My 7 month old kitten, Ash, needed emergency surgery this week, because he ate a 2.5 foot long piece of yarn. Ash is the black-and-white kitten on the right. The other one is his "sister" Minerva. They aren't littermates, but arrived at the shelter around the same time, and became the best of friends. So we adopted them together.

Minerva (left) and Ash (right)

I grew up with cats, and so did my husband. Before these kittens, we count 8 cats between the two of us. And none of them ever ate yarn. Played with it, or course, but never really ate it. Even so, I am always good about keeping my yarn stash (I’m a knitter) in bags in the closet, and putting my work-in-progress away in a cabinet when I am done with it.

However, my son made a toy for the kittens out of newspaper and yarn, and when he was done with it, put it on a shelf. We didn’t really think anything of it. But one night, it seems, Ash got up the shelf, stole the toy, chewed off the yarn, and ate it. Apparently, cats have such a strong swallowing reflex that they have to swallow things that get at the back of their throat.

That morning, he threw up liquid. He continued to throw up blood and brown liquid, and we found the toy with the missing yarn. We took him to the emergency pet hospital, and they performed the surgery and saved our sweet kitten.

https://www.gofundme.com/cat-ate-yarn-needed-surgery

Update: Ash has been in recovery for one week and is doing great!

An Accidental Mint Garden

We’ve got mint in our yard. It’s just growing there, on its own. I found some at the edge of the woods, and some in the low part of the yard, just growing on the lawn. I knew it was mint partially from  the square stem, the shape of the leaves and the way they surround the stem in an opposite pattern, but mostly from the smell. Break a leaf you suspect might be mint, and smell it. It’s unmistakable. In fact, one of the best parts about mint in the yard, is that the whole yard smells like mint when I mow the lawn.

Tristram was quite excited when we discovered the mint. We had mint at our old house, and he loved to pick it and chew the leaves right there in the yard. I love mint also, but chewing the leaves is a bit too strong for me. I prefer my mint in desserts, preferably with chocolate.

Mint plants at the edge of the woods © dmwoodman 2016

The lower part of our yard was where I decided to dig the garden, since it got abundant sun and was moist from the drainage from the rest of the yard. I dug up the sod, tilled the soil, and we planted our seeds. As the seeds sprouted, so did the mint, even though there was no evidence of mint roots in the soil when I tilled it. So how did it get back into the garden?

Mint growing up amongst the corn © dmwoodman 2016

Mint in between the pumpkins and cucumbers © dmwoodman 2016

Another mint plant hiding in the pumpkin patch © dmwoodman 2016

All living things reproduce - make more of themselves. Reproduction happens in one of two basic ways - sexual or asexual. Sexual reproduction happens when two organisms of the same species combine some of their DNA to make new combinations of genes. Animals, as a group, tend to reproduce sexually, many exclusively so.

Reproducing only sexually, though, is rather the exception than the rule. Many organisms, from bacteria to fungi to plants, can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Asexual reproduction involves making a new individual without the use of sex organs or recombining DNA. Except for possible mistakes in copying the DNA, the new individual is essentially a clone of the original. Animal cells reproduce this way all the time -  the process of mitosis or cell division -  but most animals do not reproduce their whole bodies asexually to make a new organism.

Many plants, however, are particularly good at asexual reproduction*. Jade plants (Crassula ovata), for example, reproduce primarily asexually. Although they can make flowers, they usually spread through a form of asexual reproduction called vegetative reproduction, or propagation. When leaves or branches fall off the plant, they simply form roots and grow and voila! More jade plants. This ease of propagation, and the fact that jade plants are succulents that hold water in their leaves, make them ideal houseplants for friends with brown thumbs. I gave one to a teacher who has a terrible memory for watering plants, and was stuck with a classroom with no windows. It’s doing fine. In fact, I leave my own jade plants in my classroom all summer, giving them a good soak in June when I lock the door on the last day, and then watering them again in August.

Classroom jade plants © dmwoodman 2016

And when they get too tall, I simply grab the scissors, cut off the top 4-5 inches of plant, stick them in a new pot (not usually a pot, actually, any old cup will do), and give them away.

