probe called Hayabusa2.  On the…

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by Raymond NakamuraDrawing Conclusions and Other Ideas “A picture is worth a thousand words” does not have the mathematical rigour of E=mc2, but it can be a useful rule of thumb for communicating science, among other things. Smart phones have made photos commonplace, but drawing what we see or think remains useful.Observing and DrawingEven if you are not Leonardo da Vinci (and who is), attempting to draw something in front of you forces you to…

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