How did you do? I had good fun working out the answers.

1.     Lungs in birds are very different to ours, they are more efficient. In mammals we breathe into large dead end sacks of alveoli, use some oxygen then have to get rid of the low oxygen air taking up the space. Birds let air flow continuously through their lungs and get oxygen from fresh air on both in and out breaths. This constant supply of fresh oxygen helps give birds the extra energy needed to fly.

There are two main functional differences to make it happen, extra air sacs and tubes for air exchange rather than little balls like mammals. When a bird breathes in, some of the air goes through the tubes to give it oxygen and some goes into air sacs. When they breathe out, the air sacs are emptied and the air goes out through the tubes as well. It’s easier to see with a diagram:

Modified from Vet. Res. 37 (2006) 311-324

When they breathe in, oxygen rich air splits and goes directly into sacs 3 and 4 or through the lungs then into sacs 1 and 2. When they breathe out all the sacs are emptied. The oxygen rich air stored in sacs 3 and 4 goes out through the lungs and the air they’ve already used in sacs 1 and 2 goes straight out. It’s ingenious and far more efficient than our own breathing.

2.     Birds can’t sweat, so they need to cool down differently to us. One way is though panting, evaporating the water in their mouths uses energy and cools them down.

Hot birds (I have lots in the desert) hold their wings open or drop them to encourage air flow around them. Heat is related to volumes and surface area – warm-blooded animals create heat throughout their volume, but lose it through their surface. So by spreading out their wings birds greatly increase their surface to get rid of the heat.

And some birds like chickens or honeyeaters have fleshy combs and wattles. These look red because they are full of blood and very thin skinned. Apparently if you squeeze them you will actually get drops of blood out, but it isn’t something I’ve tried on my chookens.  The air flow around them cools the blood, that can help cool the rest of the body. They work the same as an elephant’s ears.

3.     Kiwis have the biggest egg of any bird relative to their body size. It’s so enormous female kiwis have trouble walking before laying it and have to fast, they were lucky they could survive that way. Fortunately they had no predators prior to human settlement in New Zealand. Mammals such as cats, rats and possums never made it to New Zealand so the females could afford to be awkward without risking their lives.

Kiwis are ratites, the group of flightless birds that includes ostriches, emus and New Zealand’s extinct moas. Like lots of biological things, there is a fairly predictable relationship between the size of a bird and the size of the egg they lay. However the ratites don’t fit on this nice line very well, their eggs are too big. Then Kiwi eggs are big even for ratites.

But, kiwis only lay one egg. If you look at the relationship of clutch size, rather than egg size, kiwis are in just the right place. Rather than putting energy into lots of chicks and hoping some of them make it, the lack of predators allowed them to put all their energy into just one well-developed chick and give it a better chance.

4.     The Dodo was a large, flightless, ground-dwelling bird in Mauritius, closely related to pigeons. It shared many features with Kiwis not because they are related, but because they fill similar ecological niches. Once again, their island home did not have cats, rats, pigs and humans, which allowed them to stop flying.

We're not even certain what it looked like, there are very different reconstructions.

Humans discovered Mauritius and its Dodos in 1598, and by 1700 they were all gone. This was probably not because of direct human hunting – even though it was easy to catch, no-one seems to have liked the taste very much. But introduced animals and deforestation finished them. It is possible that they were already in trouble as a small, isolated population, however there is no doubt that humans ultimately caused their extinction.

The Dodo is probably the first extinction of the modern era, and it is an important lesson not just of what we can do, but how we do it. Three hundred years later we still aren’t killing most animals ourselves (except for fish), but the pets and hitchhikers we take along and our insatiable appetite for land makes us responsible for their deaths.

5.     The boys up the top are all different types of Birds of Paradise, and they are all showing off for the girls. One of the arguments people used against natural selection was that some animals have features that are detrimental to their survival, like enormous tails or bright colours that make them targets for predators – shouldn’t they be dead? Darwin had a brilliant answer to this and it is its own sub-theory and rather large field – sexual selection.

