Professor Blue

science for kids (of all ages!)

Archive for December, 2009

These paws are made for walking

Not only does Professor Blue have a blog, she also has a dog…who makes tracks in the snow. Among other animals. What did she find?
First, we shall refer to the dog as Mr. The Dog. What does this dog do?

  1. sighs and pouts
  2. eats things he shouldn’t
  3. ‘marks territory’
  4. sniffs everything
  5. prefers eating pizza
  6. nibbles on the ears of his best dog friends
  7. howls sometimes (he is not what you would call a barking dog)
  8. pants with his tongue hanging out
  9. and as you can see in the picture above, catches up on some light reading.
  10. but let’s not forget – he makes tracks in the snow!

Now that it’s winter time, it seems as if everyone’s tracks are obvious. If you have snow, that is.

We recently took a walk in the woods and spotted a trail of a single row of tracks. It was as if a one legged animal had been by because there was no left paw, right paw kind of tracks. What did it look like? Like a bobcat took out a pogo stick and bounced her way to this fallen pine tree and a pile of branches not yet covered with snow.

The State of Maine has a cool chart of animal tracks here that you can look and see if you have any visiting animals near your house. Thanks to the chart, it looks as if a red fox had paid us a visit. Mr. The Dog probably knows by sniffing it but he won’t give us any clues.

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I have the superpower to help penguins

Here is a video made by kids in Ohio who talk about using their own super powers to help the environment, animals and other people. You kids out there in internet land can make your own video on using your own super power and send it to Roots and Shoots.

You can also send it to Professor Blue and we’ll post it here on the site. Professor Blue is considering adding a cape to her lab coat now.

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Special mud pie… it’s alive! And it eats plastic

A teenaged boy named Daniel Burd discovered a way to make plastic bags decompose quickly by mixing yeast, mud and water together to grow the bag-eating microbes. Hey! This is a very special mud pie. Or mud shake (depending on how much water he added).
This is very important because plastic bags are a huge problem. WIthout the help of bacteria and microbes plastic can last a very long time in the middle of oceans, in landfills, and everywhere, actually.

One example of the many problems is that animals eat the bags and choke to death on the plastic. You can read more reasons why plastic bags are so bad at earthresource.org.

From the article: “Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.’” The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.”

Read the full article.

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