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From elementary to high school, we found the best science books for kids to help inspire them.
Science and reading go together like quarks and gluons. Every scientist I know is a serious reader, and a lot of them became scientists because of something they read. The books on this list are great ways to ignite a lifelong interest in STEM, no matter what year of school your kid is in. As always, the age categories here are rough guidelines. Nothing bad will happen if your middle school aged kid reads a book on the elementary school list.
Elementary School
Basher Science Series
Illustrator Simon Basher and a variety of co-authors have created a series of science books that are adorable and create excitement about science. My daughter read the Dinosaurs: The Bare Bones book so many times our copy went extinct. Basher’s kawaii-style illustrations get into some pretty obscure scientific territory at times. I don’t recall ever seeing a drawing of an alpha particle in any of the books about science I read as a kid, much less one where the alpha particle is personified as a standoffish kawaii guy surrounded by a wall of paper. Mr. Basher is a hard worker—he’s illustrated about 50 books, including books on fascinating non-science topics like grammar and punctuation.
Fun with Nature
Every naturalist starts by learning about the nature of their own neighborhood. This is a terrific book for young people who are just starting to explore the natural world. There are sections about insects, reptiles, amphibians, trees and mammals living in American suburbs and rural areas. The book explains what each critter looks like, what they eat, how to identify their poop, and other facts that your elementary school student will be happy to share with anyone within the sound of their voice. In the tree section, the book explains how to identify and take care of different kinds of trees, as well as what their seeds look like. Each section has cool projects to do, including how to make a chipmunk swimming pool, which is something I didn’t know chipmunks would be interested in. The book has lots of scrapbook pages, so your kid can start their own collection of interesting leaves, eggshells, sticks, lichen, and other samples, and maybe not leave their nature collections hither and yon like a certain kid that I know. This book is part of a series of Take Along Guides, including books on Birds, Nests, and Eggs and Wildflowers, Blooms, and Blossoms.
First Human Body Encyclopedia (DK First Reference)
If you and your kids want to learn the basics about anything, I don’t think you can go wrong with DK’s reference books. The ones I’ve seen have all been great, and the First Human Body Encyclopedia is no exception. Each two page spread covers a different topic, like How Muscles Work, or Inside the Intestines, and provides a thoughtfully designed combination of pictures and text that sheds light on both the inside and outside of the human body. There’s also sections on important processes like healing, aging, and the ever-popular topic of where babies come from.
Middle School
Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World
This colorful book has one-page biographies of 50 scientists, starting with Hypatia of Alexandria. The capsule biographies describe what each woman did, why it’s important today and outline some of the obstacles they faced. It gets across how careers in science can start, which is a good subject for middle school students who may have trouble finding their entry point into science. Many institutions in STEM still aren’t friendly to girls and women—the stories in this book might give your daughter the inspiration she needs to keep her interest in science alive during tough times. The book rounds out with a timeline and information about lab equipment.
How Stuff Works
The How Stuff Works book is an offshoot of the excellent Howstuffworks.com website. This book explains (surprise) how items and systems that your kids use every day work. Knowing how something works, like, say, a virus, is empowering and interesting for its own sake. Let me get up on my soapbox for a second here: People are afraid of what they don’t understand, and people who don’t understand what’s going on around them are afraid all the time. That’s no way to live. You can’t make it so your kids are happy, but you can pass along a foundational knowledge of how the stuff around them works. Combine this knowledge with an understanding that expertise is real, and that it’s possible for them to gain expertise, and you’ll have given your kids an adamantium/vibranium alloy shield against people who would take advantage of them.
The Way of the Hive
The Way of the Hive, formerly published as Clan Apis, is the only graphic novel on this list, but it earned the spot. It tells a great story about Nyuki, a young bee learning how to be a bee. Nyuki and her friends are philosophical bees, and Jay Hosler’s imagining of bee beliefs is very cool. He also drops a lot of science about bees, and does it so subtly that the reader won’t know how much science has been dropped on them until much later. The art is very much in the same tradition as Jeff Smith’s Bone (in our article on Best Graphic Novels for Kids). Jay Hosler has made a couple of other science-themed graphic novels: Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth, Last of the Sandwalkers, and Optical Allusions, starring Wrinkles the Wonder Brain!
