The day slowly dawns and a thick mist covers a canopy of leafy trees.  The temperature is mild as animals, beasts, and birds shake off slumber and survey their surroundings.  Rays of sunlight poke through the mist, indicating a hot day ahead on the grassy plains of Wyoming.  Big Al, a teenage Allosaurus, tips his head back and then shakes it vigorously side-to-side.  He twitches his three claws on his small arms and takes a few steps on his mighty legs.  His long, thick tail sweeps the grass below him, scattering twigs in all directions.  He lets out a mighty roar – one of hunger and warning.  He is ready to run and eat and fill his growling belly.  

Big Al is the largest predator on these plains.  He is a meat eater and one with the strength, speed, teeth, and claws to take down many of the creatures that roam the plains around him – the spiky stegosaurus or the plant-eating sauropods with their long tasty necks and thick bellies.  He knows he can outrun them, but he also knows that he has to be careful.  The stegosaurus is a cranky beast.  His ferocious spikes and barbed tail are mighty weapons.  The sauropods are less aggressive but much bigger.  He must watch out for their massive tails and thundering feet.  He knows his best chance of finding a meal is to target the younger dinosaurs, the babies, and the juveniles.  Or he can hunt for a new carcass with scraps left over from a kill.  Big Al is big, but he is still a teenager.  He measures 26 feet long but can grow up to 40 feet, as long as a T-Rex.  His muscular legs are strong and fast.  His three claws twitch anxiously.

Slowly, he lumbers forward, his three clawed toes digging into the muddy earth.  His fourth claw, slightly higher on the back of his foot, isn’t needed now – but it will be shortly.  He picks up speed, from a slow trot to a thundering run, reaching a speed of 21 miles an hour, crashing through bushes and swaying ferns.  His head is pushed forward, almost horizontal with his body like a rugby player dashing into a scrimmage, his massive tail straight behind him.  He swings his head quickly from side to side, his large eyes under two horned brows searching for any movement, his nose sniffing the morning air.

Suddenly he hears the loud bellow of a plant eater ahead.  She has heard his crashing and is emitting a warning call.  Big Al leaps out of the brush and races onto the plain.  Ahead of him, he sees a group of sauropods thundering away.  Their gigantic feet pound the earth, sending shockwaves through the ground.  They bellow and screech, their young racing beside them.  Big Al slows his pace and stops.  There is no way he can take down one of these beasts.  There are too many of them and he does not have the element of surprise.  He must find a different meal.

Big Al turns and wanders along the edge of the tree line.  In the sky, Pterodactyls screech and soar, diving and swooping among far-off mountain ridges.  Big Al plods along, his stomach grumbling, his scaly body registering the rising heat.  He must find a meal before the heat and bugs become unbearable.  

About an hour later, he hears some crunching and rustling in a thicket of trees.  He steps forward slowly, his eyes and ears trained toward the sound.  He must be very quiet and stealthy.  Then he sees it.  A Stegosaurus – a young one.  Big Al’s mouth starts to water and his senses tingle.  The fight is near.  He must win and he must eat.  He ducks his head lower and steps forward slowly, step by step.  The Stegosaurus is so busy eating and crunching and grunting that he doesn’t hear Big Al approaching.  Suddenly, Big Al lunges out of the bushes and attacks the Stegosaurus, his massive jaws opening 92 degrees, much wider than a T-Rex.  He clamps down on the Stegosaurus’ neck with all his might, his sharp teeth slashing the leathery flesh.  His eight-inch claws dig into the beast’s sides, scraping and making long, nasty gouges.  The beast roars in surprise and fury.  He flings himself to one side, causing some of his flesh to rip off in Big Al’s jaws.  He swings his mighty tail and impales a spike into Big Al’s leg.  Big Al roars in pain and tries to attack once more.  The stegosaurus twists his body and swings his tail again, but misses.  Big Al dodges left and right, trying to place another attack on the beast’s neck, while trying to dodge the mighty tail.  He needs to weaken the beast by inflicting as much damage as possible.  But it is proving difficult.  

The stegosaurus charges and rams Big Al with his spiky head.  Big Al jumps and gouges the beast with his clawed feet.  He loses his balance and topples to one side.  The Stegosaurus charges, ramming his leg again.  Big Al roars and slashes with his claws while getting to his feet.  His leg and feet are injured, but the beast is also tiring.  Big Al lunges once again and chomps onto the beast’s neck as it tries to flee.  He clamps down hard and holds on with 70 razor-sharp teeth, avoiding the Stegosaurus’ tail and spiky spine.  The battle rages on for 10 more minutes.  Big Al holds on with all his might as the beast slows and tires.  Soon it is over.  The Stegosaurus crumbles to the ground and dies.  Big Al has won.  Or so it seems.

Big Al must eat quickly before the other predators arrive – like adult Allosauruses.  They have heard the crashing and roaring and can smell the kill.  Big Al takes a large bite and rips the flesh away with a backward yank of his neck, like a mighty raptor, rather than side-to-side like other meat eaters.  His claws clutch the skin.  He takes a few more bites and then hears it – the crash of thundering legs through the brush.  The predators are here!  Two large Allosauruses break through the foliage and roar with excitement – and warning.  Their message is clear: Leave now or you will be next!  They don’t care if he is one of them.  He is smaller and they will eat him just as easily as any other prey.  Big Al roars and backs away, making sure to keep his eyes on the adults.  His leg and feet are hurting, but he must not show it or they will consider him fair game for feasting.  

Big Al turns and dashes into the trees, trotting as fast as his legs will take him to the safety of home – a ridge of boulders in the near distance.  He reaches the rocky outcropping and stops to rest.  His heart is beating furiously in his chest and his strength is waning.  The running and the fighting have taken a toll on him even though he has fresh meat in his belly.  He settles down to rest, his leg and feet throbbing.  They feel worse than normal; he is more injured than he thought.  With every passing hour, the pain and swelling increase.  When he tries to stand, he can’t.  His skin is hot and burning below his scales and blood seeps out of his wounds.  Soon the insects descend and start to feast.  Big Al tries to rest but the heat and insects smother him.  Hour after hour, Big Al holds on.  Slowly the sun sets and the insects retreat.  Big Al is weak and tired and hurting.  He finally drifts off to sleep.  In the morning, he cannot rise.  Fever and pain rack his body.  He rests all day and another night.  This goes on for 5 more days and nights, with Big Al slowly fading away, unable to rise or eat or drink.  On the sixth day, Big Al does not wake.  He is gone and soon he will be a meal for another Allosaurus.  That is the circle of life on the Jurassic Plains.

Big Al’s bones lay on the plain for millions of years as dust and wind slowly bury him.  Then one day, millions of years later, in 1991, a group of archeologists start digging above his grave.  They dig and scrape away at the sand until one of them shouts.  They’ve found something!  They brush away the dirt and find a bone.  Big Al’s bone.  They continue to dig and scrape and brush until they uncover all of Big Al.  Once more, he is in the sun.  The scientists collect his bones and take him back to their laboratory.  They examine his wounds and take measurements.  They realize that the wound in his leg bone is the same size and shape as a Stegosaurus barb.  Then other scientists report they have found the remains of a stegosaurus nearby.  These second scientists measure the wounds on the stegosaurus’s neck bones and they match the size and width of Allosaurus teeth!  The connection is made and they realize there was a fierce battle between the two.  The stegosaurus bones show many bite marks, indicating it was a hearty meal for several predators.

The first scientists continue to study Big Al.  They determine he was a juvenile by his size at 26 feet long.  Adult Allosauruses can reach 40 feet long, as long as the T-Rex that will come along millions of years later.  They find that Big Al suffered injuries to his leg and feet bones, plus a painful infection from wounds, thus causing his death.  

They determine he is an Allosaurus, meaning “Different Lizard” or “Strange Reptile” in Latin because their small backbones are shaped like hourglasses, unlike other dinosaurs.  They are part of the theropod family, dinosaurs who run on two legs.  The scientists decide to call him Big Al.  They assemble his bones and put him on display in a museum.  

Unfortunately, Allosauruses have been relegated to obscurity with the arrival of T-Rex – the “Tyrant Lizard”- in our museums, books, and films.  The Allosaurus reigned during the Jurassic period and the T-Rex roamed during the Cretaceous period much later.  Although very similar, the Allosaurus is slightly smaller, with longer arms than the T-Rex.  Allosauruses weighed anywhere from 1.7-2.7 tons, whereas T-Rex was larger and heavier – weighing up to 8 tons.  The Allosaurus ripped his food up and backward with his jaws like raptors whereas T-Rex possibly yanked off flesh in a side-to-side fashion like crocodiles. 