Basically, natural selection is not about survival, it is about reproduction. In my own words, he who dies with the most grandkids wins. Females have it a bit easier than males because they produce the eggs so generally they are guaranteed to at least be in the race. It might be more difficult and dangerous for them to produce babies, but they will definitely have the chance to do it. Boys have the easy job as far as babies are concerned, but they might not even get to do that much. It’s a simple truth that not every male gets to become a father, a few particularly good ones grab all the girls.

In some animals the competition is between males, in others it’s more dangerous to be male and they have a higher death rate. But some animals pair up through female choice, and that’s when the boys go all out. No-one knows what starts females down a particular path – how did the bright colours or fancy dancing or singing or gifts get started? It’s probably fairly close to random. But once it’s started males tend to get more and more extreme, because if everyone has a little bit you have to have more to stand out.

Then they are stuck in a delicate balancing act – you have to be able to survive until adulthood but then get as many mates as you can. Too extreme and you might die, too boring and you won’t leave any descendants. Pity the poor peacock, carrying an enormous tail to entice the ladies. It almost makes high heels look sensible.

The big girl received an art book for Christmas. Most of it is way too old for her, but she loves picking things out and then we get to work out how to modify them for her.

She wanted to try marbling, but we had a few problems to solve so we tried lots of different ways. The idea of simple marbling is to have partial layers so the paper contacts different materials and colours. The explanations in the book are for using oil paints on water, which we didn’t have, so we tried lots of other ways to make our layers.

Attempt 1:

We used some of our acrylic paints from squeeze bottles into a tray of water. Too thick, we ended up with worms that melted onto the paper as they dried.

Attempt 2:

We tried to thin the acrylic paint with oil and vinegar because we didn’t have any spirits. Neither worked, although the girls had a good time trying to mix them and seeing them break up into little balls. I didn’t try to teach them ‘insoluble’

Attempt 3:

We swapped the concept over – instead of trying to get coloured oil floating on clear water, we went for clear baby oil on coloured water using food colouring. Success at last!

Except of course you can’t stop there. What happens if you use different colours? Different amounts of oil? Are blobs different to more spread out? What about trying cardboard or foam rather than paper?

You can see why we’re still doing this a week later. Have you done marbling? Have you tried different ways of doing a favourite activity? 

We have a bush block in central Australia, so fire management is extremely important. It’s relatively cool and raining at the moment, so it’s time to deal with last year’s growth that is this year’s fire hazard.

As you know I have budgies and chickens, so I’ve learnt a lot about birds recently. What do you know?

1. How do bird lungs work?
2. How do birds keep cool?
3. Which bird lays the biggest egg relative to body size?
4. How is the dodo special?
5. And what’s with the boys in the picture?

Answers on Friday!

The One Million Kilo Challenge is not something I would normally be involved in, in fact I am going to give you a whole list of reasons why I think it’s a really bad idea. There’s even some science in there. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done diets in the past. Both under a doctor’s supervision, through weightloss organisations and even once out of a magazine. But as I learn more and especially as I bring up two daughters, I think losing weight is a very bad goal.

First let’s get the obvious bits out of the way. Girls are under pressure to conform to some commercial ideal. Women are judged on their looks. Women are taught to hate themselves or their bodies if they don’t measure up. There’s too much sex and not enough person in most of these images. The girls will get their body image from the people closest to them and if I’m modelling diets and discontent, that’s what they’ll get. So, fun.

But as these things are so obvious, the weightloss industry has re-spun its image. It’s not really weight loss, it’s health! Who doesn’t want to be healthy? Who wants their children to develop unhealthy habits? Who wants to die early from some dreadful disease that is completely your fault for being a fatty. What a brilliant new way to sell … the same old judgement-based-on-appearance-and-adherence-to-an-unattainable-ideal.

Because ‘losing weight’ is not the same as ‘getting healthy.’

