October 21, 2011
A Labrador retriever suffering from smoke inhalation was saved this week by firefighters who carried him out of a burning house and gave him "mouth-to-snout" resuscitation.
When firefighters arrived at the fire in Wasau, Wisconsin, the owners told them that their dog was still inside. The rescuers rushed into the house and carried out the unconscious dog, named Koda. Firefighter Jamie Giese, who owns two dogs himself, said he told the other firefighters: "We’ve got to work this dog. (We) laid him down in the front yard, and we started assisting breathing.’‘
When Koda eventually regained consciousness,
firefighters placed a human oxygen mask over his snout and rushed him to an animal emergency center for medical treatment.
The rescue was successful….Koda was returned safe and sound to his owners on Wednesday morning.
Photos: Dan Young / Wausau Daily Herald
Posted by: Liz Nealon
October 21, 2011
I recently received a letter from Mrs. Koller’s 4th/5th Grade Language Arts Class in California, asking a question that I’m often asked when I visit schools. So, I thought I would answer it here, for everyone to read.
Dear Mr. Simon,
We loved your book VOLCANOES!! After reading it in our Houghton Mifflin readers, we read the section, "Meet the Author." The students wanted to know - what made you decide to retire from teaching and become an author? Do you ever miss being in the classroom?
In answer to your questions, I loved teaching, particularly working with smart, interesting kids and exploring subjects together. It doesn’t even have to be Science. I also taught Social Studies, English and Creative Writing while I was a teacher. Whatever the subject, I just loved being a teacher!
I finally stopped teaching after I had written about 100 books. There simply wasn’t enough time to write all the books that publishers were asking me to do and have a teaching job, also.
I always say that I don’t feel that I have ever really stopped teaching, because I visit schools year round and "teach" students all over the country. As long as I continue writing and speaking, I don’t think I will ever really have stopped teaching.
Photo: Corpus Christi Caller-Times. Photographer: Michael Zamora. Reprinted with permission.
Posted by: Seymour Simon
October 19, 2011
Believe it or not, this is a beautiful mushroom often called a "turkey tail." It has a scientific name too, but one not nearly as easy to remember: Trametes versicolor. I took this picture of a turkey tail growing on a rotting piece of wood just off the road near my house. It’s a common mushroom found anywhere there are dead and rotting trees and stumps in woods. The colors are variable but are usually brown and reddish brown. The mushrooms have zones of color and the surface is velvety.
There are a number of other mushrooms that look very similar and are lumped together by collectors as "turkey tails."
Here’s another picture of a quite different looking mushroom called a puffball.
There are many different kinds of puffballs, from tiny ones that grow in clusters on trees or in circles called "fairy rings" in gardens or meadows. These puffballs in my garden are about an inch or two in diameter. But a few kinds of puffball mushrooms are over a foot across.
If you slice open a puffball, it contains either flesh or, if it’s dried out, spore dust. I advise you NOT to eat any kind of mushroom that you find growing in the woods because they are hard to identify one from another and some kinds of mushrooms are poisonous. If you have touched a puffball or other wild mushroom, be sure to wash your hands well with hot water and soap.
The autumn is a great time to get out and explore. If you would like to learn more and find interesting kinds of life, click here to download a simple, fun Seymour Science project called LIFE IN A ROTTING LOG. Happy exploring!
Posted by: Seymour Simon
October 11, 2011
I receive many interesting questions from students who press the "Ask Seymour Simon" button, but this one takes the cake!
George wrote this week to ask how to pronounce the word "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis." This is supposedly the longest word in the English language, meaning "black lung disease," an illness that some coal miners develop from inhaling dust.
I say "supposedly," because it is actually a made up word. Most doctors, when diagnosing Black Lung Disease, would simply call it Silicosis. The mother of all English words, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, was invented in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers’ League. The puzzlers made history by officially recognizing the "longest word," and it has eventually made its way into all the standard dictionaries.
So, getting back to George’s question, how do you pronounce it?
NEW-moe-no-ultra-microscopic-SIH-la-coe-volcano-cone-ee-OH-sis
If that’s still a bit hard to get your tongue around, you can hear it pronounced by clicking on this link to the Talking Dictionary of English Pronunciation.
Posted by: Seymour Simon
September 27, 2011
Our Cool Photo of the Week is of a group of giant panda cubs sleeping in their nursery in the research base of the Giant Panda Breeding Centre in Chengdu, southwest China.
These babies are part of the breeding program at the Chengdu Panda Base, a non-profit organization is dedicated to saving the endangered giant panda through wildlife research, captive breeding and conservation education. The Base was established in 1987 with six giants pandas rescued from the wild, and today the breeding program has increased their captive population (who live in a huge wildlife park) to 83.
China has also just begun its panda census. Every ten years the researchers try to take a count and determine how many of the endangered animals live in the wild, check on their living conditions, and record any changes in habitats.
Students or classes who are interested in helping to save the giant panda can get involved by going to their website and joining the Giant Panda Club.
Photo: MSNBC "Animal Tracks"
Posted by: Liz Nealon
September 23, 2011
Look at this magnificent video of the aurora australis, captured by cameras mounted on the belly of the International Space Station. These flickering, colored lights in the atmosphere are caused by electrons trapped in Earth’s magnetic field. We call the flickering lights the aurora borealis, or "northern lights" here in the northern hemisphere. But the space station was flying over the south pole when it recorded this video, and when seen over Antarctic regions they are called the aurora australis, or "southern lights." NASA says that it may be the best video ever captured of this ghostly phenomenon.