The Allosaurus enjoyed a quick flash of celebrity in the 1925 film, “The Lost World.”  But they were pushed off their throne by T-Rex in the 1933 blockbuster “King Kong” and later “Jurassic Park” (which was actually the wrong period for the T-Rex). The poor Allosaurus once again played second fiddle to his larger, flashier successor.  Where once he reigned supreme throughout Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Oklahoma, and South Dakota in the US, plus Tanzania, Portugal, and Germany, now he resides in museums fighting for recognition among the towering T-Rexes.

So, what do you think of the Allosaurus?  Have you ever heard of them or seen them in a museum?  What is your favorite dinosaur?  Share your thoughts here.

The post “Big Al” the Mighty Allosaurus For Kids appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.

Have you ever looked at something through a magnifying glass? Have you ever wondered what a butterfly’s wing, an ant’s jaws, or a blade of grass would look like if you were the size of a bug and could see it really close up? Even though most magnifying glasses don’t make things look that much bigger, you can see a lot more detail. You can see the tiny veins on a maple leaf, or maybe the little feathery bits of a moth’s antennae. But if you could magnify things by 50 or 100, or 200 times–far more than a magnifying glass can–you’d see even more detail. You might even see individual cells, the smallest parts of living things.

In the 17th century, people were just starting to make tools that could magnify things more than typical magnifying glasses. Galileo made telescopes to peer out at the stars and planets, magnifying far-off things to make them look a little closer. Other scientists began making microscopes, which looked a lot like miniature telescopes and made tiny things look bigger. But these early microscopes weren’t very strong. They only made objects look about 20 or 30 times bigger. But Antony van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant from Holland with little formal education, would change all of that. 

Antony was born in Delft in 1632, to an ordinary, middle-class family. His father was probably a basketmaker. Delft itself would have been an exciting place to grow up though: It was a flourishing market town. It produced a famous style of blue-glazed pottery and was a stop for trading ships due to its canals. 

Antony got involved in commerce early. He raised silkworms and sold them to silk merchants who would transform their cocoons into delicate, luxurious cloth. Antony’s family was comfortable, but not enough to give him the education it would take to become a scientist. Being from a family of tradespeople, he was sent to Amsterdam at 16 to learn his own trade or a job that he would spend his life working at. He became an apprentice, or trainee, to a draper, and learned about the business of making and selling cloth. He became a master of this trade, then moved back to Delft to open his own shop. 

Being a draper, Antony had to use magnifying glasses as part of his job. He used them to examine cloth samples before he bought them. He would peer through one to carefully count the threads in a section of cloth, noting whether they were straight and smooth, before deciding what he would pay a trader, and how much he could charge customers for it in his shop. Maybe as he was hunched over scrutinizing cloth, he sometimes thought back to his silkworms and wondered what their tiny jaws or feet would look like under that same magnifying glass. 

But as a young man with a business and growing family, Antony probably didn’t have much time to look at bugs under his magnifying glass. He worked hard at his shop, and became involved in his community, serving in several jobs in the city government. But, he did start to experiment with making better lenses to help him see the cloth, and as time went on, his curiosity about the world he could see under those magnifying glasses only grew. 

Around 1668, Antony had the chance to visit London, England. It was probably while there, that he first saw a book by an English scientist, Robert Hooke called Micrographia. Hooke worked with microscopes. Even though they weren’t very powerful and could be blurry, Hooke had managed to observe and sketch hundreds of fascinating objects– molds; moth wings; plant roots; and the sharp, stinging points of nettles.

Antony was captivated. He wondered what else he might see if he looked. He also wondered whether he could make his own microscope that would work even better. After all, he had experience making lenses, the most important part of a microscope, for his cloth trading business. But what Antony would create turned out to be capable of much more powerful magnification than anything else ever built.

After many years, Antony earned enough money from his cloth trade, inheritance, and city jobs to close his shop. He used his new free time to practice his new hobbies: creating lenses and building microscopes. He ground some of his lenses down from pieces of glass using sand. Others he made by melting glass and using a tiny, red-hot droplet which he worked into a nearly-round shape as it cooled. The lenses made from blown, melted glass were especially clear and probably allowed Antony to make some of his most amazing discoveries about the microscopic world. Some were almost just tiny beads, and others were shaped like discs that curved outward on both sides, like a lentil. If you have a magnifying glass at home, the glass in it will also have this lentil shape if you run your fingers over it.  

Not only were Antony’s lenses different from previous microscope lenses, but his microscope’s designs were also completely different too. Instead of making a microscope that looked like a smaller telescope, with a lens at each end, Antony would sandwich one lens between two metal plates, each with a small hole, just a bit smaller than the lens itself, to hold it in place. A screw was mounted onto plates to adjust how far the sample (the thing being observed) was from the lens. Antony’s microscopes were small all over: most measured one inch by two inches! Instead of sitting on a table, like other microscopes of the time, you would hold one right up to your eye to see the sample. 

But even if they were small, Antony’s microscopes were revolutionary. The lenses were very clear and high quality. And where older microscopes magnified things about 20 to 30 times, Antony’s made objects appear about 200 times larger! Antony became obsessed with looking at things under his microscopes. He measured everything and drew detailed pictures. He looked at the jaws of bumblebees, wood, blood cells, lice eggs from his socks, and much more. He was constantly looking for specimens to study. 

One day, Antony collected some water from a pond. It looked completely clear and fresh. But, even though nothing was visible when he looked at the water with his eyes, under the microscope he saw a world crowded with life, a multitude of tiny organisms swimming around. This was a stunning discovery. No one even suspected that living things might be swimming around in clean water! But because his microscopes were so powerful, Antony was able to make the invisible visible. He called these life forms “animalcules”, or “tiny animals” in Latin. 

He also scraped the gunk off his own and his neighbors’ teeth, smearing it onto his microscopes. Antony took time each day to scrape his teeth clean, which was unusual for the time. He compared his tooth gunk to that of his neighbor, who rarely cleaned their teeth. He noticed far fewer animalcules hanging out in his own tooth goo than that of his less-hygienic neighbor.

Antony sent his drawings, measurements, and detailed descriptions to the Royal Society of London. The Society was a group of the most prominent scientists of the time. Robert Hooke, the author of Micrographia, was a member. Many in the Society doubted that Antony was telling the truth about his discoveries. They had never seen the kinds of things Antony described under their microscopes.  Hooke was skeptical too, but he decided to try to observe similar samples for himself. After months of trying, Hooke was finally able to see some of the tiny beings that Antony had described. He presented the findings to the Royal Society, and they finally invited Antony to join the group. He never attended any meetings in person but did keep writing letters to the Society until his death fifty years later, detailing discovery after discovery. 

As his reputation spread, many people visited Antony’s workshop to look through his microscopes. The Czar of Russia spent two hours observing his specimens! But Antony was secretive about how he made his microscopes and kept the best ones hidden away from visitors. He never wanted to teach others just how he made his high-quality lenses either because he felt it would take too much time away from his own observations. Unfortunately, only a few of his microscopes survived, and others would take years to reconstruct the knowledge of how he built them

Even so, Antony’s observations revealed a whole new world of life that had been invisible up till then. Eventually, others would discover that some of the denizens of this invisible world caused diseases. Nineteenth-century scientists like Louis Pasteur and Alfred Koch would make these connections over 200 years later. In the 20th century, scientists would delve even further into the invisible, studying the internal machinery inside animal and plant cells and bacteria, using microscopes even more powerful than Antony could have imagined or devised. We also came to understand that not all members of this invisible world are responsible for diseases–many don’t bother us at all, and some even help us. 

Antony van Leeuwenhoek made his microscopes and observations with very little formal education or support. He didn’t speak the languages used by scholars of the day–English, Latin, and Greek. He only spoke Dutch. But he made over 500 of his tiny microscopes and spent nearly every day for fifty years observing. He looked at anything and everything under his microscope. He didn’t need a reason, his curiosity just drove him to look. 

What are you curious about? How can you learn more about it? Whether you read about it in books, observe it under a microscope, or set up an experiment, follow that curiosity! You never know what you’ll find.

Sources

https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/van_leeuwenhoek_antonie.shtml

https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/museum/hooke.html

https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/leeuwenhoek.html

Curtis, Robert H. (1993) Great Lives: Medicine. Macmillan, New York.

The post History of Antony van Leeuwenhoek for Kids appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.

Think of some of the objects you saw: family, friends, trees, maybe a pet, or the big blue sky and white moon in the dark of night. Maybe you saw a smile and objects moving, a car speeding by, or someone kicking a ball. Most of these objects are things you are used to. But when you were a baby they were very interesting! You were curious about everything because it was all new and fresh! As we get older many of these things to become familiar and perhaps not as interesting. Tonight we’re going to learn about Leonardo da Vinci, also known as one of the most curious and creative geniuses in recorded history. As we learn about him, think about how he saw the world differently and how you might see the world differently, too. 