Before someone tries to tell me how strongly linked they are, I’ll agree that they are (although not as strongly as some seem to think). BUT (and here’s the science)

Correlation does not equal causation.

Which basically means that just because two things happen together, doesn’t mean that one of them caused the other one. It should sound familiar to some of you. And it’s not just semantics – say that being fat doesn’t cause terrible illnesses, if you are focusing on your appearance are you really solving the problem? Could you actually be making it worse?

For example

I like analogies. I, like many young drivers, once let my car run out of oil. Unfortunately for me I was in the middle of a 400km journey and there was nothing along the way. Nowhere to stop, no way to get a lift, no mechanics and certainly no oil. I watched the needle of the temperature gauge climb and a gentle tapping sound began, getting louder and louder until eventually the engine died. (Luckily I was only about 50km out at that point and someone came past and gave me a lift.)

Did the knocking sound kill my engine?  Would stopping the knocking have saved the car?

No and maybe.

The knocking sound definitely was not doing anything to harm the engine, otherwise playing loud music on car stereos would be a lot less popular. Even though a knocking sound and your engine not running properly are very closely correlated, they don’t cause each other. They are both caused by a third element, the lack of oil.

And stopping the knocking could be good or bad, depending on how you do it. If you catch it in time, add the oil and have a mechanic work their magic on it, you’re golden because you’ve got to the cause of the problem. But if you treat it cosmetically by turning the stereo up, I hope you are within range of a taxi.

Weightloss

And that’s exactly what weightloss is. Once again I agree, weight (or fat) is closely linked with all sorts of health problems. But it doesn’t cause them. Bad eating and inactivity cause both the medical and social problems.

If you put the time into improving your eating habits and being more active, you’re golden. You will improve your health, the thing you’re being emotionally blackmailed to do, and hopefully your adherence to a questionable image will improve too if that’s what you are after. Humans being humans, your life will become easier if your appearance conforms.

But if you concentrate on the cosmetic ‘losing weight,’ you’re just turning the stereo up. That way leads to a range of unhealthy strategies such as meal replacement and ludicrously unbalanced diets, that are short-term fixes and generally leave you with worse habits.

And don’t do a thing to improve the health issues allegedly caused by ‘being overweight’ such as metabolic syndrome or heart disease.

Skinny People

And there’s an even worse trap. If your car isn’t making any funny noises or doing strange things with the warning lights, you can be pretty sure that it isn’t going to suddenly die on you. Unfortunately the analogy breaks down here, because the human fat/health correlation isn’t really all that tight.

There are some people who are genetically lean, they can have a terrible diet and be inactive while still meeting the media’s standards of attractiveness. But unfortunately for them, or in cosmic payback if you’re really annoyed with them, they are just as vulnerable to the health problems that come with that lifestyle as their less attractive peers. They can get the heart disease without the fat.

So to summarise

Healthy, balanced diet and activity = important for everyone, lean or fat.

Losing weight = almost purely social goal that may or may not be important to you, gets even more complicated and guilt inducing when you have children and may actually make you less healthy.

One Million Kilo Challenge

Which then begs the question, why have I signed up for the One Million Kilo Challenge?

Firstly because, in spite of the cringe inducing links to television and really questionable ethics of weightloss marketing, they do seem to have a health focus. I’m quite looking forward to some of the recipes and having a place to log my exercise. We were already doing a post-holidays health improving plan and even though I had vowed not to look at a set of scales, I can do it as a payment for the other advantages.

Because there is something else happening, the reason for this long and rambling post. It’s part of my campaign to get off the internet and make a change in the real world. I’ve entered the challenge as part of a team, and we are fundraising for a children’s medical charity to help stop kids from the Northern Rivers region having to be sent away to larger hospitals. I can do a weekly weigh-in if it translates into solid cash going to people who need it.

And here’s the reason for blogging it – I’d like you to help. If you don’t have a favourite charity but like children, please make a donation. Every bit gets us closer to our goal. And if you do have a favourite charity, consider doing something in real life that could help them today.

