Science in the Library

Today marks the 55th day since schools closed in California. Although state and local governments are working to put a reopening plan into action, schools are going to remain closed for the rest of this 2019-2020 school year, and summer programs are likely going to have difficulty reopening too. So what are kids to do? We have all these children with sharp eyes and brilliant minds, and not much to use them on apart from video games. Enter Citizen Science! As citizen scientists, kids can use their mental energy (and Internet bandwidth) to work toward furthering a good cause like studying wildlife in remote regions of the globe, tracking climate change, learning about distant galaxies, or discovering underlying causes of diseases to move researchers closer to finding treatments.  So today I gave a webinar highlighting my personal favorite citizen science projects for kids to try. There are thousands of projects out there, and I must have played at least a few dozen of them be...

On Thursday, February 27, we had a special astronomy festival for the whole family! People of all ages got to learn something new and inspiring about the way our understanding of the universe has grown, and also the ways that you can help scientists track changes in night sky visibility. Globe At Night Neighborhood Science Kit When Los Angeles Public Library got a grant for bringing Neighborhood Science to other libraries, Pasadena was chosen as one of the first libraries to get their Neighborhood Science kits. There are currently five Neighborhood Science kits  at Pasadena that you can check out and use to conduct observations and collect data that will help scientists understand more about the way our climate is changing, our air and water quality is changing, etc. The Globe At Night kit  includes a Sky Quality Meter for measuring the darkness in your area, and other tools and information. You can use a Sky Quality Meter to get a reading of the sky's level of darkness, ...

I was doing some work on the nonfiction collection today, focusing on the shelves about astronomy, space, planets and time. While examining the books closely, I came across a few that I want to remember as being really interesting: Faraway Worlds: Planets Beyond Our Solar System , by Paul Halpern and Illustrated by Lynette R. Cook, is a fascinating look at the search for distant planets. It contains simple visual demonstrations of how scientists are able to find stars that have planets--the "wobbling star" is explained with a good diagram about the gravitational pull of a large planet. Halpern's writing is very accessible and Cook's illustrations take the book to another level of imaginative wonder, as she artfully speculates what a beach might look like on a planet with two suns. There is even a page at the end dedicated to explaining how Cook comes up with her illustrations. Really a fantastic and imaginative read. I found a lot of books about the Hubble ...