High School
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
William Kamkwamba is a young engineer who grew up in rural Malawi, where starvation was never far away. Kamkwamba writes with real urgency about waiting for the corn crop to be ready so that he and his family could eat. Despite these grim conditions, he did have a couple of resources available that changed the course of his life: abandoned farms full of abandoned farm equipment and a library supported by the US Agency for International Development. Guided by books he checked out from the library, Kamkwamba scavenged old farm machine parts and used them to build a wind turbine that provided his family with electricity for the first time. William Kamkwamba is the best example that I can think of what an engineer can and should be: someone who uses the forces of nature to solve problems. His story has also inspired a young readers edition, a documentary, a picture book and a movie.
The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe
This giant coffee table book introduces readers to the building blocks of all that is. This book got its start when author Theodore “Theo” Gray built a table based on the periodic table of the elements, which is a fascinating project in its own right. Each element in the book has a two-page spread, which features how they were discovered, what kinds of items they are in and where they fit in human history. Each visible element is pictured in great photos, and the invisible ones like Flerovium (or Ununquadium) are represented by the logos of the research institutions where they were discovered. The book is a tribute to the elegance and explanatory power of the periodic table. The Elements is part of a trilogy, which continues with Molecules: The Elements and Architecture of Everything and Reactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules and Change in the Universe.
The post Best Science Books for Kids by Age appeared first on Nerdy With Children.
From elementary to high school, we found the best science books for kids to help inspire them.
Science and reading go together like quarks and gluons. Every scientist I know is a serious reader, and a lot of them became scientists because of something they read. The books on this list are great ways to ignite a lifelong interest in STEM, no matter what year of school your kid is in. As always, the age categories here are rough guidelines. Nothing bad will happen if your middle school aged kid reads a book on the elementary school list.
Elementary School
Basher Science Series
Illustrator Simon Basher and a variety of co-authors have created a series of science books that are adorable and create excitement about science. My daughter read the Dinosaurs: The Bare Bones book so many times our copy went extinct. Basher’s kawaii-style illustrations get into some pretty obscure scientific territory at times. I don’t recall ever seeing a drawing of an alpha particle in any of the books about science I read as a kid, much less one where the alpha particle is personified as a standoffish kawaii guy surrounded by a wall of paper. Mr. Basher is a hard worker—he’s illustrated about 50 books, including books on fascinating non-science topics like grammar and punctuation.
Fun with Nature
Every naturalist starts by learning about the nature of their own neighborhood. This is a terrific book for young people who are just starting to explore the natural world. There are sections about insects, reptiles, amphibians, trees and mammals living in American suburbs and rural areas. The book explains what each critter looks like, what they eat, how to identify their poop, and other facts that your elementary school student will be happy to share with anyone within the sound of their voice. In the tree section, the book explains how to identify and take care of different kinds of trees, as well as what their seeds look like. Each section has cool projects to do, including how to make a chipmunk swimming pool, which is something I didn’t know chipmunks would be interested in. The book has lots of scrapbook pages, so your kid can start their own collection of interesting leaves, eggshells, sticks, lichen, and other samples, and maybe not leave their nature collections hither and yon like a certain kid that I know. This book is part of a series of Take Along Guides, including books on Birds, Nests, and Eggs and Wildflowers, Blooms, and Blossoms.
First Human Body Encyclopedia (DK First Reference)
If you and your kids want to learn the basics about anything, I don’t think you can go wrong with DK’s reference books. The ones I’ve seen have all been great, and the First Human Body Encyclopedia is no exception. Each two page spread covers a different topic, like How Muscles Work, or Inside the Intestines, and provides a thoughtfully designed combination of pictures and text that sheds light on both the inside and outside of the human body. There’s also sections on important processes like healing, aging, and the ever-popular topic of where babies come from.
Middle School
Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World
This colorful book has one-page biographies of 50 scientists, starting with Hypatia of Alexandria. The capsule biographies describe what each woman did, why it’s important today and outline some of the obstacles they faced. It gets across how careers in science can start, which is a good subject for middle school students who may have trouble finding their entry point into science. Many institutions in STEM still aren’t friendly to girls and women—the stories in this book might give your daughter the inspiration she needs to keep her interest in science alive during tough times. The book rounds out with a timeline and information about lab equipment.
How Stuff Works
The How Stuff Works book is an offshoot of the excellent Howstuffworks.com website. This book explains (surprise) how items and systems that your kids use every day work. Knowing how something works, like, say, a virus, is empowering and interesting for its own sake. Let me get up on my soapbox for a second here: People are afraid of what they don’t understand, and people who don’t understand what’s going on around them are afraid all the time. That’s no way to live. You can’t make it so your kids are happy, but you can pass along a foundational knowledge of how the stuff around them works. Combine this knowledge with an understanding that expertise is real, and that it’s possible for them to gain expertise, and you’ll have given your kids an adamantium/vibranium alloy shield against people who would take advantage of them.