A jade plant cutting © dmwoodman 2016

Milfoil reproduces this way also. Just one stem, or a few leaves, may be enough to start a whole new milfoil plant. That’s why it’s so important that people clean their boats when they move from lake to lake. Only a small amount of milfoil stuck in the motor or on the boat trailer may be enough to establish milfoil in a body of water, and it’s virtually impossible to eradicate. Then there goes the fishing. The whole lake gets clogged with milfoil.

So jade plants and milfoil regrow from bits of leaves and stems, but many other plants reproduce by sending out their roots and popping up a new stem. These reproductive roots are called rhizomes. Other plants send out runners - shoots that look like above-ground roots but are really a special kind of horizontal stem. Mint does both. Therefore, mint in your lawn can start growing in the garden nearby. Mint can also regrow from roots that are buried deep in the soil. We’ve now got so much mint in the garden that I had to pull out half of it so it wouldn’t take over the area reserved for Tristram’s precious beans.

So what to do with all the mint? You can freeze it, dry it, or use it fresh. Me, I’m using most of it to make homemade mint extract.

*Many species of invasive plants, such as japanese knotweed and purple loosestrife, reproduce both sexually and asexually with ease. This ability to produce thousands, if not millions of offspring, is part of why these plants are so difficult to get rid of once they become established.

A Eulogy for Chris Underwood

My sixth-grade boyfriend died Tuesday. A slightly chubby redhead named Chris Underwood with a bowl cut and tinted glasses, who loved Huey Lewis and the News. In other words, a big dork. But so was (am) I, so it worked out great.

Chris Underwood, senior year of high school

The majority of our relationship consisted of talking on the phone, winking at each other across the classroom, and holding hands at lunchtime. We went on two dates - one to go see the “The Land Before Time” (the original) with his mother and little sister, and one to go bowling. Chris was funny and smart. He was one of the first friends I could really just be a nerd with. Together, we used to correct our sixth grade teacher during math class (she wasn’t all that confident with decimals and fractions) and see who could do a better job reading our Junior Great Books upside down.

We were also in an enrichment program called LIGHTS. LIGHTS stood for something, but I don’t remember what. A GT program led by dedicated educator Gail McGrail, each student was basically guided on an exploration of an area of their particular interest. Chris’s was music. He developed a DJ service, and DJ’ed our middle school and high school dances. He even DJ’ed the big 8th grade graduation semi-formal dance. He was that kind of a geek - he’d rather provide the music than be part of the crowd.

Middle school relationships don’t last, of course, but Chris became a family friend. Everyone in my family had paper routes, and we must have delivered papers to two-thirds of South Grafton. Chris had a paper route in North Grafton. So when our district manager wanted us to go “crewing,” which meant go door to door to sign up new customers, we’d all pile in the minivan, and Mom would drive across town and pick up Chris and we’d have a friendly competition to see who could get the most new subscriptions. Then we’d go to Friendly's and get sundaes.

Later, when we were old enough to get “real” jobs, Chris and I both ended up at the local Burger King. We had a blast whenever we were on shift together. Later, my younger brother Jay worked at Burger King. Chris was still there, working his way through college, and he and Jay would geek out about music and have competitions to see who could remember the most theme songs from 80’s sitcoms.

My favorite memory of Chris is a nerd joke we used to play on our co-workers. At that time, the chicken tenders came in a box, but the box was the same size no matter the number of tenders. So you were supposed to write the number on the outside. But when Chris was in the kitchen at the chicken-and-fish station, and I was bagging orders, he’d make up an algebra equation on the spot and write it on the box. Solve for x and it equaled the number of tenders. I’d giggle and solve his equation in my head, but everybody else would groan and sigh and open the box and count the nuggets. We loved it.

Yes, we were the two biggest math geeks in our grade, probably in the school. We adored math, and we also adored our math teacher, Mr. Tite.

Our hero, our idol, dorky math teacher supreme Mr. Tite. © dmwoodman 1995

Chris and I never ended up in the same math class, but we would study together, and make up practice problems for each other. Chris would emulate our math teacher’s style, and later developed a wicked impersonation of him. (For our senior year talent show, the cool kids put together a sketch where they impersonated the teachers. But they knew they needed Chris to be Mr. Tite. He slayed it!)

