Picture yourself lying on a dirty cot with a hole cut out under you to collect buckets full of unstoppable diarrhea. Now imagine your child lying there. Finally, pretend you are not one of the lucky ones lying on a cholera cot in a hospital, but are lined up outside in the street, waiting for help.
Cholera is an ugly disease.
The bacteria Vibrio cholerae makes a toxin that shreds the intestinal lining, causing white flecks that look like rice to be passed in huge volumes of watery diarrhea. In hospitals, these “rice water stools” are collected and measured in buckets so body fluids can be replaced. Adults can lose up to 22 liters a day while battling this devastating infection. Without fluid and electrolyte replacement, most victims die from shock.
Lucky patients that recover often still carry the bacteria and can infect others. They can even re-infect themselves.
Cholera bacteria can survive outside the human body in water. They do especially well in dirty water. Unsanitary conditions are breeding grounds for Vibrio cholerae.
I read this morning in the New York Times that cholera has spread from the Hatian countryside to the crowded, unsanitary camps of the earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince. The camps don’t have clean toilets and are often flooded when it rains. Over a million people live in filth and poverty. According to the article, health officials predict that over 270,000 people could get sick with cholera over the next few years.
People like you, and me, and our kids.
What can you do to help? Support aid organizations that are mobilizing to get clean water, water purification supplies, and medical supplies to Haiti. Once the supplies arrive though, it’s up to the Hatian government to make sure workers are able to get them to the people most in need. Let’s hope they do.
The waste begins in the fields, where produce that is imperfect, or hard to pack, is left to rot. From there, our food takes a 1,500 mile (on average) journey to the grocery store. There are casualties of up to 15% along the way. Once in the supermarket, an enormous amount of imperfect produce and meat is discarded.
The few, hardy survivors that reach our refrigerators at home stand a 15% to 25% of being tossed into the trash, rather than eaten.
I’d love to say that I wasn’t guilty of throwing food away, but I can’t. I waste an embarrassing amount of food. Piles of lunch meat get tossed every week when I think three days have passed. (Didn’t I see something on the news once about how quickly lunch meat goes bad?) Sometimes I have to hold my nose as I carry an unrecognizable vegetable to the organic composting bin. Meat gets pushed to the back of the freezer, soon to be covered with a layer of white permafrost.
Wasting food is not only expensive, but it’s bad for the environment. Food rotting in landfills adds methane gas (a greenhouse gas) to our already warming atmosphere.
What can I do? I can cut a bad spot off of a red pepper and use it anyway. I can make banana bread and apple crisp out of brown bananas and mushy apples. I can label food in my freezer and try to use it before it becomes mystery meat. I can try to buy more food that’s grown and raised locally, so it doesn’t have the chance to rot in trucks.
I’m on a mission!
How much food do you waste? What do you do to keep track of and use the food you have on hand? I’d love to hear your tips!
You can go to stilltasty.com to find out what the shelf life is on the food in your fridge. You may be able to keep some foods longer than you think! Just remember to always throw away moldly nuts and breads, since they can contain potent toxins made by fungi.
In 1348, Pope Clement VI’s physician wrote the following as the “Black Death” hit Avignon: “It was so contagious, especially that accompanied by spitting of blood, that not only by staying together, but even by looking at one another people caught it…The father did not visit his son, nor the son the father. Charity was dead and hope was crushed.” (From Deadly Companions by Dorothy H. Crawford)
Scientists have long suspected that the bacterium Yersinia pestis,which causes bubonic plague, caused the Black Death that killed over 30% of Europe’s population in 1347 and continued to burn through Europe for the next three hundred years. Two teams of scientists reported this week that not only was Yersinia pestis definitely the microbe that caused the Black Death, but that bubonic plague has its roots in China, where it has lived in fleas in the wild rodent populations for thousands of years. Humans are an accidental host of this deadly bacterium, but in three major waves it decimated the populations of Europe, Asia and Africa, causing the most dramatic fall in population ever recorded.