The sun is never at rest, but the amount of solar activity changes over eleven-year cycles in which the sun is alternately very quiet, and the years it has many storms. We are entering a new, active cycle, and the aurora you see in this video was caused by a geomagnetic storm on the sun that launched a blazing hot coronal mass ejection (CME) toward the earth. No one has a better view of its effect on Earth than the crew of the International Space Station. The lights are so bright that you can see the underside of the space station grow green in the reflected light.
Video: Taken over the southern Indian Ocean, the movie spans a 23-min period from 17:22:27 to 17:45:12 GMT on Sept. 17. Courtesy NASA.
Posted by: Seymour Simon
September 21, 2011
My goodness. It seems that every morning when I go out to pick raspberries for our breakfast cereal, I find another exciting-looking caterpillar! Of course, they are eating nearly around the clock these days, getting ready to spin their cocoons, where they will spend the winter before emerging as butterflies or moths in the spring.
As I wrote the other day, it’s best not to handle hairy caterpillars because some of them are poisonous or otherwise dangerous. Some of them have specialized hollow hairs, and when they are touched by humans, the hairs can create a tiny scratch on our hands and release a strong toxin (poison) into the almost invisible cut. This process is called "urtication," and caterpillar urtications can cause severe allergic responses in some people. So keep your hands off hairy caterpillars!
I picked this one up on a piece of cardboard and moved it out of the grass to a rock in order to get a better look at it. It was still sparkling with morning dew, and curled up into a ball as soon as I got near it. That is a defensive mechanism, to protect itself from predators (though I really wasn’t going to hurt it!). I could see immediately that this kind of caterpillar is a typical "woolly bear" variety, with a thick coat of black bristles called setae. The red bands around its body are so distinctive that I was able to easily identify it simply by typing "caterpillar black hairs red bands" into a web browser.
Well….I can say is…..WOW! This is the caterpillar of the Giant Leopard Moth (Hypercompe scribonia).
It is one of the most beautiful of all moths - white with iridescent blue spots. And it truly is "giant," with wingspan of about 3-inches (8 cm). That is biger than your middle finger - a good-sized moth, for sure.
We do not clean up our garden very much in the fall, leaving the dry stems and leaves to create winter shelters for helpful and beautiful insects like these. I hope that lots of them find a safe haven up under the raspberry bushes, because I would love to see a giant leopard moth in person come the spring.
Keep your eyes open when you are walking in the outdoors, and then write and tell me what interesting wild creatures you see.
Moth Photo: Wikimedian Kevincollins123
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Posted by: Seymour Simon
September 21, 2011
Last week (before it got so chilly here in Columbia County, NY) Liz and I were sitting on the deck watching the sunset when we saw this swarm of gnats (pronounced NATS - silent "g". They are small, two-winged flies).
Click Ghost of Gnats 
to see the video.
Turns out it was indeed a mating swarm. When this happens, a big group of male flies are irresistibly attracted to pheromones secreted by a female or females who are ready for mating. Pheromones (pronounced FAIR-uh-moans) are a chemical substance given off by some animals, especially insects, that influences the behavior of other animals of the same species. The males detected the pheromones from hundreds of yards away, and all rushed to the same place to try to find the female.
You end up with this ball of almost all male flies, searching for the female who is somewhere in the middle. The expression for this is "a ghost of gnats." Isn’t that great? It does look a little bit like a ghost haunting in the sunset twilight, as all the gnats move as a big group.
Photo: A Fungus gnat, courtesy Maine.gov
Posted by: Seymour Simon
September 20, 2011
Today’s Cool Photo of the Week is a detailed image of Saturn’s rings, captured by the Hubble Telescope, using ultraviolet light. The rings are made up of many small particles of ice, with some dust and small bits of rock, that have formed into clumps and orbit around Saturn. Some of the particles are as small as your fingernail; others are bigger than a car! Seen from afar, they blend together and appear to be rings around the giant planet.
Saturn is the second biggest planet in our solar system, after Jupiter. How big is Saturn? About 75 Earths could fit inside of Saturn. Although it is not the only planet with rings (Uranus and Neptune have rings, too), Saturn’s rings are the largest and most visible.
This image of Saturn was taken when the planet’s rings were at their maximum tilt of 27 degrees toward us. Saturn experiences seasonal tilts away from and toward the sun, much the same way Earth does, over the course of its 29.5-year orbit. That means that every 30 years, we Earth observers can catch our best glimpse of Saturn’s south pole and the southern side of the planet’s rings.
Isn’t this a magnificent image of Saturn?
Photo: NASA and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)
Look for a digital version of my book SATURN, coming out as a Read and Listen™ eBook later this year.
Posted by: Seymour Simon
September 19, 2011
I headed out to the garden early this morning to pick raspberries for breakfast, and found a furry looking caterpillar with big black ‘eyebrows’ eating the leaves of the raspberry bush. I looked it up online, and discovered that after it spins its cocoon, it will overwinter in dried leaves in our garden, and eventually emerge next spring as a hickory tussock moth (Lophocampa caryae).
This caterpillar has aposematic coloration, which means which means that the colors on its body serve as a warning to predators that it is dangerous to eat. And in this case, the warning includes YOU! If you see this caterpillar in your garden, don’t touch it. Those long, white-and-black hairs (called ‘setae’) have tiny barbs on them, like fishhooks. If you get the microscopic hairs on your hands and then rub your eye, a doctor will have to remove the uncomfortable hairs from your eyeballs. These are "look but don’t touch" creatures, for predators, and also for us!
Posted by: Seymour Simon
