OBJECT #10: Agate

I can’t remember how I obtained this slice of agate.  My basement contains hundreds of rocks and minerals and it’s easy to lose track of where they all came from.  My husband is the main rock collector, so that makes me “once removed” from parts of the collection, giving me an excuse for not being able to remember where they came from.

    An agate is actually considered to be a type of gem stone, often classified as chalcedony, which is in the quartz family (SiO2).  The name “agate” was given to these rocks by an ancient Greek named Theophrastus, who named them after the river where he found them:  the Achates.

    Many agates probably started out as hollow bubbles in lava.  As the lava cooled, hot mineral-rich water seeped into the bubbles.  As the solution cooled, the minerals precipitated out and formed crystals.  The color of an agate was determined by what kind of minerals were in the solution.  Some of the minerals cooled into very fine-grained rock, with particles so small that the texture of the rock is smooth and glassy.  Sometimes there was enough mineral soup to fill the entire empty cavity, but in some agates the minerals ran out before they reached the center, leaving an empty space.  Often, the edges of the central empty cavity are ringed with large crystal formations. 

    Some agates are found as “geodes,” spherical rocks that must be cracked open to reveal the gems inside.  (Mexico has some really good geode sides.  There are places were thousands of small geodes can be easy collected.)  Some geodes turn out to be “duds” and aren’t much to write home about.  Others will be found to contain crystals that are quite attractive.   One of the largest geodes ever found was in Brazil. It weighed 35 tons and was filled with amethyst crystals (a type of quartz that is often light purple in color).

    One type of agate is not spherical, but occurs in long stripes.  In this case, the mineral-rich silica water filled in long, narrow cracks in the cooling rocks.  They are simply called striped agates, or banded agates.  They have the same beautiful multicolored patterns as the round ones.

    Agates come in lots of colors, but most often in shades of red and brown, gray, or blue.   Agates are used primarily for decorative purposes, such as jewelry or crafts such as book ends.  The only practical use for agates that has ever been documented is burnishing leather (a few places in Asia).  There is a church in Oregon where thin slices of local agates were used as panels for the stained glass windows.  I guess that’s sort of a practical use, but it’s decorative as well, so we could count it in both categories.  You can see from one of my pictures how light will go through these thin slices of rock.  This makes sense when you remember that silica, the main component of agates, has the chemical formula SiO2, which is the same formula for glass (and sand).

    There are lots of places online where you can buy geodes if you want the thrill of cracking open your very own never-before-seen specimen.  If you want a chance to be creative and create your own personal agate design, check out the agate craft idea on my website.  Just click on Free Downloads, then on Earth Science.

OBJECT #9: Cow Magnets

    These are cow magnets.  If you’ve never heard of a cow magnet, you are probably scratching your head wondering is this is a joke.  Seriously, these are cow magnets and they are used with cows. Cows are not very discerning grazers.  They will pick up bits of metal along with grass.  Nails, staples and broken pieces of wire fence have been known to lurk under clumps of grass in pastures, and these metal bits end up in cows’ stomachs.  Cows have four stomachs, one of which is the famous rumen, full of bacteria and other microorganisms that digest the grass.  A cow would not be able to live on grass alone without the help of these microorganisms.  This is because animal digestive systems cannot break down the cellulose wall around plant cells.  The nutrients are inside the cell and the wall must be broken down in order to release the nutrients.  Microorganisms produce the right enzymes for breaking apart cellulose.  Ruminate animals have the largest number of microorganisms living in their gut, so they are the ones that can live on nothing but grass and hay.

    The bits of metal in the cow’s stomach can cause damage, of course, but the most damage is done when those bits of metal get all the way into the intestines.  At some point during the last century, a farmer had the brilliant idea of making a cow swallow a large magnet.  The magnet is too large to pass from the stomachs into the intestines, so the magnet becomes a permanent resident in one of the stomachs, often the rumen.  All the bits of metal are attracted to the magnet and are thereby kept from going into the intestines.

    At first they used the smooth type of magnet.  The problem with this type is obvious.  Yes, the metal bits stick to the magnet, but then the magnet can become a mass of prickly bits of metal.  Someone eventually figured out how to design a plastic housing to surround the magnet.  The metal bits are drawn inside the outer diameter of the plastic housing, so hopefully only the smooth plastic will touch the sides of the stomach.

    Young cows are forced to swallow one of these magnets very early in their life.  The magnet then (hopefully) stays inside stomach for the life of the cow.  As far as I know, no attempt is made at recovering the magnet when the cow expires, although I suppose maybe butchers who are cutting up cows for use as meat for our dinner plates, might rescue a magnet if and when they came across one.  I think the magnets are cheap enough that farmers don’t worry too much about recycling them.

