After spending a weekend relaxing at my parents’ cabin, watching loons, eagles and osprey fishing in the lake, we headed north to Ely and got close up and personal with some much larger Minnesota predators at the North American Bear Center and the International Wolf Center.  Our French visitors were especially excited to experience our wildlife, since bears and wolves have been completely eradicated from their own country.  They informed us that there was only one bear and a few re-introduced wolves left in France.  Fortunately for us, the United States’ depleted wolf and bear populations are coming back thanks to the efforts of organizations like the bear and wolf centers.

At the Bear Center, we watched black bears Ted, Honey and Lucky snack and play from a balcony just above their habitat.  We learned that black bears are much less aggressive than grizzly bears and can usually be scared away from campsites by yelling, clapping, and throwing things at them.  They are also very unlikely to attack people in defense of cubs, which is a grizzly bear trait.  The bears were playful and the 2-year old cub Lucky was especially fun to watch! You can watch these amazing animals live via the “bear cam” on their website at www.bear.org.

Across town, which isn’t very big and is filled with enough canoes and Duluth packs for an army, you’ll find the International Wolf Center.  This organization, whose mission is to advance the survival of wolf populations by teaching about wolves, their relationship to wildlands and the human role in their future, has put together an extensive collection of information about wolves in myth and reality (including lots of cool werewolf legend stuff for “Twilight” fans.) Best of all, the facility houses a pack of four wolves living in a viewable habitat behind the facility.

The pack changes over the years, as new wolves are introduced and the pack dynamics change.  Two arctic subspecies of the gray wolf, Malik and Shadow, born in 2000, were recently put into “retirement” when they got older and the younger wolves got too aggressive with them. Currently, the pack consists of Grizzer and Maya-two great plains subspecies born May 5, 2004 and Aidan and Denali, two northwestern subspecies, born on April 27, 2008.  The wolves weren’t too active when we were there, but at one point, two of them came close to be scratched by some wolf center workers and another took a nap right in front of the viewing window.

The wolves looked like leggy huskies close up and we learned that they have  bigger feet (for chasing prey in the snow) and much stronger jaws than domesticated dogs.  We also learned that their bodies are made to survive nearly two weeks without food, since they only bring down their prey thirty percent of the time.  The wolves at the center are only fed once a week, but you can see them eat if you’re there on the right day.  They eat everything except the stomach of their prey, since the stomach contains plants, which they can’t digest.

You can go to www.wolf.org to read more about wolves and watch their wolf pack live on webcams!

We finished the road trip by weaving our way through tall pines and past hidden lakes to the majestic shores of Lake Superior, where we took the scenic highway down the North Shore.  Stopping to play on the rocks and hike down to the lake at Gooseberry Falls State Park was a highlight of the trip, even as rain started to fall.  My husband looked like a kid again as he waded smiling into the frigid water of Lake Superior and stomped around in the waves.  I felt thankful to live in Minnesota and for all the efforts people have made to preserve our wilderness and nurture our native species.

Eat fish.  It’s good for you .

We hear this message over and over, and it’s true.  Fish is good for you.

Most people are also aware that eating to much fish can be bad for you too, if it’s the kind of fish that tend to build up heavy metals and pesticides.  Farm-raised fish can be full of toxins, depending on how they’re raised.  After all, you are what you eat, even if you’re a fish.

Sadly, our appetite for our finny ocean friends has brought many of our favorite fish to the brink of extinction.  The majestic Bluefin tuna  is almost certainly doomed and many other species are in trouble too.  It may not seem like a big deal, but fragile ecosystems hang in the balance.

What can you do to help save our oceans?  Visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch website and print off a Seafood Watch Pocket Guide to help you select seafood that is both safe to eat and abundant enough to be well-managed and caught in environmentally-friendly ways.  They even have a sushi guide.

If you want to shop at a grocery store that sells seafood responsibly,  Whole Foods Market seafood department works harder than any other fish market (I know of) to help keep farmed seafood and the environment healthy.  They use the Seafood Watch program for wild-caught seafood and buy the rest from Marine Stewardship Council Certified Fisheries.  I love their seafood department and I can enjoy their sushi without guilt!

In other words, if you do your homework, you can feel even better about eating fish!

The Monterey Bay is one of my favorite places in the world, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium is an amazing resource teeming with ocean life.  Click here to go to webcams at the aquarium where you can watch fish, sharks, jellyfish, otters and more!

I just stumbled across this great blog post on Babble.com with a link to a website devoted to food safety called StillTasty-Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide.  It’s a great resource with information on how long you can store and eat every kind of food imaginable!

For example, raw eggs, in the shell are good for 3-5 weeks after purchase, even if they’re past the printed expiration date, as long as they’re refrigerated.

I’m putting StillTasty on the “shelf” with my other favorite websites.

Eat well.  Stay well.

Now that it’s summer, move your science lab outside and try doing the Tablecloth Trick or Throwing Eggs.  If you’d rather check out the power of the sun, try making a solar oven from a pizza box!  You probably have everything you need for these experiments right in your kitchen, and if you don’t have a pizza box, just save one next time you order out.

What are you waiting for?  Have fun!

Did you know that we have ten times more microbes in our bodies than human cells?  It may sound gross, but these microbes are often more friend than foe and keep us healthy  in return for a little space to call their own.

There was a fantastic article in yesterday’s Science Times about microbiomes- what scientists call the collection of microorganisms colonizing our bodies.  The study of microbiomes has intensified in recent years and scientists are trying to catalog some of the bacteria we carry.