When was Leonardo da Vinci born?

Leonardo was born on April 15th, 1452 in the country of Italy in a town called Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci means Leonardo of Vinci, the town where he was born.  He was born during a time that later became known as The Renaissance, which means “Rebirth” because the way people saw the world was changing dramatically during this time. The Medieval Times was over and people were beginning to see themselves as beings who had control over their life and the world and could think differently than those who came before them. 

Childhood & Early Education

Leonardo grew up with his father and spent much of his time exploring the land around their home. He loved to observe the birds and animals and get lost in the beautiful countryside. Around the age of 15, his father noticed he had an interest in and a gift for art. For this reason, his father had him become an apprentice to Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, Italy. An apprentice is a student to a master artist. And at this time Florence was known for its gifted artists and sculptors. In Verrocchio’s workshop, Leonardo learned from his master how to paint and sculpt. Sculptors used materials like clay or marble to make grand sculptures.   

Leonardo studied and helped with paintings and sculptures in Verrochio’s workshop until he was 20 years old. The next step in an artist’s life was to join a guide and Leonard did just that when he was accepted into the painters’ guild in Florence. A guild was a group of skilled artists who worked and met together. At this time he created many pen and pencil drawings and technical drawings of weapons and other mechanical devices. He was very interested in how things worked and in creating new devices. He loved inventing things! 

Milan and Duke Sforza

In 1482, when he was about 30 years old Leonardo moved to the city of Milan where he worked for the city’s duke, Ludovico Sforza. There he created paintings and worked on inventions for the Duke. The ability to create and improve technical devices is called engineering — and Leonardo was a very gifted engineer. He worked for Duke Sforza for many years. There he painted two of his best-known works The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper depicting Jesus and his Twelve Apostles. He also helped design buildings and gave the Duke engineering advice for his army. 

One of Leonardo’s other biggest projects was a huge, 24-foot bronze horse for Duke Sforza. He spent 12 years designing it out of clay, which would be a mold to be turned into bronze. Unfortunately, before they could pour the metal into the mold to finish the horse sculpture, the project was stopped, because a war started and the metal had to be used for cannons instead of the horse! In our day, someone decided to get together the money to finally build the horse Leonardo always wanted. If you ever visit Milan, Italy you can see it today!

After the war Duke Sforza was no longer Duke, so Leonardo stopped working for him. Leonardo continued working in his workshop in Milan and soon had his own students and apprentices.

Florence

In the 1500s a French army invaded and took over Milan, so Leonardo left and went to Florence, where he had been an apprentice as a young man. In Florence, he painted his most famous painting, The Mona Lisa. Leonardo was a gifted artist, but he wasn’t afraid to learn new topics and never stopped learning. He was infinitely curious! Leonardo began to study math and science. He studied the human body, which is called anatomy. He also observed the flight of birds and studied the flow of air and water. He looked at everyday objects through different eyes. He wondered how bodies worked, how birds flew, and what gave living things their motion. He didn’t take anything for granted and saw the miracle in everyday life and studied deeply to try and understand it. 

Eventually, Leonardo moved back to Milan and continued his scientific studies, writing and creating many sketchbooks to help others understand the human body and how it worked. He came to believe that all bodies and living things worked according to certain laws of nature, which was very ahead of his time. 

Rome

In 1513, around the age of 60, Leonardo again moved to Rome where he lived in the Vatican and worked for Giuliano de Medici. At this time many of the popular Renaissance artists were living and creating amazing works of art in Rome. The famous St. Peter’s Cathedral was being built at the time and Raphael was painting walls in the Pope’s new apartments. One of the most famous artists of all time, Michaelangelo, was also in Rome working on the Pope’s tomb. 

By the age of 65, Leonardo was asked by the King of France to move there, where he became his main painter, architect, and engineer, which was a great honor. There he continued his sketches and consulted other artists in their works. He also helped plan a palace and garden for the king. He spent a lot of time arranging his writings and sketches about nature in his many notebooks, which fortunately we have today! Leonardo passed away at an old age while living in France.

Leonardo’s Influences

Today we’re lucky to have many of Leonardo’s paintings and notebooks. Many of the ideas he had were for machines that wouldn’t be invented for hundreds of years. For example, in his study of birds and flight, he had the idea for an airplane, a helicopter, and a parachute, which he sketched in his notebooks. He also had the idea for many military machines, such as an armored car, a giant crossbow, and a three-barreled cannon. When you get the chance you can find a book about Leonardo’s inventions at the library or look at them online. They are amazing!

What can you learn from Leonardo?

One of the most interesting things about Leonardo was his ability to take his artistic talents and engineering skills and combine them. He became known as a Renaissance Man because of his curiosity and ability to combine many different skills to invent amazing things. He believed artists were the best qualified to achieve true knowledge, because of the unique way they were able to view the world. Think about that as you observe the miraculous world around you. Never take for granted the little things. Even the smallest living things like a flower or a bee are extraordinary as you look at them closely and learn more about them. Think about what you might do to learn more about the world around you like Leonardo. You could take the time to study a rock or a leaf and sketch it into a notebook as Leonardo did. This is the way he came to better understand the world, one simple object at a time. 

Listen to the audio

The post History of Leonardo da Vinci for Kids appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.

But it doesn’t walk the earth, it swims in the ocean! It’s a blue whale! These animals can be over 100 feet long, and weigh about 200 tons. Its heart is the size of a small car!

I’ve been pretty fortunate to be close to some of these amazing animals. Once, when I was paddleboarding with my son, a mother and baby humpback whale were playing in the water not far from us. Another time, we were snorkeling and could hear their songs in the water all around us. We’ve also been able to see them up close during boat rides.

Whales and dolphins have captivated people for thousands of years. Blue whales usually stay in deeper water, but dolphins often play and jump near the shore, and you don’t have to go too far out in a boat in many areas to glimpse a whale. Their size, power, and, in some cases, friendly nature, seem to pique our curiosity. There are cases of whales and dolphins warning people of danger, even saving their lives. And for thousands of years, we’ve watched and wondered about these magnificent creatures. 

Whales and Dolphins in Stories

If you’ve been listening for a while, it probably won’t surprise you to find out that people have been telling each other stories about whales and dolphins for thousands of years. The Maori, the native people of New Zealand, consider whales to be kaitiaki, or guides for sailors. In fact, a whale even played a part in helping them find their homeland! According to Maori legend, Paikea was the favorite son of his father, the chief of their tribe in what is now the Cook Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. Paikea’s brothers were jealous of him, and one night he overheard them plotting to drown him when he went out fishing the next day. Knowing of the plot, he was able to get away in his canoe, but he ended up drifting at sea, not knowing which direction to go to get back. As Paikea’s hope began to die, a whale picked him up and carried him all the way to New Zealand! There, he started his own settlement and became a beloved leader. The movie Whale Rider follows a modern Maori girl who wants to be the chief of her tribe, following in her grandfather’s footsteps. When she is told a girl can’t become chief, she decides to prove herself by riding a whale, just like Paikea. 

Arctic Tribes and Whales

Various arctic tribes in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and elsewhere, consider whales to be symbols of their way of life. They carve them into totem poles and have a long tradition of hunting them using traditional tools and weapons. Unlike the whaling industry that grew later, these hunters only take the small number of whales that the tribe will be able to use. 

Ancient Greeks and Dolphins

The Ancient Greeks were fascinated by dolphins. Their legends told of dolphins saving people lost at sea by riding them to shore. Ancient coins even show people riding dolphins. Dolphins were even said to have led a group of priests to the spot where they would set up one of most important religious sites in Ancient Greece, the Oracle at Delphi.

Jonah and the Whale

And of course, there’s the story of Jonah and the Whale in the bible. But did you know that this story is not only in the Christian Old Testament, but also the Jewish Torah and the Muslim Koran? In all three stories, Jonah disobeys God’s command to go into a city to preach about him. He boards a boat to run away, but soon the boat is caught in a storm. The sailors on the ship suspect that Jonah’s god is angry at him and causing the storm, so they throw him overboard. Soon, a huge whale swallows him, takes him all the way to the city where god wanted him to go, and spits him out on the shore.  

Whale Hunting

Although whales and dolphins are the helpers and even heroes of many folk stories, people haven’t always been heroes to them. Humans began hunting whales over 8,000 years ago. For people who lived near coastlines, they were a valuable source of food – one whale could feed a lot of people after all! Traditional hunting like this didn’t endanger whales, or bring them close to a point where there wouldn’t be any left. For a long time, people hunted from small boats with simple weapons, and took only the few whales they could use.