    Why do I have cow magnets in my basement?  My husband comes from a dairy farming family.  I think he picked up a few while at the farm years ago, and they have been in my basement collection ever since.  I’ve used them occasionally in my science classes because they are actually fairly strong magnets. 

OBJECT #8: Oboe

    This isn’t exactly junk.  But it’s sitting gathering dust in my basement.   In my childhood and teen years this oboe and I spent a lot of time together.  Why, as a fourth grader, did I choose the oboe over all other wind, brass and string instruments?  Because hardly anyone played it, of course.  I had to be different.  I had to tackle the hardest instrument possible just to prove to myself I could do it.  (Little did I know that for the first year I would spend most of my practice time blowing single notes to strengthen my diaphragm, holding the notes for as long as I could, until I could  play a continuous note for the better part of a minute!  A bit tedious for a fourth grader?)

    As a fifth grader I had to begin to make my own oboe reeds.  My teachers said the ones you bought at the music store were junk.  Real oboists made their own reeds.  It was like taking on another instrument.  It was fun at first.  I still have the instructions my dad wrote down for me as we listened and watch my teacher demonstrate reed making.  The paper has translucent oil spots all over it, as the sharpening stone oil would spill out occasionally, soaking the items in the bottom of the fishing tackle box that held all my reed making equipment.  But my dad’s meticulously neat handwriting is still there, the same as the day he wrote it.  and I could make a reed again if I had to, just following those instructions.  My tools included a very sharp specialized carving knife, a sharpening stone, two specialized items called a plaque and an anvil, a cutting block and a razor knife. Amazing, I don’t remember ever cutting myself while making reeds.  (I sliced my fingers with coping saw blades and X-acto wood-carving knives instead.)

    An oboe reed consists of three things:  a stem made of a small metal pipe wrapped in cork, some red nylon string, and a very expensive piece of dried reed imported from Europe.  You had to soak the very dry piece of reed until it was pliable enough to bend in half and be tied around the metal stem.  The wrapping had to be extremely tight.  I would sit straddling a chair with one end of the string tied to the back of the chair so that I could use both hands to pull tightly as I wound the string around the reed.   I would often do up a batch of these “blanks,” then get around to carving them later.

    Carving a reed took me the better part of a hour.  Fussing with it and getting it to sound just right seemed to take forever.  You’d rough it out, then start patiently scraping it thinner and thinner, especially at the tip.  The center of the reed was called the “heart” and had to be not too thin and not too thick. and nicely rounded.  I learned the hard way not to press too hard when thinning the tip.  One crack and the reed was ruined.  Cracked reeds were the bane of my late childhood.  Those dumb things could crack at any time, even right in the middle of a concert.  I’d always have to have some back-up reeds in my case at all times.

    Oboe reeds are a real pain.  You have to store them in a special case so that they don’t get touched or scratched.  Then, when you want to play, you have to soak them in a glass of water for a few minutes.  It’s not like a trumpet or a flute where you can just whip it out and start to play immediately.  You have to sit and wait while the reed soaks for a while.  Dry reeds just don’t work.  So also inside my oboe case I had to keep a little tiny jar of water.  My teacher told me to put some Listerine in the water to keep germs under control.  To this day, the smell of Listerine reminds me of my oboe.  Speaking of odd things in my oboe case, I also had a long goose feather.  My teacher insisted that a feather was the ideal cleaning tool.  A fabric swab pushed through the barrel time and time again could actually increase the diameter of the shaft, altering the pitch or timbre of the instrument.  So I jammed a feather up and down inside each piece of the instrument after I took it apart.  The feather did not absorb the condensed water and the feather came out wet.  Thinking back on it, I wonder that this did not bother me more than it did.  I simply wiped the feather across my pant leg and put it back in the case.

    Because I had chosen an instrument that hardly anyone played, I had opportunities that other kids didn’t.  As a middle school student, I was invited (begged) to play in the high school orchestra.   Since the high school orchestra met first thing in the morning and my school bus couldn’t get me there in time, my poor mother spent two years driving me to the high school five days a week.  In the high school orchestra I was no longer trapped in the realm of simple scores adapted for younger players.  I was introduced to the real world of classical music.  And I found out how many of those classical pieces had oboe solos in them--just about all of them!  I think I spent most of my early teen years with butterflies in my stomach.  The butterflies would get particularly rambunctious in the few weeks preceding a concert in which I had one or more sizable solos. (I even had heart palpitations sometimes.)  A couple of times I talked into playing in a recital where it was just me and a piano to back me up.  After a few of those, I realized that I was not destined for a career in musical performance.  I performed okay, but the stress just wasn’t worth it.  When my oboe teacher told me that it was necessary to begin practicing several hours a day if I wanted to keep improving, I reassessed my relationship with this piece of plastic and metal.