Chris was so good at explaining math concepts, and he started tutoring and leading Adult Ed classes in high school.  I told him he was going to be a math teacher, but he insisted he was going to be an accountant. Ha, I was right!

Chris was dorky and funny and smart and lovable. He was dedicated to math education. Grafton High, I am so sorry for your loss.

Growing a Garden From Seed, Part 1

Tristram was three when I decided we should have a vegetable garden. For one thing, he seemed like he would enjoy helping take care of it. Our neighbors had a garden, and he would “help” water it sometimes, by taking his little toy watering can, filling it up in the kiddie pool, and tottering over to the garden and watering the plants. But the main reason was that I wanted him to have a sense of where food comes from. I wanted him to know that fruits and vegetables don’t just magically appear in the grocery store, that they come from living things and have to be grown.

What makes something alive? Thought experiment - make a list of 10-15 living things. What do all these living things have in common? Chances are, your list is mostly made of familiar animals like cats, dogs, horses, squirrels, or picture-book animals like elephants, giraffes, and lions. All of these creatures are a particular kind of animal - mammals. And they all do have characteristics in common - brains, bones, breathe oxygen, have hair. But what about other animals, like bees, or worms, or squids? Or things that are not animals, like maple trees, or button mushrooms, or pond scum? What characteristics do all of these examples have in common?

Are the mushrooms growing out of this rotting log alive? © dmwoodman 2004

All of the things I listed are alive. A living thing, or organism, is defined as anything that can grow and develop, reproduce, adjust to its surroundings, adapt to changes in the environment, and is made of one or more cells*. Having a brain, or even breathing oxygen are not necessary to be considered alive.

The yeast colonies and the green mold in this Petri dish are both living things. © dmwoodman 2004

In fact, there is a whole group** of organisms, a kind of thermophilic, or heat-loving, bacteria, that eat basically sulfuric acid. They live in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, and in underwater volcanic vents.

A hot pool in Yellowstone National Park. The colors are made from mats of thermophilic bacteria. Some can live in temperatures of up to 185 °F (85 °C) © dmwoodman 2005

Plants are living things with their own life cycle, which is why I chose to start our garden from seed. The seed will sprout into a small plant, with few leaves. The plant will develop into a larger, taller plant with more leaves. Eventually, the plant will produce a flower or other reproductive structure, make seeds, and the cycle starts again. A plant life cycle is not that dissimilar to an animal life cycle. A frog is a typical elementary school example. Frog eggs to tadpoles to tadpoles with legs to frogs to eggs again.

What’s missing from both of these examples? Well, quite frankly, sex. Sexual reproduction is one of the two basic forms of reproduction for all living things. Sexual reproduction happens when two organisms of the same species*** combine some of their DNA to make new combinations of genes. The process of combining genes to make an new individual can happen in many ways. For frogs, and many other aquatic animals, the fertilization is external. The female releases unfertilized eggs into the water, and the male releases sperm on top of those eggs. No penetration is involved in frog sex.

Plants can also have sex, though it looks so different from what we think of a S-E-X that we often don’t realize what’s going on. First, the plant has to go through plant puberty, which for many plants means growing flowers. (Not all plants make flowers - conifers, or gymnosperms to use the scientifical**** term, make cones, and ferns make spores. But let’s stick with flowers for now, they’re more familiar and more attractive.)

Flowers are the reproductive organs of the plant. Yes, flowers. Think about that next time you lean over to smell one! In my biology class, I usually get the flower sex lesson in May. It’s pretty good timing for some interesting realizations on the part of the students, what with prom and Mother’s Day coming up and all. Although February would be just as good.

Most flowers consist of three major parts - the pistil (sometimes called a carpel), the stamen, and the petals. The pistil is the female part. It contains an ovary - the same term used for animals - which has one or more ovules, or eggs inside. They look basically like tiny seeds.

The stamen is the male part, and contains the anther, or head of the stamen. Inside the anther are millions of developing pollen grains. The pollen is what will be transferred to the top of the pistil, called the stigma, to eventually fertilize the ovules.