But by the 17th century, things were changing. Whaling, as whale-hunting was called, was becoming more sophisticated and more organized. And people were making a lot more money from it. Food wasn’t the main goal – people had found many uses for different parts of whales. The oil in the whale’s body could be used to lubricate machinery, and make oil lamps, candles, and soap. Sperm whales were especially valued: their bulbous heads alone could contain over 6 thousand pounds of oil! Baleen – the fibery material in many whales’ mouths that helps them catch their dinner of tiny krill – was lightweight and flexible, but strong. People used it to make the frames of umbrellas, mattress springs, and horse whips. 

Hunting the biggest creatures on Earth could be dangerous. Men would set out from a whaling ship in small rowboats, armed with harpoons that they would hurl by hand at these gigantic animals. Of course, most creatures do what they can to avoid being killed, and whales are no different. They could ram into the side of the boat or even lift the smaller boats out of the water by swimming up under them. Herman Melville based his famous novel, Moby Dick, on a real whaling voyage that ended tragically for the crew when a sperm whale attacked the ship, sinking it. In the novel, Melville imagines Captain Ahab, a whaler obsessed with getting revenge on the “white whale”, Moby Dick, who long ago bit off his leg. Ahab becomes so dangerously obsessed that he ends up losing his ship, his crew, and his life to the whale.

But whaling was big business in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century. As I mentioned, whale oil and baleen had many uses, so whalers could make a lot of money. And, as time went on, people invented more sophisticated tools for hunting whales. By the early 20th century, some species of whale were getting dangerously close to becoming extinct. But technology kept getting better (or worse, if you think about it from the whale’s perspective). People invented harpoon guns, and harpoons that would explode when they hit the whale. They began using high-tech electronics and helicopters to track the whales. 

Whales can Sing?

People began to question whether we should be hunting whales at all by the middle of the century.  Some species were close to extinction – there were so few left that scientists warned that soon, there wouldn’t be any. Scientists also began to realize that whales are intelligent and complex. Many live in groups and cooperate with each other to hunt and stay safe. They communicate with clicks, chirps and, in some cases, whole songs! A Navy engineer named Frank Watlington first recorded the songs of humpback whales in the 1960s. He shared these recordings with some friends who were biologists, Roger and Katharine Payne. The group was so astounded by the songs, they wanted people to appreciate how amazing and complex these creatures are. So they decided to release an album of whale songs! People loved the whale songs – they’re actually very relaxing and melodic, and the record was a hit! In fact, one of the recordings was sent into space on a probe called Voyager – so someday in the far-off future, aliens might even be able to appreciate these gifted whale vocalists.  

Not only did people like listening to the whales, the record inspired many people to start caring about whales. They began to realize that if we kept hunting them, we’d lose these amazing creatures. People  began to organize and protest commercial whaling. Some even went out on boats, trying to get between whaling ships and the whales they were hunting. The movement even inspired a science fiction movie, Star Trek IV, where space travelers go back in time to the 20th century to rescue a pair of humpback whales who can save the future Earth. 

Freeing the Whales

Popular culture had an impact in this case. Commercial whaling was finally banned in 1986. Not all countries agreed to the ban, but most did. Japan, Iceland, and Norway kept hunting whales, though Iceland has pledged to stop by 2024.

But by this time, some whales faced a different kind of mistreatment. Many orcas and dolphins were used for entertainment at water parks around the world. Some were well-treated, but many weren’t. They were often kept in tanks that were too small, and water that was too hot or not salty enough, like the ocean water they normally live in. This made many whales sick. Again, it was pop culture, a movie that spurred change. The movie Free Willy came out in 1993. In it, a lonely boy befriends a captive orca named Willy. He realizes that Willy is sick and wants to live free in the ocean. 

The movie sends the message that these majestic creatures belong in the wild, but the orca actor, Keiko, who starred in the movie was anything but free. In fact, Keiko lived in a too-small, too-hot tank in a Mexico City marine park, and actually was sick. Fans of the movie were outraged and wrote letters and raised funds to help free the real Willy. Finally, five years after the movie came out, Keiko was released into the wild in Iceland. He was fitted with a tracking device, and lived until 2003, or about 25 years old. Wild male orcas often live up to 35 years, but Keiko was already in poor health and probably not well-prepared to live in the wild. Today, dozens of orcas are still held in captivity. They often suffer from health problems, and don’t live as long as their wild cousins. 

Watching Whales and Dolphins

The best way to see whales today is in the wild!  Many organizations offer whale watching trips that let humans see whales in their natural habitat. You go out in a boat to an area where wild whales usually hang out and wait for them to show themselves. Sometimes you see just glimpses of backs and tails as they surface for air.  Watching the water spout from their blowholes is fun!, But other times you’ll see them breaching or rolling in the water, playing and showing off. If you find yourself near the ocean, you can also just sit and look out at the water. If you’re patient and stay long enough, you might see a group of dolphins, or pod, jumping and playing offshore. Be sure to bring a camera and binoculars! That way, both you and the creatures you’re watching can enjoy the experience. 

Sources

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/04/iceland-to-end-whaling-in-2024-demand-dwindles

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/oceans-the-great-unknown-58.html

https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?13796/The-History-of-Whaling-and-the-International-Whaling-Commission-IWC

https://whalewatch.co.nz/our-people/indigenous-kiwi-and-paikea/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick

https://wwhandbook.iwc.int/en/species/blue-whale

Gish, Melissa. (2012) Whales. Creative Education. Mankato, MN.

Sandstrom, Donna. (2021) Orca Rescue! The True Story of an Orphaned Orca Named Springer. Kids Can Press. Toronto.

The post Whales and Dolphins Facts for Kids appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.

Have you ever seen the word “pasteurized” on a carton of milk? You might think it means something about pastures – big grassy fields where animals graze. That’s usually how people pronounce it. But while it’s nice to think of the cows that gave us the milk sunning themselves in grassy pastures, the word actually refers to something that happens after the milk is out of the cow. Before milk goes into cartons and then on to the store, it undergoes pasteurization. The milk is heated to a specific temperature in order to kill any harmful microorganisms, or germs, that might make you sick. It has nothing to do with grassy fields! Instead, it’s named after the man who invented the process: Louis Pasteur.  

Educational Background of Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur’s background gave no hint that he would become a great scientist later in life. Born in 1822 in Dole, France, he came from a long line of leather tanners. His family was poor, and Louis wasn’t even that interested in school as a child. He preferred fishing and drawing. He actually became very good at drawing portraits of his friends and family using pastels and pencil.

Things began to change when Louis went off to college. He began to study hard, but still struggled. His grades in chemistry – a subject he would later do important work in– were especially bad. He wanted to go to the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, but had to take the entrance exam twice! But even though he had setbacks, his hard work and dedication paid off. 

While he was working to try to get into the Ecole Normale, Louis began attending lectures by a famous chemist, and decided that he wanted to be a chemist too. So, when he finally went to the Ecole Normale, that’s what he studied. After he got his doctoral degree, he got a job at the University of Strasbourg, teaching and doing research in the structure of chemical crystals. 

He also met his wife, Marie, there. She was the daughter of the head of the university. At first, she wasn’t so sure about this serious, somewhat shy man. But after getting to know him better, she fell in love too, and they married. She would support him throughout their lives together, helping in the lab and with his papers. 

Louis Pasteur’s Early Works

Even though Louis started out as a chemist, his most important work is in microbiology, or the study of organisms so small, you need a microscope to see them. This shift happened almost by accident, but as Louis himself reminded people, “In the fields of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.” In 1854, he got a new job at a university in northern France. While there, the owner of a factory came to him with a problem. His factory fermented sugar beets to make alcohol, but sometimes he ended up with a spoiled, sour elixir, instead of alcohol.  

At this time, scientists didn’t know how fermentation worked. Some thought it was just chemicals rearranging themselves spontaneously under the right conditions. Most people just knew that when you left crushed grapes or soggy grain in a covered container for long enough, you got wine or beer. Louis wasn’t satisfied with those answers though, and set about trying to solve the mystery. He got samples of the good alcohol and the sour substance and put them under his microscope. 

What do you think he saw?

He saw different kinds of microorganisms swimming around in them! The alcohol samples had yeast, which is a microscopic type of fungus. The sour stuff had bacteria, which is a completely different kind of microorganism! Both types float around in the air, but Louis was the first to realize that the yeast settled in containers of grapes or mashed grain and caused fermentation. Those tiny yeast ate up the sugars in the beets, used it to make energy, then got rid of the uhhh…waste that they didn’t need. That waste was the alcohol.

