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Science & Nature

Cloudette by Tom Lichtenheld

Thu, 04/14/2011 - 00:00 | Ann McDuffie
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Cloudette

In Cloudette, by Tom Lichtenheld, a smaller than average cloud is happy and well-adjusted to her life in the sky. Being small gives her all sorts of advantages such as cute nicknames, great hiding places and the best view of the fireworks. But when the big clouds sail off to create storms and to water the fields, Cloudette gets the urge to do something big and important, too. So off she goes to find a job.

She could work at the firehouse or the garden center or even at the car wash. But nothing works out until she comes across a dry, barren patch of ground that used to be a pond. Cloudette has an idea! She puffs herself up until she becomes a rain cloud and finally discovers a job just right for a little cloud.

Car Science: An Under-the-Hood, Behind-the-Dash Look at How Cars Work by Richard Hammond

Thu, 02/03/2011 - 10:02 | Virginia Johnson
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Car Science by Richard Hammond

Kids who like car books soon outgrow the ones with nice pictures and simple diagrams—and then what? What do you give a car-crazy kid who – might – be drawn into the fascinating world of science and engineering if he had the right teacher? Most car books for older kids are chock full of dull details and have no excitement whatsoever. They drone. They drag. They discourage with their very verbiage. We’ve got a cure for that.  Richard Hammond, star of the BBC’s Top Gear and past host of Brainiac: Science Abuse, has teamed with picture-mad DK publishing to bring off Car Science: An Under-the-Hood, Behind-the-Dash Look at How Cars Work.

The book is divided into four very fun, very illustrated sections: Power, Speed, Handling, and Technology. There’s never a dull moment as Mr. Hammond divulges details of “…everything you need to know to be a real driving expert. How a turbocharger works, how gasoline is made; we’ll look inside gearboxes and learn why a Formula 1 car’s brakes glow pink when it’s stopping. And, at the end, we’ll look at the kind of cars that we might be driving in the future.”

Where Did All the Bees Go?

Tue, 10/26/2010 - 00:00 | Caroline Parr
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 Dave Hackenberg is not your average backyard beekeeper. He and his son run a business managing three thousand hives, moving them around the country in a tractor trailer to pollinate blueberries, almonds, and pumpkins from California to Maine. But one day several years ago, Dave opened a hive in Florida and was faced with a mystery: where were the bees?

What he found that day astonished him, as Loree Griffin Burns reports in “The Hive Detectives, Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe.”  Not only were the twenty million bees in his four hundred hives gone without a trace, but there was no sign of any other insects, either. Usually an abandoned hive is crawling with honey robbers, but not this time. “It was as if something was in the hives, something so awful that the bees who lived there were forced to leave, something so sinister that other insects refused to enter, even for free honey.”