Y. pestis is carried by fleas, who are made ravenous by the bacteria and jump from rodent (often rats) to rodent looking for warm blood and injecting thousands of bacteria with each bite. As rats die, the fleas sense the cooling blood and jump to new victims. If the victim is human, they will probably be infected with bubonic plague and, if untreated with antibiotics (which they didn’t have during the middle ages), stand a pretty good chance of dying. If the infection goes to the victim’s lungs and they infect someone else by coughing on them, that person is as good as dead.
Bubonic plague eventually died out in Europe, but not before infected rats stowed away on ships traveling to the United States in the 1890s, where they arrived in San Francisco and quickly infected the squirrel population. Over 50 kinds of rodents in the Western U.S., Canada and Mexico are potential hosts for Y. pestisis and the bacteria is still surviving in these populations, from California to Colorado. Fortunately, as long as the disease stays in wild rodents and away from urban rat populations, it probably won’t cause many cases of plague in the U.S.A. (there were only 15 in 2006.) We’re lucky to live in the age of antibiotics, which can treat most cases of plague today.
What should you do if you don’t want to catch the “Black Death?” Avoid wild rodents like the plague.
“Dad! Ask me scientific question!” was a common refrain from the backseat of our station wagon when I was a kid. My dad is a physicist, and encouraged my sister and me from a young age to think about the world around us. On one level, I’m sure that talking about science was a way for me to connect with my dad, but after some time, I started to look at the world differently and ask my own questions.
On long car trips, we loved to play twenty questions. Not only was it a fun game, but without realizing it, we were learning to organize information and ask good questions.
“Is it an animal?”
“Yes!”
“Does it eat meat?”
“Yes!”
“Is it a mammal?”
“What’s a mammal?”
In other words, you don’t even need a lab, or even a kitchen table to do science. Every time you bend over to look at a bug, point out a bird or talk about the moon, you’re doing science with your kids. Teaching them to be curious is one of the greatest gifts you can give.
You will be amazed when you fill a plastic zip-lock bag with “blood” and poke sharp skewers through, only to find that the bag doesn’t leak! All you need is a ziplock bag, water, food coloring and wooden skewers. Heavy-duty ziplocks work best! Fill a quart-sized ziplock bag with water, add a few drops of red food-coloring, and seal it. Slowly poke several wooden skewers completely through the bag, from one side to the other, avoiding the part with air in it. See how many you can push through! (Remember to be careful with the sharp points and I’d recommend putting a bowl underneath to collect drops.)
Why doesn’t the bag leak? Plastic is a polymer, made up of long, elastic molecules that form a seal around the spot where the skewer is poking through. In addition, the bag is sealed and contains very little air, so there isn’t much air pressure pushing on the water. If you make a hole in the part of the bag with air in it, all the air around you will push on the liquid and you’ll find that the bag leaks like crazy!
We turned our kitchen into a Halloween science lab this morning for the Fox9 news. The kids had a blast! Here’s one of the segments on how to make “Magic Potion”:
Making magic potion is simple! Chop a head of red cabbage into small pieces and add it to a pan with enough water to cover it. Boil the cabbage uncovered for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, let it cool, and strain the juice into a jar or bowl. (Save the cooked cabbage for dinner.)
If you want to avoid the stove, chop half a head of red cabbage and blend it with about 3 cups of water. Strain the liquid through a colander and then through a coffee filter in a plastic bag with one corner cut off. Blended cabbage juice makes longer-lasting bubbles and turns a slightly brighter shade of blue!
Now, pour about 1/4 cup of the cabbage juice, or “magic potion” into two clear glasses or bowls and set them on a white piece of paper (so you can watch the color change.)
Try adding a Tablespoon of baking soda to one glass of potion. What happens?
To the second cup of potion, add a few Tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice. Notice anything different?
Finally, mix the two cups of potion together.
Why did the color change when you added two different chemicals to the magic potion? Everything in our world is made of very tiny pieces called atoms. Atoms are so small that if you blow up a balloon, it will contain about a hundred billion billion atoms of the gases that make up air. Atoms are often bonded to other atoms to form a group of linked atoms called a molecule.