Studies in Microorganisms

Louis was hooked. He went on to study the microorganisms in wine and beer, finding new ways to make sure they weren’t contaminated by tiny critters that would spoil them. But he wasn’t just interested in making beverages safer, although this was very important for people’s health and the French economy. Louis wanted to know more about how these tiny microorganisms lived. If so many scientists were wrong about fermentation, what other discoveries were waiting to be made?

One idea that didn’t make much sense to Louis was “spontaneous generation.” Spontaneous generation was the idea that some living creatures just arose from nonliving things. Rotting meat made flies, some people thought, because they’d seen fly larvae on rotting meat. Louis thought that flies must be laying tiny eggs in the meat. He suspected that microorganisms, like the yeast in beer and wine, actually float around in the air, settling on things and, if the conditions are right, growing and multiplying.

Louis devised an ingenious way to demonstrate that living things didn’t just spring fully-formed from non-living things. He designed a bottle with a long, skinny neck that curved downward like the top of the letter S, opening toward the ground. He then boiled a broth, killing any microorganisms that were already in it. He poured some of the broth into the S-neck bottles, and some into bottles with necks that opened upwards, toward the sky. 

Then he waited. After a few weeks, the bottles with the S-necks hadn’t really changed. But the ones with upward-facing necks had become cloudy. Looking at the liquid under a microscope confirmed that microorganisms had landed from the air and grown in it. But, microorganisms couldn’t land in the S-neck bottles, so that liquid stayed clear!

With all these accomplishments and discoveries to his name, you might be wondering, what else can one scientist do? A lot, it turns out! Louis wanted to study how microorganisms might be involved in causing diseases, and maybe even find ways to prevent or cure those diseases.  Sadly, he was motivated by events in his own life: three of his daughters passed away from typhoid fever when they were young. He started studying two diseases caused by bacteria: chicken cholera and anthrax. 

Chicken cholera is not a serious disease for humans, but is deadly to chickens, which you might have guessed from the name. Louis developed a vaccine for it almost by accident, but as with his study of microorganisms in alcohol, he was prepared to take advantage. Before going on vacation Louis gave an assistant specific instructions for how to infect some chickens with the bacteria they had been growing. But the assistant waited too long, and the cholera bacteria dried up. Lucky chickens!

But Louis didn’t think of himself as unlucky. Instead, he decided to give the chickens a dose of the dried-up, mostly-dead bacteria. These chickens got a little sick, but soon recovered. Later, Louis injected those same chickens with fresh, living cholera bacteria. Louis suspected that the first dose of mostly-dead cholera bacteria might actually protect the chickens from the living bacteria. He was right! The chickens didn’t get sick again!

Next, Louis heard about a vaccine for anthrax that a veterinarian named Jean Jaques Henri Toussaint had invented. Anthrax bacteria was deadly to both farm animals and people. He tested Toussaint’s vaccine, and it worked. In an unfair twist, Louis got credit for creating the vaccine, because his test was more widely covered in newspapers at the time. Sadly, Toussaint died only a few years later.

But Louis wasn’t done working on vaccines. The next disease he studied was truly terrifying: rabies. Rabies is a virus that causes animals, and unfortunate humans they might bite, to get a high fever, behave aggressively, fear water, and eventually die. There was no cure. Louis got to work, trying to develop a weaker version of the disease that could be used to make a vaccine. He tested it out on dogs. It seemed to work, but Louis wanted more time to experiment. 

But the experiment was about to speed up. One summer day in 1885, a mother burst into the lab, gripping the hand of her nine year old son. Both were crying and distraught. The boy, Joseph Meister, had been bitten 14 times by a rabid dog. Louis was worried because he had never tried his vaccine on a human. But without help, Joseph would die. Louis had to try. Just as they had done with the dogs, Louis and his assistants injected Joseph with the vaccine several times over the course of weeks. Louis and the boy’s mother spent this time worrying and waiting. It can take weeks or months for a person to get sick with rabies after they’ve been bitten, so they wouldn’t know if the vaccine had worked for some time. 

But time passed, and Joseph stayed healthy! He went back to school and playing outdoors, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he was afraid of dogs after that. People all over the world heard about the new rabies vaccine, and people came from miles away to receive it if they’d been bitten. Today, almost all pet dogs and cats get the rabies vaccine, though humans usually only get it if they’ve been bitten by a wild animal. Louis’s vaccine saved countless lives.

Louis Pasteur always wanted to use his work to serve others. Thanks to his work, we know a lot more about how microorganisms work, how they cause disease, and how to keep from getting sick from them. But Louis knew that wanting to do good wasn’t the same as actually doing it. He worked tirelessly, sometimes pacing the room late at night while he thought through a problem. He was careful and methodical in his work, trying to be sure he’d gotten it right, before he made any exciting announcements. But he also knew when to take advantage of an opportunity. If he didn’t, he never would have studied the yeast in fermented drinks, or how to make vaccines from weakened germs. He never would have saved Joseph Meister’s life with his rabies vaccine. Your milk wouldn’t be as safe to drink. So next time you notice something unexpected, or find something didn’t work the way you thought, think of Louis Pasteur, and keep examining it. Look at it carefully. You might discover something amazing!

Sources

Curtis, Robert H. (1993) Great Lives: Medicine. Macmillan, New York.

Dickman, Nancy (2016) Louis Pasteur: Germ Destroyer. Gareth Stevens Publishing, New York.

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/cellular-energetics/cellular-respiration-ap/a/fermentation-and-anaerobic-respiration

https://www.nature.com/articles/d42859-020-00008-5

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20527335/

http://thispodcastwillkillyou.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/TPWKY-Episode-82-Anthrax.pdf

The post History of Louis Pasteur for Kids appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.

Every summer, a wonderful holiday called the “4^th of July” is celebrated in America and it is a joyous time filled with parties and barbecues, and street parades to celebrate America’s independence from Britain in 1776.  And do you know another historic event that happened on the 4^th of July in 1899?  Why, the discovery of “Dippy the Dinosaur,” of course!  What?  You’ve never heard of “Dippy the Dinosaur?”  Well, let’s put on our wings, pack some peanut butter sandwiches, and get ready for a long flight ahead – all the way to London – the wonderful city by the sea in England.  Let’s take flight and fly as fast as we can across mountains and valleys and a big blue ocean to the bustling island – the jewel of the United Kingdom.

Heading to the UK

The night is cool and we glide along on a powerful jet stream – the air whipping our wings and bumping us along past huge fluffy clouds and sparkling stars.  I don’t know about you, but sometimes these bumpy flights can make me a little “sea sick” – or air sick.  It’s a good thing I didn’t have too much to eat before we took off!

Ahhh, there – down below us – see those twinkling city lights and bright red buses?  We have arrived in London!  Let’s land over there on the grass by that big, long building that looks like a cathedral or a palace.  What is it, you ask?  It’s the Natural History Museum and you are going to LOVE it!  It has all sorts of neat things like space rocks and models of prehistoric humans – and DINOSAURS!  And the biggest dinosaur of all in here is DIPPY!!!  Let’s hurry and go inside!

Wow – there’s a stegosaurus skeleton in the lobby!  It’s way bigger than us and has huge, rock-like spikes along its back!  Its jaws are open and gaping at us and his spiky tail is raised high behind him.  He looks like he’s VERY hungry and would like to eat us for lunch!  I’m glad I didn’t live near him during the Jurassic period!  Those prehistoric people must have been very brave.  And what’s that behind the stegosaurus?  It’s an escalator going up into a big, red, glowing ball.  The sign says it is the planet Saturn!  Wow – only in London can you find a planet behind a dinosaur’s butt!

Let’s ride the escalator – I’m tired of flying – and see where it takes us.

Up we go, hearing the roar of the dinosaur behind us as we slowly approach and go into the big red planet.  This is so neat – it’s like a tunnel ride at Disneyland!  

Dippy the Dinosaur

The escalator takes us to the second floor and we follow the signs to find Dippy.  I’m so excited!  This dinosaur is called a Diplodocus Carnegii and it is named after Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish-American steel tycoon – or businessman – who paid for a hunt to find dinosaurs in Wyoming, USA!!!  But what is a Diplodocus?  Well, let’s find out!  Up ahead is a sign that tells us to go down this corridor and around that corner into a big room.

Oh, my word – that is one HUGE dinosaur!  In front of us stands a gigantic skeleton of Dippy the Dinosaur!  He is so tall and so long he takes up the whole side of the museum it seems!  He is lit in blue light and looks truly magnificent!  His head almost touches the ceiling WAY above our heads.  We are so small next to him – we only come up to his shin!  He has a long neck like a giraffe, 4 tall legs, and a tail that is so long it almost touches the back of the room.  He looks like a Brontosaurus!  Have you ever seen them in picture books or dinosaur movies – the dinosaurs that can stretch their necks high up into the tall trees to eat leaves and fruit?  The plaque next to Dippy states that he was discovered near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, on the 4^th of July 1899!  That must have been one amazing celebration!  It says Dippy weighs 3,300 pounds, is 22 feet high and 70 feet long.  Wow – I wonder how much he weighed with all his skin on!!!  The plaque says he is 145-156 million years old and that he and his other diplodocus friends roamed the US Midwest during the end of the Jurassic period.  He is very similar to other sauropods – or dinosaurs like him – such as the Brachiosaurus and Brontosaurus.  