In other words, pollen is plant sperm. You may, in fact, be allergic to plant sperm.

A pumpkin flower. This flower has male parts only (the female flower is on a different part of the pumpkin vine). The stamen with fuzzy pollen on the top is clearly visible in the center.
© dmwoodman 2016

The petals, of course, are the big brightly colored beautiful parts (mostly - some are small, dull, and boring, but they’re usually way up high in trees anyway). These large, showy petals serve to attract pollinators, usually bees but sometimes butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, ants, birds or bats. I’ll write more about pollen and pollinators in the next post, but basically, these animal help transfer pollen from one flower to another. The transfer of pollen, by insects, wind, or chance, is how plants have sex. The pollen fertilizes the ovule inside the plant's ovary.

The fertilized ovules then develop into seeds. A seed is sort of like a baby plant. The correct term is embryo, which is actually the same term used for animals at this stage of their life cycle (often described as a fertilized egg when referring to animals). It is the earliest stage of development, after fertilization. The seed also contains nutrients that supply energy to the embryo. You may remember that plants perform photosynthesis to get energy. But seeds can’t photosynthesize. For one thing, they are underground, so don’t receive any sunlight. For another thing, the embryo may not have any chloroplasts yet, the cell parts necessary to capture the sunlight. So the seed comes with its own energy stores, usually in the form of sugars or starch, that the plant embryo can digest and get energy from until it grows big enough to do photosynthesis. (The process of breaking down sugars to get energy, for plants and animals, and fungi, and protists** is called cellular respiration.) The plant life cycle continues.

The first year we planted our garden, I really didn’t care if we even got much of a harvest, I just wanted plants that would be sure to sprout, and would grow big and impressive. So I chose corn, green beans, pumpkins, and sunflowers. Then I threw in cucumbers as well, on the chance that they would actually produce fruit (yes, fruit, more on that in “Growing a Garden From Seed, Part 2”), since I love to eat them. Turns out that not only did everything grow, flower, and make produce, but Tristram discovered that his favorite vegetable was garden-fresh green beans. Win! So now we are sure to plant plenty of green beans every summer.

Tristram eats a green bean. © dmwoodman 2012

*This last characteristic of life, being made of at least one cell, is why viruses are not, at the moment, considered living things. They are made of less than one cell. They don’t have a cell membrane. Some don’t even have their own DNA. But the great thing about science is that scientific principles are continually modified and revised as we discover new information about our world and universe. I suspect someday the definition of “alive” will be adjusted to include viruses.

** The science of organizing living things into groups according to similarities in called Taxonomy. Taxonomists have organized all life into six major groups, called Kingdoms. The Kingdoms are: Archaebacteria, Eubacteria, Protista, Fungi, Plants, and Animals. Within each kingdom, the organisms are further divided into groups, then further divided within those groups, and again, and so on, until the groups consist of species.

***More or less. For animals, one way to define a species is a group of organisms that are genetically compatible, that is, they can mate and produce fertile offspring. The definition of species is more variable for other kingdoms of organisms. Plants, for example, can often breed with closely related species, a process called hybridization. In fact, most of our modern crop varieties were developed through purposeful hybridization. Humans have been genetically modifying our crops since the beginning of agriculture.

****Special thanks to Tony Millionaire, author of the wonderful comic Sock Monkey, for the excellent word “scientifical.”

Cold Brew

I recently discovered cold brew iced coffee. So, it seems has everyone else.

But why pay $4 for a cup of it from your local fancy coffee shop? It’s so stinkin’ easy to make at home. Just take 1 cup of ground coffee of your choice, add 4 cups of filtered water, stir it well, and let it sit for 12-24 hours at room temperature. Filter out the grounds, and there you go. However, it’s pretty strong. I usually dilute mine 50/50 with whatever strikes my fancy that morning. Milk, cream, water, ice, whatever. Today, I used one cup cold brew concentrate, ¼ cup cream, 6 ice cubes, and a generous squirt of caramel syrup, and blended.