I eat yogurt filled with healthy, or beneficial, bacteria on a daily basis to keep a healthy population of these little helpers living in my gut.  This keeps the bad bacteria from finding a place to take hold.  A more extreme version of this was mentioned in the Science Times article, where a woman dying of an intestinal infection caused by pathogenic, or bad bacteria was saved when bacteria from her husband’s intestines was introduced into her large intestine.  Within hours, the good bacteria had “kicked” the bad bacteria out, taking over residence.

I also learned that babies born by C-section (like my three kids) are more prone to skin infections and asthma, possibly due to the fact that coming from the sterile amniotic sac, they are colonized by bacteria from adults’ skin rather than that bacteria from their mother’s birth canal.  In fact, people with asthma have a different set of lung microbes than healthy people and obese people have a different set of bacteria in their guts than people of normal weight.

You’ve heard that kids on farms and are exposed to dirt have healthier immune systems than city kids?  It’s not the dirt itself, but the microbes in the dirt giving them their immune systems a boost.

There are years of hard work in the lab ahead of scientists to validate their beliefs that beneficial bacteria may one day be a weapon in the arsenal against infectious disease, but in the meantime, I plan to keep eating my yogurt and letting my kids play in the dirt.

“Mom!  I caught a big Northern!”  my son screamed at me.  I ran to get the net, excited that he’d finally hooked a big one, right off our dock.

When I got the net around the fighting fish though, I was sure it wasn’t a Northern Pike.  We took pictures of the huge, gray creature and were lucky enough to have it wriggle off the hook before we donned gloves to try to get it off ourselves.  I guessed that it was a bowfin, based on the long fin running down its back and a neighbor’s report of catching one on the same lake.  We confirmed it online when we got home.

Along with gar and sturgeons, bowfin are in an order of primitive, ray-fin fish that have survived since the time of the dinosaurs.  They can grow to 43 inches and weigh up to 21 pounds.  My son’s weighed between 5 and 10 pounds and I’m glad we didn’t have him try to hold it up for a photo, since bowfin have very sharp teeth and will bite anyone who attempts to handle them.  We released the fish and watched him disappear  into the deep.

The kids were a little afraid to swim off the dock after that.  I don’t blame them.  Who wants to go swimming in the lair of a prehistoric monster?

Imagine pieces of matter (too small to see) called atoms that will only fit together in a certain way, like a puzzle.  These atoms can attach to each other to form small three-dimensional shapes, or larger ones, but the shape will always be the same, depending on what kind of atoms make up the “puzzle pieces.”

This is what happens when crystals are formed.  Diamonds and salt, for example, are crystals shaped like cubes, while quartz crystals are formed in trigonal shapes, sort of like three-dimensional kites. You can have very small diamonds, or huge ones, like the Hope Diamond, which is as big as a silver dollar and blue from impurities in the stone, but they will all have the same basic shape.

We grew alum crystals in a jar last week and I am amazed at how beautiful they are.  I couldn’t get a very good picture, but they look like a string of real gems and were simple to grow.

To grow these spectacular crystals, you will need a small jar of alum, which can be found with the spices at the grocery store, water, a glass, a jar, a stick and some thread.

Fill the glass with about 3/4 cup of water and add a few teaspoons of alum powder.  Stir until the powder dissolves and repeat until no more alum will dissolve and you can still see some floating around in the glass.  Then, let the glass sit overnight or until some small alum crystals form in the bottom or on the sides of the cup.  It took two days for us to get some decent crystals, but we got several small ones that were fun to look at!

Fish a large crystal out of the glass with a spoon and tie a thread around it.  Tie the other end of the thread around the stick (we used a BBQ skewer) and wind it up so that you can rest the stick over the mouth of the jar and the crystal will hang down about half way.  Then, pour the remaining liquid from the cup into the jar.  There is still alum in the water, which will add more “puzzle pieces” to the crystal and make it grow bigger.

Now you can watch your crystal grow.  What shape is it?  Look at your crystals under a magnifying glass.  Take a picture of them, or draw them your science notebook!  Here is a link to a great Smithsonian website where you can learn more about gems and crystals.

“With great power comes great responsibility.”  Similar quotes can be found all the way back to ancient Greece, like Socrates “rule worthy of might.”

It makes me think of Spiderman.

At any rate, on this Independence Day weekend, as members of the most powerful nation in the world, I think we should all take a moment to reflect on personal responsibility .

We’re a nation of blamers.  We’re all furious at BP.  I rant about the people overfishing our seas and at the farmers feeding antibiotics to animals to make them grow faster, among other things.

But, when I turn the microscope on myself, I see a mom who has spent the week driving her kids from activity to activity, guzzling gas.  I see a foodie who loves eating sushi whenever she gets the chance, not alway checking to see where her fish came from and whether it is sustainable.  I also see someone who occasionally forgets to turn lights off, uses too many paper towels and cleans her toilets with disposable brushes.  That’s only the beginning.

My name is Liz and I’m part of the problem.

What can I do?  I can carpool more and always check where my food is coming from.  I can take two seconds to wring out the dishrag and use it to clean up a mess instead of grabbing a paper towel.  I can take responsibility for my own actions.

What will you do with your great power?

Here’s a quick experiment for bored kids:

You’ll need a button, a glass, water, and a carbonated beverage.

Pour some water in the glass.  Drop the button in.  What happens?

If it sinks*, dump the water out and fill the glass with carbonated beverage.  Drop the button in.  Now what happens?

The button is more dense than the water and sinks in uncarbonated water, but in a carbonated beverage, carbon dioxide bubbles form on the button and make it buoyant, so it floats to the top.

What other sinking objects can you make float with carbonation?

If your kids like this, check out this Float or Sink experiment that even very young kids can do!

*If your button floats, the experiment won’t work, so try to find one that sinks!