A tour guide comes into the room and he states that Dippy has 80 vertebrae – or bones – in his tail and that his tail may have been used for defense – to swat away other dinosaurs who were trying to attack him.  His tail may have made a cracking sound like a whip and he may have used it for balance while standing on his rear legs to reach high tree tops for food.  Can you imagine a dinosaur sitting on his tail?  Some other scientists state that his long tail might balance his long neck so he doesn’t topple over!  It’s kind of like a seesaw – you need the same weight on either side or it just slams down!

And look, there’s a large claw on each of his front feet.  Maybe that was to dig for roots or to help him move around, like when we put spikes on our tires.

If I crane my neck, I can see his head far above me.  He has peg-like teeth pointing forward in his open mouth.  The tour guide states these teeth helped strip leaves off branches and his teeth fell out every month and were replaced by new teeth.  That’s a lot of visits by the tooth fairy!  The guide states Dippy liked to eat leaves from the trees or soft water plants from riverbeds.  Boy, he would have to do A LOT of eating to fill that big belly!

His front legs are slightly lower than his back legs – like cats.  Maybe that’s to help him bend low to eat plants on the ground.

Since Dippy is a bunch of bones today, we have to imagine what his skin looked like.  The guide states that fossils found near Dippy had impressions – or marks – left from his skin.  These marks showed that he had narrow pointed spines about 7” long on his tail and maybe on his back and neck.  These were probably to stop other dinosaurs from attacking him.  He had scaly skin like a crocodile with different shapes of scales – rectangle, dome, square, and others – depending on where they were on his body.  This probably protected him from heat and bugs.  He was so huge that the sun was shining on him all day long!  That would have been a painful sunburn if he didn’t have those scales!

But how did Dippy get here in this museum in London?  The guide states that he was found in Wyoming by Andrew Carnegie’s archeologists – those are people who dig for fossils and dinosaurs.  This was such an amazing find that Mr. Carnegie wanted to share it with the world.  So, he made plaster casts of Dippy and sent these casts around the world – to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Mexico City in the early 1900’s!  This was during a time called the “Bone Wars,” when everyone was rushing to find a dinosaur.

Dippy is the most famous dinosaur in the world and the first dinosaur many people had ever seen.  King Edward VII of England was amazed when he saw a sketch of Dippy in Andrew Carnegie’s home and that’s how Dippy was gifted to London!  

Dippy even has a poem written about him.  It goes:

Crowned heads of Europe

All make a royal fuss

Over Uncle Andy

And his old diplodocus!

Travels of Dippy the Dinosaur

Dippy has traveled all over the world and been put on display for millions to see.  During World War II, he was taken apart, put in crates, and stored in the museum basement during the bombing of London.  Poor Dippy was buried again!  

But we are so lucky to see him today in all his glory!  He must have been an AMAZING dinosaur in his time, roaming the plains of the US, his feet making thundering sounds and shaking the ground as he searched for food or went to the watering hole.  I wonder what kind of sounds he made?  Maybe a big roar like a lion – or a high screech like a bugle with that long neck.  

What do you think of Dippy and diplodocuses?  Would you have liked to live in the Jurassic period with Dippy?  Which dinosaur is your favorite and why?  Do you think a big asteroid crashed into Earth and destroyed all the dinosaurs?  

Did you know that other animals are going extinct every day due to people expanding into their land and erecting more buildings, destroying the forests for lumber, or polluting the seas with trash?  What can you do to help these other creatures?

Animals, like the dinosaurs, can go extinct at any time, which is why we have to be careful how we treat the earth and the animals which live on it. What can you do to help these creatures who are near extinction?

Maybe on the 4^th of July every year we could make a donation to a fund that helps save our wildlife, seas, and forests.  Wouldn’t that be a great way to honor Dippy and save other species?  I think Dippy is an amazing reminder that we must work to save all the endangered species struggling to survive today.  Who knew a prehistoric dinosaur could help save other wildlife millions of years in the future?!

The post History of Dippy the Dinosaur appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.

Have you ever wondered why your hair is curly like your mother’s, or you have freckles like your father? Or maybe your parents say you smile like your uncle, who you don’t even see that much. All these things are related to your genes. Genes are the stuff inside your body that tell your cells how to build YOU. You get your genes from your mom and dad, and they got them from their parents. Genes are made out of a substance called DNA, which is short for deoxyribonucleic acid. Don’t worry, you don’t have to remember that!

But, you might also wonder, what exactly does DNA look like? 

Rosalind Franklin wondered about that question too, and as a scientist, she helped answer it. It wasn’t an easy question to answer, because DNA is much, much too small for people to see. Knowing how DNA is put together would help other scientists learn more about how it works, and eventually make all kinds of other medical advances possible. And Franklin did end up discovering what DNA looks like! 

But before we get to that, we need to go back to London, in 1920, where Rosalind Franklin was born. Franklin was part of a well-off Jewish family, who had been involved in politics for a long time. One uncle served in the British government. Another uncle and aunt were activists for women’s voting rights, which Britain granted in 1918. Her mother did charity work, and her father was a banker and a teacher. During World War II, the Franklin family took in Jewish refugee children who had escaped from Europe. 

Rosalind’s obsession wasn’t politics though. She did care about people, but she was fascinated by science. As a child, Rosalind’s aunt described her as “alarmingly clever–she spends all her time doing arithmetic for pleasure, and invariably gets her sums right.” Rosalind didn’t really spend every moment of her childhood doing math. She was good at most other subjects too. She learned German, French and Latin, but did not do well in music!  Even though she was an excellent student, she also enjoyed sports, travel, and hiking.  But by the time Rosalind was a teenager, she knew that she wanted to be a scientist. She realized that this, too, could be a way to help people.

When it was time to go to college, Rosalind won a scholarship to pay for it. Since she didn’t really need it, she decided to donate her scholarship to a deserving refugee student.  Because of World War II, many people were trying to escape Europe. Many came to England, and did not have much when they arrived. A scholarship to go to college would have been a huge gift.

Franklin studied chemistry at Newnham College, a women’s college that is part of Cambridge University. After she finished her studies, she worked in a lab at Cambridge, but didn’t feel she was respected there. Also, World War II was still raging, and Franklin hoped to do something to support the war effort. So, she left Cambridge to work at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. Studying coal might sound very boring, but it was actually very important work. Coal was critical to the war effort because it was used in gas masks that soldiers wore. These masks filtered out harmful gasses and particles that might otherwise make them sick. Rosalind made several discoveries that helped improve gas masks.

After the war, a friend helped Franklin get a job in a lab in France. Rosalind loved France – the language, the food, and the people. In her new job, she learned to use X-Ray crystallography, which allows scientists to take pictures of microscopic structures, things far too small to be seen with your eyes, and even too small for most microscopes. She became an expert in using this technology, and it would help in her later work on DNA.

In 1950, a professor named John Randall asked Franklin to build an X-ray crystallography lab at the King’s College in order to study DNA. However, Dr. Randall didn’t inform Maurice Wilkins, a scientist who had also been working on DNA at King’s College, that he had hired Rosalind to be in charge of the lab. This upset Wilkins, who thought he would be in charge. The two did not get off to a good start, and never really got along. 

Even so, Franklin launched into her work in the lab with the help of an assistant named Raymond Gosling. She improved the X-ray camera, which allowed her to take much clearer images of microscopic structures. This would allow her and Gosling to make their  big breakthrough. 

But before we get much further, we need to go back a little and talk about what DNA is and why scientists were so excited about it in the 1950s. 

DNA is the instructions for building you. Not just you, but any plant, animal, or other living thing. You are made of billions of cells that are too tiny to see with your eyes. There are many types of cells, but each one contains a copy of all your DNA. 

Think of each cell in your body as a Lego set. You have lots of pieces that can be used to make different parts of your body. Your cells also have machinery for building those blocks into the parts of your body, like fingernails, muscles, or eyes. DNA is like the instruction booklet: it tells your cellular machinery which blocks to use and how to put them together to make the different parts of your body. 

People knew DNA existed before the 1950s. They’d known about it for almost 100 years, and knew something about the chemicals it was made of. But they didn’t know the details of how those chemical pieces were put together. Remember, the pieces that makeup DNA are WAY too small for anyone to see with their eyes, or even with the microscopes that existed at the time. 