I‘ve been umming and ahhing on whether to post this, because it doesn’t really fit with this blog. I know I do vaccine posts occasionally and it’s always a balancing act, but this isn’t really about vaccines at all. It’s about information, and if bloggers and social media users (ie you readers) don’t talk about this, who will?

I’ve talked about it more on my education blog because it’s one of my particular interests as a part of critical literacy – how do we decide what is a good source of information? This is even more important now because information can come from anyone and anywhere – you’re reading this on a self-published blog! As those who are actually using the internet the most, we have a vested interest in shaping its direction, and I for one hope that we can evolve ways of judging the reliability of the information we are getting.

While I have enormous fun reading and arguing on the internet, one of the problems that comes up all the time is, how real is it? How many of us feel the need to switch off occasionally to reconnect with reality? And wouldn’t it be better if we could find ways to blend our worlds? I mean if I’m going to put so much time and energy into the internet, it would be nice to know that it actually achieves something.

Enter Stop the AVN.

I first discovered the Australian Vaccination Network when my eldest daughter was born and the vaccination question came up on a mothering forum I frequented. I must admit my first reaction was jaw-dropping shock – are you kidding me? How can people write this stuff? There were no references. There were silly mistakes confusing viruses and bacteria. Things that screamed out to me with my specialist training, but wouldn’t necessarily be obvious to people in different fields. And running through it all was the conspiracy thread – you can’t really trust the government, they are in the pocket of big business and don’t have your best interests at heart. But never so blatant, and I can see how it would appeal to a demographic who were (at that time) deeply discontented with the long-running Howard government.

And above all, the pitiful stories. The images of children ‘damaged’ by vaccines. But while they were tragic and difficult to read, the only connection to vaccines was ever ‘her parents believe.’ And as a new Mum myself I knew that parents believe all sorts of weird and wonderful things, especially when their children are in pain or upset. It doesn’t make them true. And I was deeply angry that these poor children and their families were being used to hurt other children, which is becoming heartbreakingly obvious with the outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases and the death and hospitalisation of unvaccinated children.

I spent several years on my little corner of the internet, writing about why the information from the AVN was not trustworthy, and then I ventured onto Facebook and discovered Stop the AVN. This is a group of like minded individuals, held together by nothing more elaborate than a Facebook page. And we are dedicated to taking the fight against the misinformation of the AVN off the internet and into the real world.

There have already been several successes, especially the complaint to the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission, which found that the AVN provided information that was ‘false, misleading and solely anti-vaccination’ and issued a warning against them as a danger to public health. And their many financial irregularities were investigated by the Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing, resulting in the loss of their charitable fundraising licence and further investigations.

Meryl Dorey is no longer the go-to person for television and radio to provide ‘balance,’ whatever that means in science, and ordinary Australians are now fighting back in blog comment sections, pointing out that this is not a matter of other people’s opinions, which might deserve respect, but scientific facts. This is incredibly exciting, it shows that we are beginning to have the conversations we need to have to keep the internet useful, not leaving it to governments and Google but doing it ourselves.

And just as the tide was turning, as citizens of the internet were deciding what was valid information and the standards we should be working to, the Woodford Folk Festival decided to give Meryl Dorey a platform to tell lies about autism. That may sound harsh but the title of her proposed talk was a lie referring to a paper that, as usual, didn’t say what she thought it said, so it’s a relatively safe call. In fact I’ve written out predictions of the top 5 lies she will try to tell, I’ll be very interested in how many I get right.

This was picked up by bloggers and Stop the AVN, and MamaMia and traditional media got on board. Along with literally thousands of commenters, ordinary internet citizens voicing their displeasure, writing emails and standing up for our right to trustworthy information. Eventually Woodford realised what a public relations nightmare they had wandered into and they have changed the format, including an actual, you know, immunologist and a moderator from Doctors Without Borders.