Mmmmm, caramel… © dmwoodman 2016

Here’s how cold brew* works:

Coffee in general is what chemists refer to as a mixture. A mixture is a combination of two or more substances that each stay the same substance when combined. Salt water is a classic example. It’s still table salt (NaCl) and still water (H2O), but they are combined. This kind of combination of chemicals is called a physical change. (Yes, salt and water are chemicals - anything made of atoms is considered a chemical by the chemistry definition. Actually, the term “salt” refers to not just one chemical, but a whole category of chemicals. But that’s not super important for this example, so we’ll leave that for another time.) The salt is still salt, a chemical made by the ionic bond between the elements sodium and chlorine, in the ratio of one sodium atom to one chlorine atom. However, the salt has changed form - from a solid white cube to collection of dissolved ions. But clearly it is still salt. The dissolved salt tastes the same as the solid salt.

Salt water is a solution - a specific kind of mixture made when one substance dissolves into another substance so that the two are indistinguishable. Collecting a dropper full of salt water from the top of the mixture results in the same concentration of salt to water as a dropper full from the bottom (assuming you put in the correct ratio of solute - the salt - to solvent - the water - more on that later). Another term for this type of mixture is a homogeneous mixture, from the root word homo, meaning same. (The opposite is a heterogenous mixture, in which you can see all the individual parts, and each sample from the mixture is a bit different. Fruit salad is a great example of this kind of mixture. So is granite.)

Granite formation in Acadia National Park, Maine (c) lsimonds 2006

So in order to make coffee (or tea, for that matter), some or all of the solid needs to dissolve in the liquid solvent, water. The more solute that dissolves into the water, the stronger the coffee. And there are multiple ways to make more solute dissolve, or make them dissolve quicker.

Try this at home - get cubes of something that dissolves in water, such as a sugar cubes, bouillon cubes, or those little colored pellets used for dyeing Easter eggs. Set up several cups of water. Make one cup hot. Make another cold. Put twice as many cubes in a cup. Stir a cup. Leave one cup overnight. What other possibilities can you come up with?

The rate of dissolving depends on how much of the solute (the cubes of some solid) are contacting the water at any given point. It makes sense that in order for water to dissolve a solid, the water molecules needs to touch the solid. This idea of change happening at interfaces - the point at which two different types of matter meet - governs many scientific observations, from the most basic chemical and physical changes to global surface processes such as weathering of rocks or melting of glaciers. (One form of this idea is called Collision Theory - the idea that two chemicals can only react if they bump into each other.) Another simple experiment - take loose sugar and a sugar cube of equal mass and see how long it take for each to dissolve in water of constant temperature and volume. The sugar cube takes longer, of course, even if you stir it, because only the outside of the cube interfaces with the water. The inner sugar crystals can’t dissolve until they are exposed to the water, which takes time.

When substances are heated, the atoms that make up that substance move quicker. In fact temperature in the purest scientific sense of the word is a measure of how fast the particles that make up a substance are moving. So since hot water molecules move around faster than cool water molecules, they come in contact with your sugar cube more quickly and more often than cold water ones. Therefore, your sugar dissolves faster. This is also why there is more undissolved sugar sludge at the bottom of your iced coffee than hot coffee - it’s not the fault of the barista failing to stir it properly, really. It’s because only so much solute can dissolve into a particular solution without help.

So back to coffee brewing.

Some of the chemicals in the coffee beans (of which there are many - flavonoids, antioxidants, caffeine, etc.) easily dissolve in water because they contain some degree of polarity - the extent to which one or more of the atoms in a molecule hogs the electrons. Water itself is a polar molecule. It is made of 2 hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom. They bond covalently, that is, the atoms share their electrons. But oxygen is like the big brother who is forced to share his X-box with his annoying little twin siblings. He shares a little, only when mom or dad is watching. The rest of the time he pushes them out of the way and doesn’t give them a turn. Oxygen is like that. Most of the time, the shared electrons spend time with the bigger, stronger oxygen atom. Since electrons are negative, the oxygen side of the water molecule is more negative, and the two hydrogens, positioned like Mickey Mouse ears on the oxygen atom, are more positive. Having a positive end and a negative end makes the whole molecule polar, like a magnet, and it can thus magnetically attract other compounds and molecules that have negative and positive ends, such as salt, sugar, and caffeine, causing them to dissolve.