One more important discovery about DNA came just a few years before Franklin began working on it. Remember when we talked about genes in the beginning of the episode? 

They’re how parents pass traits–like brown hair, big feet, or freckles–on to their children. In 1944, a scientist named Oswald Avery first showed that DNA is what makes up genes. Before that, no one was sure what was inside living things that did this. He showed that DNA was that thing, which made people very eager to learn more about it! 

So by the 1950s, several scientists were trying to figure out exactly how DNA was put together. Using her upgraded X-Ray crystallography camera, Franklin and Gosling took a photo of DNA. Taking this photo wasn’t like snapping a picture on your cell phone. It took hours of work and careful planning. Franklin called it Photo 51, and it was the key to understanding how DNA is put together. Photo 51 looks like a circle with an X made of little dashes in the middle. 

But this wasn’t the end of Franklin’s work. Remember, a photo shows something only from one angle. This was going to be kind of like trying to figure out what a building looks like by looking at a picture of its roof. Franklin got to work using the photo and her knowledge of the chemistry of DNA to try to figure out what the whole structure was put together. In a few months, she had worked out that DNA was shaped like a double helix. To imagine what a double helix looks like, picture a rope ladder. You’re holding the ropes on one end and a friend holds the other end. If you twist the ropes on your end, you’ll get a double helix!

Unfortunately, Franklin wouldn’t be the one to show the world what DNA looked like. Maurice Wilkins got a hold of Photo 51 and showed it to his friend James Watson. Pretty soon, Watson and his coworker Francis Crick were using the photo to try to figure out DNA’s structure. They also worked out that it was a double helix. Watson and Crick wrote a paper and quickly published it, just weeks before Rosalind Franklin had planned to publish her own paper.

Franklin didn’t realize that Watson had seen her photo, so she thought they had done all the work and made the discovery on their own. She had also started a new job, and was glad to be out of the tense environment at King’s College. At her new lab, she and her coworkers made important discoveries about a virus that affects plants, called tobacco mosaic virus. Franklin was glad to feel appreciated and respected again.

Rosalind Franklin would never know that her photograph had helped Watson and Crick decipher the structure of DNA. Unfortunately, she passed away of cancer only a few years later. Watson and Crick would go on to win a Nobel Prize for learning the structure of DNA. It’s unfair that Franklin didn’t get the credit she deserved while she was alive, but strangely enough, it was James Watson who eventually revealed her role in the discovery of the double helix, in a book he wrote in 1968. 

Even though she didn’t get credit for her DNA discovery while she was alive, Rosalind Franklin knew she had made important contributions to science. She felt that science was the best way not only to explain life, but to improve the world. She knew that her work on coal, x-ray crystallography, and plant viruses had done this, so she was proud of her work. In the end, Franklin was more concerned with learning and improving lives with science than she was with being first to do something. She spent her life trying to answer important questions, and even though it’s a little late, people do celebrate that now. I hope you pass along what you’ve learned about Rosalind Franklin, so more people can celebrate her achievements!

Sources

Berger, Doreen. “A Biography of the Dark Lady of Notting Hill.” The United Synagogue, Dec. 3, 2014. https://www.theus.org.uk/article/biography-dark-lady-notting-hill 

Borgert-Spaniol, Megan (2018) Rosalind Franklin: unlocking DNA. Abdo Publishing, Minneapolis.

Maddox, Brenda. “The double helix and the ‘wronged heroine.’” Nature 421, 407–408 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01399 

Pray, Leslie A. (2008) “Discovery of DNA Structure and Function: Watson and Crick.” Nature Education 1(1):100. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/discovery-of-dna-structure-and-function-watson-397/ 

Oswald Avery. Wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Avery  

Rosalind Franklin. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin 

The post History of Rosalind Franklin for Kids & Families appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.

Do you have a special toy that helps you go to sleep at night? Maybe a bear, or a rabbit, or a penguin? Lots of kids have stuffed animals that help them feel safe and cozy at night. 

The scientist Jane Goodall also had a special stuffed animal when she was a child. Her story starts back in 1930s London, and it was her father who gave her the special animal. Its name was Jubilee, and Jubilee was a chimpanzee. Her father didn’t know it at the time, but chimpanzees would turn out to be a very important part of Jane’s life. As a grown-up, she would become a primatologist, a person who studies apes and monkeys. She would become one of the first people to study chimpanzees in the wild, and one of the first women in the field of primatology. 

Jane was obsessed with all kinds of animals from a young age, not just chimpanzees. When she was a toddler, she brought worms into her bed because she was so curious about them. Instead of getting mad when she found her daughter carefully watching her wriggly new friends, Jane’s mother told her gently that the worms couldn’t survive inside, and needed to be outside in the dirt. I don’t know, but maybe this is what made her father think that she needed a special stuffed animal to sleep with!

Living in the city, Jane didn’t have a lot of opportunities to watch animals. That’s why it was so exciting when she got to visit a relative’s farm when she was four. At the farm, she was given the job of gathering eggs that the chickens had laid. Being a very curious child, Jane wanted to know how the hens laid their eggs. She watched them pecking around the yard, but they never laid eggs there. She watched them going into the henhouse, but couldn’t really see them laying there either, but it was hard to see inside. She asked the grown-ups in her family, but they wouldn’t tell her either. So Jane hatched a plan. She knew that the chickens laid their eggs on special nests in the henhouse, so she decided to go inside, watch quietly, and wait. 

So one morning, that’s what she did. She crawled into the henhouse, covered herself in hay, and sat in a dark corner. Then she waited. And waited. And waited. For hours. The grown-ups had no idea where she was, and became worried.  As the day wore on and Jane didn’t come home, they started looking for her, calling her name as they walked all around the fields and surrounding area. 

But still, Jane waited and watched. Finally, late in the afternoon, her patience paid off: She saw a hen lay an egg! She burst out of the henhouse, hay stuck to her clothes and hair, shouting to her parents about her discovery. Fortunately, Jane’s mother again saw things from her daughter’s perspective. She sat down with Jane and listened while she told her all about her discovery, how chickens lay eggs. Jane’s mother realized that she had a curious, determined, and patient daughter, and wanted to support and encourage her. 

Inspired by the book Tarzan and the Apes, Jane decided at age 10 that she wanted to go to Africa to study animals and write books about them. At the time, most grown-ups around her thought this was a crazy idea. World War II was raging in Europe, and Africa was known back then as a “dark continent” because not many Europeans had explored it and it wasn’t easy to travel there. People also thought back then that adventures like the one Jane was dreaming of were just for boys. But Jane’s mother was not most grown-ups. As always, she supported her daughter. She told her that it wouldn’t be easy, but if she worked hard and took any opportunity that came along, she could do whatever she set her mind to.

As a young woman, Jane continued to dream of going to Africa to study animals. Her opportunity finally arrived when she was 23, and a friend invited her to visit Kenya. She moved back to her parents’ home and worked very hard for a whole summer to earn enough money to make the journey. Finally, she made enough to buy a ticket on a boat and make the first part of her dream come true: she was on her way to Africa.

Once she was in Africa, Jane met the famous anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey. Louis was impressed by Jane and hired her to work as his secretary in Tanzania, where he and his wife were doing their own research. After a few years, he sent Jane to the Gombe Preserve in Tanzania to study chimpanzees. The second part of Jane’s dream was coming true!

But it wasn’t as simple as packing her bags and heading into the forest. As one of the first women in primatology, the British managers of the preserve thought that Jane wouldn’t be safe as a young woman working in the wilderness. They insisted that she bring a chaperone, or someone to look after her, even though she was a grown-up who had lived by herself before. Jane’s mother stepped forward once again to support her daughter and went with her to Gombe as she started her research. 

The forest was a thick tangle of trees, plants, and vines, and there were dangerous animals to worry about. Jane’s tools when she went out to observe the animals were basic: a notebook, binoculars, and some food. But if the managers of Gombe Preserve were afraid for Jane, it didn’t make a difference to her. Instead of being afraid when she went into the forest for the first time, Jane has said that she felt like she was “coming home” to a place where she belonged. 

Jane’s way of working with chimpanzees was unconventional for the time. At this point, she still hadn’t gone to college or gotten a degree, so she didn’t know how researchers normally did things. She gave names to the animals she observed, like Greybeard, Goliath, and Flo, instead of numbers. She would watch them quietly for hours, so they got used to her, and would sometimes even approach her. This allowed Jane to get much closer than any other scientist had before. 

But even though she didn’t do things the way a primatologist was “supposed to,” Jane’s methods turned out to work very well! With patience and perseverance, she was able to observe many things about chimpanzee life that no one had ever noticed before. She got to know each animal as an individual and saw that each chimp had a unique personality, a lot like humans. She observed them hugging, kissing, and patting each other on the back. They seemed to have human-like emotions too–to feel sad, happy, and angry. They seemed to love and show affection for each other. 