I have to admit I’m not entirely happy with this – how exactly can you balance a conspiracy theorist who has been found to be a danger to public health against a professor who has spent years studying and doing genuine research and a doctor from a Nobel prize winning organisation? I think it is false and don’t know why people would want to get health information at a folk festival anyway.

Emotions and manipulation through fear? Check.

Nuance and facts? Not so much.

An example of using the power of the internet and social media to effect real world change? Priceless.

To all my readers I have both a question and a challenge – how do you decide who is worthy of your time? How do you decide what on this enormous, un-edited, un-reviewed, free-wheeling, not-quite-linked-to-reality smorgasbord of information overload you will trust? Do you read critically, asking yourself if an article has the evidence to back it up? (And please do answer in the comments, as a teacher I want to know.)

To all the quacks and conmen who are currently cluttering up my, and your, internet, I have something to say:

Look! Up in the sky!
It’s a bird, no.
It’s a plane, no.
It’s social media users who are learning to take back our internet, and we’re developing into effective real-life activists.

And now that the embargo is off, that was more than a bit of nostalgia. One of the real world things Stop the AVN did today was organise a plane with a banner to fly above Woodford with a simple message

A good way to finish posting before Christmas with a bit of Christmas trivia.

1.     Reindeer are Rangifer tarandus. There are 8 or 9 subspecies, some of which are threatened or extinct, but as a species they are relatively numerous. Reindeer are the same animal as Caribou, just the European name. I never realised that.

Those reindeer are called Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen. Except originally it was Dunder and Blixem. And seeing they are usually depicted with antlers, they must be girls, castrated or too young to be pulling a sleigh – adult male reindeer in Scandinavia lose their antlers in December.

2.     Xmas is not some new fandangled laziness or trying to take Christ out of Christmas. X is an extremely old and venerable abbreviation for Christ, except it’s not really X. It’s actually the Greek letter Chi (Kai) and is the first letter of Christ in Greek. Together with Rho it has been used as the Christogram, or symbol of Christ, for over 1500 years.

It is used in art, church vestments, was the symbol of the Holy Roman Empire and is used by the Catholic Church. It was also used as an abbreviation in parish records, where there are names recorded as ’Xtopher.’ In fact, the X in Xmas is far older – Christ is the barbaric new language used by these modern hooligans.

3.     I actually mean the Solstice on December 22nd (yesterday). The official beginning of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, there are archaeological sites linked with the solstice that are thousands of years old. Given the amount of effort involved with many of these constructions it’s safe to assume the Solstice was very important, the shortest day when the sun begins to return. Co-opting existing celebrations probably had a lot to do with setting the date of Christmas.

Speculation on the Star of Bethlehem is also a perennial favourite at Christmas. I have to say I don’t really like my own opinion on this one. It would be so nice if the Star was a planetary conjunction, or a comet, or even a supernova. But I have to admit I don’t think it exists.  I always enjoyed a good historical hunt, until I read someone (I think it was Stephen J. Gould) pointing out that before you hunt for something you should see what evidence there is for it. And seeing there are no reports from non-European sources of strange things in the sky and it isn’t even in all the gospels, which weren’t written until much later anyway, it’s probably just an embellishment. What a pity.

4.     There have been all sorts of things added to Christmas puddings over the years. We are mostly familiar with the sixpence, it’s fallen out of favour because modern coins have a lower silver content and so aren’t as safe to cook.

• Every member of the family should stir the bowl from east to west for the three kings.
• Sixpence is for wealth.
• A small silver wishbone is for luck.
• A wedding ring means the finder will get married this year.
• A button is for a batchelor.
• A thimble is for a spinster.
• In an older tradition, a bean would be cooked in and whoever found it would be the family guardian angel for the year.

5.     The picture above is one species of Mistletoe. Mistletoe is a parasite, rather than growing into the earth it puts its roots into another tree or bush and uses their water and nutrients, but with evergreen leaves to produce their own energy. Although life as a parasite sounds bad, mistletoes are actually keystone species and can have positive effects on biodiversity. Birds are attracted to nest in and eat the berries, and then pollinate and spread other species as well.