Hot water brewing, usually with a drip coffee maker, happens relatively quickly, because of the bouncing around of the molecules. But some molecules dissolve easier in hot water than cold, which can give a different flavor and strength to your coffee. (Other factors also add to the flavor and strength, such as how long the beans were roasted). Some of these chemicals are acidic chemicals that lend the coffee its bitter flavor. So making iced coffee by making hot coffee, then sticking it in the fridge, usually makes bitter coffee. In addition, the coffee supposedly starts to lose flavor after half a day. (I don’t know this for sure, though. In college, I helped run a coffee and ice cream shop, and we’d put the leftover coffee in the fridge to use for a special shake the next day. We made it with espresso chocolate chip ice cream and iced coffee, and called it a “Kick in the A$$”. No one ever complained about the flavor.)

Ok, so if hot water makes coffee more bitter, why not brew it with cold or room temperature water? Well, it’s like the sugar examples above. Did you put a sugar cube in room temperature water vs. hot water? If you don’t have the patience for a sugar cube, try food coloring. Go on, try it. I’ll wait.

The coffee behaves similarly. Not as much of the coffee chemicals dissolve in the same amount of time, making really weak coffee. You could try putting in more coffee grounds, but much like the sugar in your iced coffee, it will just sink to the bottom and sit.

Now, if you tried the food coloring experiment when I suggested, by the time you go back and check it, the drops will have spread out more through the cold water, making it more similar to the hot water trial. Did you go check? See, I told you so.

And that’s the trick of cold brew. Time. Most anything will dissolve if given enough time. Sugar cubes. Cold coffee grounds. The rocks of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Some chemicals dissolve easily, and some do not, leaving you with different flavors in your coffee, or different rock formations in and around your stream.

My son and I by the Sandy River, May 2012. The rock strip in front of us (probably some kind of quartz mixture) is different than the surrounding rock, and isn’t dissolving as fast, so sticks up higher than the other rock. © dlwoodman 2012

The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. © dmwoodman 2005

And that is just some of the chemistry of coffee, with a bit of geology thrown in for good measure. Now that I've scienced your morning coffee, what can I science next?

*Cold brew isn’t technically brewed cold like in a refrigerator, it’s brewed at room temperature. But it’s all relative. Room temperature is colder than boiling, and cold brew sounds way better for marketing purposes than room-temp brew.

Introduction

Every year, on the first day of school, I challenge my freshmen to tell me something they did over the summer that has to do with science. The only constraints are that it has to be school-appropriate, and that they can’t repeat what anyone else says. And while occasionally I do get that uber-science-geek kid who tried to build a Tesla coil (I’m serious, initials T.C. if he’s reading), or worked on their grandfather’s old perpetual motion machine (true story, E.E.) or made a Rube-Goldberg machine from the toys they had lying around their bedroom (oh wait, that was my nerd-child), most of the students are at a loss. Until we get going.

It only take a few students saying swimming, hiking, or fishing for the rest of the students catch on. Then they start realizing that walking to the convenience store is anatomy and physics. Planting a garden is biology and earth science. Repainting the spare room is physics and chemistry. Finally, someone says, “I breathed,” and everyone groans. And say, “Yes, absolutely!”

“Huh?” but then they think about it. And they realize. Going on a plane, eating a sandwich, dirt biking, cooking breakfast, playing video games, sleeping, texting, are all related to science. Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Earth Science, everything fits somewhere, and every student has a legit answer to the question.

And that’s the point. Science isn’t just for nerds, or really smart people, or PhD’s. Science is everywhere. Everything is related to science.

Science is simply the understanding of and natural explanations for how the world and the universe work. The understanding of our daily activities as well as our big life changes. Big questions get more press, and have many many books written about them. With this blog, I hope to present the science behind more every day things. The “gee, I’ve always wondered why that does that” sort of things. Or maybe you haven’t wondered. That’s fine. But I still hope you enjoy reading, and gain an appreciation of how science relates to your life.