She also saw them making tools, which was hard for other scientists at the time to believe. Many of them thought that only humans made tools. She had seen chimpanzees use pieces of grass or sticks to fish termites out of holes in their mounds. They would also use rocks to pound open fruit. Child chimpanzees even have toys–they use vines to play tug-of-war!

After Jane had spent a few years observing chimpanzees at Gombe, Louis Leakey arranged for her to attend Cambridge University to earn a doctoral degree. So she went back to England for a while but returned to Gombe to continue her work there afterward. She set up a research center at Gombe where scientists still study chimpanzees today. And, just like she decided she would when she was 10 years old, she wrote several books on her experiences with the apes.

Dr. Jane, as people often call her now, still works on behalf of chimpanzees. She spends her time traveling around the world meeting and talking to people about how to help protect nature and animals. She loves speaking with young people especially and carries a stuffed monkey (not a chimp!) with her wherever she goes. She believes that young people can be very powerful and change the world if grown-ups just listen to them.

Sometimes, a person can make a difference in unexpected ways, and small actions can add up to bigger changes. Dr. Jane used her patience and determination, quietly watching chimpanzees for hundreds of hours, to learn things that no one else ever suspected. Now, she uses that quiet patience and determination to inspire others to have hope and work to make the world a better place. I’ll leave you today with a quote from Dr. Jane herself: “Each and every one of us makes a difference each and every day, and we have a choice: What kind of difference are we going to make?”

I hope Dr. Jane’s story inspires you to think about the things you can do to make a difference for the better!

Sources

https://www.janegoodall.org.uk/chimpanzees/chimpanzee-central/15-chimpanzees/chimpanzee-central/19-toolmaking

https://wiki.janegoodall.org/wiki/Jane_FAQ%27s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Goodall

The post The Jane Goodall Story for Kids appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.

Close your eyes and imagine that you’re living in a futuristic city. Looking at the horizon, you can see towering wind turbines gently rotating in the wind. On the other side, you can see a whole field of solar panels. A nearby dam uses river water to produce even more electricity. The air you breathe is clean and fresh. The cars and other vehicles don’t give off any smoke or pollution. Your surroundings are clean and green, with plants growing all around you. Far away, you can see an old power plant, which is being demolished to make way for new, alternative energy sources. You can also see several large factories nearby, but none of them are emitting black smoke! This is what a city looks like where alternative energy rules the world .

So, what actually is alternative energy? As you may know, today we rely almost completely on petroleum and coal-based energy sources which are called fossil fuels. Energy companies obtain these resources from deep inside the earth’s surface and refine it to produce different fuels, like gas, gasoline, diesel and kerosene. These fuels are burned in power plants to produce electricity. Petroleum was formed by the remains of tiny plants and animals that died millions of years ago. Coal, on the other hand, was formed by larger plants like ferns. These dead materials were covered by layers of mud, rock, and soil over the years. Because of the pressure caused by all the top layers and the heat from earth’s core, the plant and animal remains transformed into petroleum and coal.  Because it took millions of years for petroleum and coal to form, this means that the amount of fossil fuel resources in the world are limited and won’t last forever. Since the number of people in the world  and businesses  in the world keep increasing and advancing, the need  for energy is also rising.  This is why finding new ways to harness energy is so important! Luckily, the world already has a lot of alternative energy sources and smart scientists and engineers are always working on finding new ways to harness energy and improve the technology we already have.

The alternative sources of energy include solar power, wind power, hydro power, tidal energy, geothermal energy, and biomass energy. These are called renewable energy, because they are naturally replenished in a short amount of time unlike petroleum. For example, there’s always more sun and wind! 

First let’s talk about solar energy. Solar energy is the energy we get from the sun. The sun is an incredibly huge, ball of energy which lights Earth with its rays we receive as sunlight. For thousands of years, people have used the sun’s energy to cook food, dry clothes, and keep warm. In our day, people have invented technologies to transform sunlight or solar energy into electrical power. This is done by solar cells, which are also called “photovoltaic” cells. “Photo” means “light” in Latin and “voltaic” stands for “electricity”. So, it’s basically turning sunlight into electricity! Pretty amazing, right? Solar panels are made by putting together many solar cells. If you’ve ever seen shiny panels on rooftops, those are solar panels. A few of my neighbors have them. In Arizona, solar panels are popular because we get LOTS of sunshine. It can also save people money, because the panels capture the light energy from the sun and turn it into electricity that can be used to power all the electric equipment in their house. Solar panels are sometimes used to power boats, food trucks, buildings, and satellites. Although solar energy IS renewable, how much energy they can produce depends on the time of day, season of the year and location in the world. For example, Arizona is much better for solar panels than a place like England that is often cloudy.

Now, let’s talk about wind energy. Wind energy is made from the wind, which is freely available to us just like sunlight. During the middle ages, people used wind power to pump water or grind grains. They built windmills to do that. Nowadays, people use a large structure called a wind turbine to make electricity using wind power. You may have seen these wind turbines as very tall structures that have long blades to capture the wind. Wind turbines can be around 400 feet tall, because the turbine blades need to reach high up into the atmosphere where the wind is faster than on the ground. The power of the wind is transformed into electricity by a small machine called a turbine generator which is connected to the turbine blades. Energy companies build hundreds of wind turbines in large fields where there are a lot of wind. These areas covered with wind turbines are called “wind farms”. When our family drives to California we pass through a huge wind farm. If you’ve never seen a wind farm look up pictures of San Gorgonio Pass. It’s pretty amazing.

The next form of alternative energy is hydropower or hydro energy and is made by using the power of moving water. In the past, people have used the power of water by making water wheels in rivers. Ancient Egyptians used hydro energy to grind grains and early Americans used it to saw wood. In the 1800’s, scientists discovered how to make electrical energy using hydro energy by turning the turbines of a generator. So, it works a little bit like wind power. To harness hydro energy today, people build a dam across a river which creates a water reservoir, which is like a man-made lake. By making a reservoir, we can have a controlled flow of water which can be used to generate electricity. That is, powerplant workers can control the amount and speed of the water flowing out of the dam. So, unlike solar or wind energy, hydro power is more constant and controllable. In Arizona we have the Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam that generate a ton of electricity using hydro power. Be sure to lookup pictures of these impressive dams.

Tidal power is another type of hydro power. But instead of using inland waters like rivers and reservoirs, the energy of seawater is used to make electricity from tidal energy. Ocean tides usually occur twice daily, and tidal powerplants use turbine generators to convert that energy into electricity. Tidal turbines are placed in the path of the tidal waves. When the waves hit the turbine blades, they begin to spin. This movement is transformed into electric power using the turbine generators. So, you can see that the design of wind turbines and hydro turbines are very similar. However, tidal power can change based on the season. We cannot control it like how we control the power generated from a reservoir.

Geothermal energy is a form of alternative energy, that is obtained from the earth’s core. You may already know that the core of the earth is packed with heat. You can sometimes see this heat coming out of volcanoes and geysers. Geothermal energy can be used for heating, cooking and in electricity generation. We get it by circulating water or other liquids through underground tubes. The liquids absorb the geothermal heat and bring it back up. The captured heat can be directly used for heating. It can also be used to produce electricity using steam turbines.

Another really interesting form of alternative energy is biomass. Biomass is  biological materials such as sugar cane, straw, wood chips and many other plant materials. These can be burned to generate electricity instead of burning fossil fuels. Biomass can also be used to make other types of fuel such as diesel and biogas that can replace petroleum-based fuels. This makes biomass different and more important than the other types of alternative energy we discussed. That’s because biomass can be used to produce solid, liquid and gaseous forms of energy instead of just electricity. 

It’s pretty exciting to consider all of the new forms of energy that have been developed over the last 100 years and the improvements that are happening every day. Does alternative energy interest you? If so, do an internet search to watch videos of some of the amazing things people are doing to use renewable energy and what is being done at places like wind and solar farms. Also, more and more engineers and inventors are needed to solve the energy problems we have. Does engineering interest you? If so, math and science are important subjects to improve at. Also, being creative and coming up with lots of ideas. Can you think of an interesting way to use alternative energy to power something you use everyday?

With all of the new inventions, we have more and more options and not one of them is perfect, so many people believe a combination of technologies will solve the problems of pollution while sustaining all of our energy needs. There are over 7 billion people on this planet, so we need to find ways we can all live here and have enough energy without polluting this precious gift we can be given. 

The post Alternative Energy & Renewable Energy for Kids appeared first on Bedtime History: Podcast and Videos For Kids.