Acids usually dissolve in water to form free-floating hydrogen atoms. Bases are the opposite and take up free hydrogen atoms. The molecules in the cabbage juice magic potion change when exposed to an acid or base, making the potion change color. Vinegar is an acid, which turns the potion pink and baking soda is a base, which turns it blue or green.
When you mix the vinegar potion and baking soda potion together, a chemical reaction occurs and you make Carbon Dioxide gas. That’s why you see bubbles!
Try adding some other liquids to your magic potion. Can you tell whether they are acids or bases?
Here’s a short video that shows you exactly how to do the experiment!
This experiment is easy, non-toxic and so much fun that it is worth every bit of the mess it makes. Your kids will love it!
All you need is a cup of cornstarch and half a cup of water with a little food coloring in it (purple and green are fun for Halloween and red would be gross!) Mix the two ingredients to a medium-size bowl with a spoon or your fingers. The goo should be the consistency of syrup.
Now, play with the mixture! You will discover that it behaves like a solid when you agitate it, or move it quickly, and like a liquid when you let it sit still. Pour some onto plates or into bowls if you want to. We poured it directly onto our table which was pretty messy, but lots of fun! Hold a handful on your palm and watch it drip between your fingers! Roll it into a ball. If it gets too dry, just add a little more water. You can easily clean the goo off of flat surfaces using a plastic spatula. Wash it off hands with water.
Cornstarch molecules are like long ropes. When you leave them alone, or move them slowly, they can slide past each other and look like a liquid. However, if you squeeze them, stir them or roll them around in your hands, the ropey molecules look and feel more like a solid. Materials like cornstarch goo are known as non-Newtonian fluids, since they don’t have the normal properties of either a liquid or a solid.
Click here to watch my video on how to make cornstarch goo.
Mad Scientist’s Green Slime is a homemade polymer that’s as much fun to play with as it is to make. Here’s a demonstration I did on our local morning show: Halloween Science on Kare 11 Sunrise show (It will start playing on the right side of the website after a short ad.)
This is a great Halloween eggsperiment and a jar of them would make a spooky centerpiece for a Halloween party!
Put some raw eggs into jars and cover the eggs with (white or cider) vinegar. It’s fun to use permanent markers to make the eggs look like eyeballs before you put them in the vinegar! Remember to always wash your hands after handling raw eggs, since they can carry a bacteria called Salmonella enteriditis!
Do you notice anything happening to the eggs when you add the vinegar?
Let them sit overnight in the refrigerator and see what they feel like the next day. What happened to the sharpie ink? Before handling the eggs, gently rinse them with water, and be careful not to get vinegar in your eyes, since vinegar is an acid and stings!
Image from Kitchen Science Lab for Kids (Quarry Books 2014)
Only the membrane of the egg will remain, which is like a rubbery balloon. What does it feel like?
If you want, draw or record what you observed in your science notebook.
What happened? Egg shells are made up of two chemical elements called calcium and carbon, which stick together in calcium carbonate crystals. Vinegar is an acid that break the crystals apart in a chemical reaction. The carbon and vinegar react to form carbon dioxide bubbles, which you probably noticed when you added the vinegar to the eggs.
To make alien monster eggs, return the eggs to the jars. Cover them with corn syrup and add some green food coloring. Leave them for 24 hours in the refrigerator and see how they feel the next day!
What happens? The balloon-like membrane of the soft eggs let water molecules pass through via a process called osmosis. Corn syrup doesn’t have much water in it, and water molecules move out of the egg into the corn syrup, making the egg shrivel.
Image from Kitchen Science Lab for Kids (Quarry Books 2014)
If you want to, now try rinsing the eggs and submerging them in water again overnight (in the fridge.)
Here are two fun Halloween science projects that will amaze and entertain kids!
Mad Scientist’s Green Slime is a homemade polymer that’s as much fun to play with as it is to make. Send some home with your party guests in zip-lock baggies!
Try making Fizzy Balloons too, but before you do the experiment, draw spooky faces on the balloons and watch them grow as the gas turns them into Halloween monster heads!