The Way of the Hive
The Way of the Hive, formerly published as Clan Apis, is the only graphic novel on this list, but it earned the spot. It tells a great story about Nyuki, a young bee learning how to be a bee. Nyuki and her friends are philosophical bees, and Jay Hosler’s imagining of bee beliefs is very cool. He also drops a lot of science about bees, and does it so subtly that the reader won’t know how much science has been dropped on them until much later. The art is very much in the same tradition as Jeff Smith’s Bone (in our article on Best Graphic Novels for Kids). Jay Hosler has made a couple of other science-themed graphic novels: Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth, Last of the Sandwalkers, and Optical Allusions, starring Wrinkles the Wonder Brain!
High School
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
William Kamkwamba is a young engineer who grew up in rural Malawi, where starvation was never far away. Kamkwamba writes with real urgency about waiting for the corn crop to be ready so that he and his family could eat. Despite these grim conditions, he did have a couple of resources available that changed the course of his life: abandoned farms full of abandoned farm equipment and a library supported by the US Agency for International Development. Guided by books he checked out from the library, Kamkwamba scavenged old farm machine parts and used them to build a wind turbine that provided his family with electricity for the first time. William Kamkwamba is the best example that I can think of what an engineer can and should be: someone who uses the forces of nature to solve problems. His story has also inspired a young readers edition, a documentary, a picture book and a movie.
The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe
This giant coffee table book introduces readers to the building blocks of all that is. This book got its start when author Theodore “Theo” Gray built a table based on the periodic table of the elements, which is a fascinating project in its own right. Each element in the book has a two-page spread, which features how they were discovered, what kinds of items they are in and where they fit in human history. Each visible element is pictured in great photos, and the invisible ones like Flerovium (or Ununquadium) are represented by the logos of the research institutions where they were discovered. The book is a tribute to the elegance and explanatory power of the periodic table. The Elements is part of a trilogy, which continues with Molecules: The Elements and Architecture of Everything and Reactions: An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules and Change in the Universe.
The post Best Science Books for Kids by Age appeared first on Nerdy With Children.
When one thinks of elegance something like a propulsive rocket landing or Simone Biles pirouetting through the air probably comes to mind. The sea-dwelling gossamer worm may deserve a mental slot in the same category, incredibly, because it’s able to swim like Aquaman covered in Vaseline. The worm’s such a good swimmer, in fact, it’s likely to inspire next-generation aquatic robots. (Because there’s nothing nightmarish about that.)
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently posted the above video of the gossamer worm to its YouTube channel. MBARI, a nonprofit research institution associated with the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, posted the video as a complement to a research paper published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology analyzing the creature’s extraordinary swimming abilities.
MBARI
As the video shows, the gossamer worm, or Tomopteris, is a stellar swimmer thanks to its unique physiology. Apparently the sea worm has a “flexible, gelatinous body” that allows for its agile movement. More specifically, the worm has a series of swimming “legs”—or parapodia—that it uses for propulsion. Thanks to its flexible body, the propulsion from the parapodia causes a wave to undulate up the worm’s body as it swims. This body wave, in turn, extends out the parapodia, amplifying the worm’s overall thrust. In either the forward or backward direction too!
MBARI
The authors of the research paper looking at the worm’s abilities note that it could very well provide inspiration for “soft materials” and robots. Indeed, it really seems like it’s only a matter of time before there’s a Cambrian explosion of animal-like robots. Obviously robot dogs are already frighteningly popular and ubiquitous flying robots can’t be far behind in our estimation. There are also some robo-animals we’re genuinely excited for, however. Such as all of the ones that researchers are going to model off of squirrels.
The post This Elegant Sea Worm Is Inspiring Aquatic Robots appeared first on Nerdist.
In Marvel producer Trinh Tran’s new book, The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, she revealed that the moment the women of the MCU came together in Avengers: Endgame was seen as “pandering” from test audiences.
Tran was adamant (as were others who were desperate for an ounce of parity from Marvel) that the scene should stay in the movie. Because the scene tested poorly, they added scenes of the women fighting together in smaller groups with reshoots and worked up to that big scene in the final cut. So in the short term, it gave more buildup to the women arriving onscreen together.
To anyone who’d been watching the MCU films for years, though, those additional scenes didn’t make much of a difference in how the scene was ultimately received in its theatrical version. Also revealed in the book is that the idea for the scene came from Thor: Ragnorak co-writer Craig Kyle’s photo of all the women present at the reception of Avengers: Infinity War for his daughter—an image shared to Twitter, too.