Mistletoe was important in Druidic festivals and in pre-Christian Celtic cultures was seen as representing the essence of males. It has been linked with fertility as well. Somehow this turned into the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe in about the 16th century.

And I’ll leave you with my absolute alltime favourite Christmas song. Whatever your religion or beliefs, hold your families tight and raise a glass. Have a great Christmas season.

Location:

Slab has been well prepared, very smooth and level on a hard substrate. Block is minimum size, house too close to front boundary.

Floorplan:

A simple rectangle with only one room and firepit in the centre for cooking. Entrance centre front is decorative only, 6 windows give adequate light and ventilation but difficult to crawl through, not weatherproof.

Construction:

Walls, roof, door and chimney all constructed from gingerbread. Thin, smooth and even but rather brittle, I have concerns about its strength, load bearing ability and waterproofing.

Joints appear to be made of a sugar and protein mix. The long protein chains help strengthen and bind the mortar. Joins are uneven, some are coated inside and out and others inside only. Walls and roof are crooked, flashing on the roof is a solid seal but very overdone. I have concerns about how long the joints will last as they are not reinforced.

The construction is solid, but it is through use of excess materials.

Conclusion:

The house is decorative and appears to be habitable immediately, however it is very unlikely to last. I predict it will come to pieces in a matter of days. Not recommended as a long-term investment.

I’m sure it will be delicious.

Hmmm, science or trivia? Both?

1. What are the reindeer’s names?
2. Why is it abbreviated ‘Xmas’?
3. What astronomical event is probably the basis of Christmas?
4. What goes in the pudding and why?
5. And what is the picture?

Answers on Friday!

I‘m seriously out of touch but I know everyone is doing the Christmas Links post. So instead I decided to do holiday links, and include ideas of things to do with your kids over the holidays. I’m trying to go for some of the older ones, so unless you’ve been around since the beginning these should be relatively new ideas. And I always like reminders, to those activities I saw and thought would be good but never got around to and forgot.

Babies

Torch Chasey was my very first post, a game we played all the time as crawlers and still do today. That’s a long time for a game to stay popular!

Balloons in Winter isn’t much good for the Australian readers but perfect for some of the US and Canadians. We constantly have a packet of balloons on the go in our house, they are the ultimate children’s toy.

10 Ways to Engage All the Senses has lots of ideas for things to do, ten of them in fact

Toddlers

If you’re at home for the holidays, you can still go Cubby Camping. This can be a nice one for a relative’s house as well, especially if they are around a lot of people they don’t know well. A little picnic where no-one else can see can relieve some of the stranger stress.

Fridge Magnets are lots of fun, also a great stocking filler. Little magnets are still very popular around here and played with all the time.

The kitchen is the centre of our house, so we have heaps of different games we play in there. Here are 10 of them.

Preschoolers

Try choosing a theme for a few days, we did lots of activities based on Butterflies.

For little ones venturing into drawing and colouring, Paper Chromatography is perfect. We do it on napkins and use double thicknesses as wrapping paper.

One of the gifts my about-to-be preschooler is getting this year is a treasure box to keep her marble collection in. She finds them all over our yard from the previous owners and they’re rolling around in a draw. If your little one is interested in something in particular, it might be the perfect time of year to start a collection with some of these ideas.

School Kids

If your big kids are complaining they’ve done everything, maybe they need more of a challenge. Rather than just playing in a sandpit, can they create their own castle mould and test how to build the perfect sandcastle?

For a great project that will give them their own unique clothes, try Reverse Dying. I’d forgotten how much fun that was, we must do this one again!

And for the big kids who can stay up later, how about 13 Things to Do at Night?

Presents

And it wouldn’t be Christmas without it – if you are still stuck for ideas, how about 35 Christmas Presents for Future Science Geeks?