I took this shot for my daughter and it’s the coolest picture I’ve ever taken! #BadassLadiesOfMarvel 💪@MarvelStudios @Avengers @Guardians @Antman @theblackpanther @captainmarvel @thorofficial #AvengersInfinityWar pic.twitter.com/u36x1SB0zN
— Craig Kyle (@MrCraigKyle) November 27, 2017
According to Tran, this sparked a conversation about an all-woman Marvel film that some pitched to Feige. Because Marvel/Disney hadn’t done it yet (at that moment) and they plan years in advance, Tran went for that short-term inclusion in Endgame. “Hadn’t done it yet” is a bit light; let’s be forthright and say they refused to have a female-led movie until Captain Marvel and, recently, Black Widow. It also doesn’t help how often the word “empowered” was used in a simple visual context in the book’s quotes, rather than empowerment through narrative.
This doesn’t lie on Tran alone, but a whole industry that devalues women’s work on and off the screen. Let’s also be honest and admit that the “Girl Boss” mindset and culture has had a grip on society for decades. However, this was especially so the last ten years.
The “women of Marvel” photo story doesn’t help
The reveal that the idea came from seeing some of the women together in a photo on set reinforces this point. To put a bunch of women together and expect people to take it as a truly empowering moment is absurd. It was literally an afterthought.
Especially when there were significant structural issues with most of the women leads in the showdown with Thanos. In Avengers: Infinity War, a woman’s death (Gamora) was in service to two men’s character arcs (Star-Lord and Thanos). Then, in Avengers: Endgame, despite two original Avengers dying (Black Widow and Iron Man), only Tony Stark gets the onscreen, heartfelt goodbye—even after movie after movie of sexualizing Black Widow for no reason and having her partnership with another hero be the focus of many team films.
I’m just sayin’ … they could have had a joint funeral. Anyone with two birthdays in the same month as their immediate family knows the drill. All this disrespect to the only woman on the first big-screen Avengers team. (I’m not counting the original Avenger, since that “reveal” was almost two decades later.)
This is not new, but worth bringing up because, let’s be real, the last five years (especially the last two) have been a blur. That “girl power” moment felt like the Kylie Jenner Pepsi commercial of the MCU in the way almost every side agreed it was pandering and empty.
Even with the Quantum Realm, this was a hard fix
Behind-the-scenes drama over the years at Marvel and Disney, with what we now know about writers like Joss Whedon, makes me not even want to say, “Oh, if they’d done a few movies before that, it would’ve worked”—”a few movies before” meaning some majority women-led teams, solo films, etc. With the power of hindsight, we now know it would’ve likely been worse. Back in 2019, Princess Weekes wrote about how Marvel doesn’t know what to do with the powerful women they do write in.
If they couldn’t write most of their very few women well in Phase 1 and Phase 2, how would we expect them to handle a whole team? It took until Phase 3 (the same phase as both of those latter Avengers movies) and really Phase 4 to get complicated, interesting women as leads. Phase 3 was also the first phase featuring leads that are women of color. Tessa Thompson and others spoke out over the years, in their limited capacity, to call attention yet again to inclusion issues. It was Thompson who said she and a group of Marvel ladies marched over to Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige during a Thor: Ragnarok press event and suggested the time had come for an all-female superhero team-up movie.
Marvel’s phase 4 and 5
By the end of the year, we’ll be about halfway done with phases 4 and 5. (It’s hard to see exactly where one begins and ends and pandemic delays don’t help.) Still, we haven’t had enough to warrant a less shallow Girl Power™ moment—though we are hopeful. In this short amount of time, we’ve had six movies/ TV shows with women leads, disability representation, the first woman director for a Marvel film (Cate Shortland), the first woman of color (Chloé Zhao) to direct a Marvel film, a majority Asian cast film, and more. Next year, there will be Muslim representation with Ms. Marvel. Thor will be taken over by two powerful women, and we have nothing but the highest expectations for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
Even further down the line with The Marvels, we will be getting a women-centered team (as far as we know). I know representation and seeing oneself and others onscreen alone is a drop in the bucket when it doesn’t feel earned (i.e. the scene that brought about this article), but these are still promising changes—not just because of who we see on the screen, but who is participating behind-the-scenes, as well. Hopefully, like my fellow TMS writers, I won’t feel these conflicting feelings of joy followed by disappointment as these stories play out.
(via ComicBookReader.com, image: Marvel Entertainment/Disney.)
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The post New Book Reveals Endgame’s Unearned Girl Power™ Moment Tested Poorly, Leading to Changes first appeared on The Mary Sue.