    I made a decision not only to quit playing the oboe, but to leave high school entirely.  I dropped out after my junior year.  Music was just one of the many stresses I was tired of.  I was in the advanced track in all my classes and was putting in at least 6 hours of homework every night, plus weekends.  45 minutes on the bus each way, to and from school...  I thought college couldn’t be worse that was I was doing.  (And I was right, as it turned out.)

    I think my own experiences with school stress were partly what led me to consider homeschooling for my own children.  I had spent the bulk of my teen years feeling stressed out all the time.  Was that really a necessary part of education?  I decided it wasn’t.  I wanted my kids to have a wonderful, relaxed childhood even into their teen years.   I think the teen years are more grand finale of childhood than the beginning of adulthood. As things have turned out, several of my kids have chosen to take a few classes at our public high school, to supplement our homeschooling curriculum.  They did just fine and didn’t get stressed out the way I did.  They never learned or worked “just for a grade.”  They never had to worry about their grade point average.  They were simply interested in learning.

    One of my sons almost went into music.  He is an accomplished guitarist and plays percussion on the side as well.  He composes and records songs in the music studio I built for him in our lower garage.  He debated long and hard about whether to become a professional musician, then decided to keep music as a hobby and go into landscape architecture as a career.  Music is so much a part of him that I doubt his guitar will end up as “junk in a basement,” like my poor oboe has.  For him, music is a de-stresser, not a stresser.  He plays his guitar to relax and unwind.  I like it that way.

OBJECT #7: Hercules Beetle

  
This isn’t a real Hercules beetle, but it’s almost as big as a real one.  It measures almost a foot (30 cm) in length.  It’s a model that my younger daughter made for a contest that the Penn State Entomology Department sponsors every fall.  They hold a huge Insect Fair and one event is the Build-A-Bug contest.  One year our homeschool group incorporated this contest into our insect unit and helped each student build a bug.  My daughter chose the Hercules beetle (maybe partly because she knew how fond I am of beetles).  The basic shape was made from cardboard and wire then covered with paper mache.  Then a heavy coat of paint and shiny coat of varnish.

    The most poignant lesson my daughter learned at the bug festival that year wasn’t about insects, but about people. The contest turned out to be juried by the all the spectators who came through the bug contest room, so the more family and friends a contestant had, the better their chance of winning.   Sure, there were some entries that were so good that they got votes no matter what, but overall, the contest was quite a bit skewed toward those who had brought along a huge fan club.  We were just us, total of three votes.  I looked a my daughter, shrugged, and said, “Oh well, life’s just like that sometimes.  You did a really nice job on your project and I’m proud of your work.  I’m going to hang it on the wall in my studio.”  So I did  and it’s been there  for... hmm... can it be seven years already?  Wow.

    Speaking of beetles, our house has been invaded by the one of the newest arrivals to North America-- a beetle that falls into the genre of “stink bug” or “squash bug.” (Entomologists call these particular invaders “brown marmorated stink bugs.”)  I think technically it may be a “shield bug,” which is actually a “true bug.”   (Beetles aren’t really “bugs.”  Only certain kinds of bugs are technically “bugs.”  Beetles are coleoptera and "bugs" are hemiptera.)

    Anyway, about once or twice a month, we find one of these little critters crawling up a curtain or buzzing about a light.  They are easy to catch and very harmless (unless you are a plant) so we just pick them up and put them outside.  We’ve found them in the house all the way through the winter months, so we know they are not just crawling in through a crack somewhere.  They must have wintered over in the house.  But we can’t discover where they are hiding out.  We’ve looked everywhere that seems likely for a bug to hide out.  But they just appear seemingly out of nowhere.

    My son read a research article online that gave us some info on these bugs, It seems these bugs are new arrivals from Asia.  They appeared in North America only about a decade ago and probably have spread from the east coast.  They have crept their way west and now, as I can witness, are colonizing central Pennsylvania.  They eat most plants, including those found in gardens and commercial farms.  Entomologists at various universities are studying them to find out if there is a safe way to get rid of them but as of yet have not come up with anything.

    We didn’t take the “stink” part of the name too seriously until on evening my daughter called me into her room to try to track down a strange smell.  It didn’t fit into any of our usual categories of smells.  We knew it was not a dead mouse or stinking cat litter or spilled paint.  Hours later my daughter suddenly remembered that she had found one of those bugs, crushed it with a tissue, and put it into her trash can. 

    My son also read in that article a scary story about a house that was infested with hundreds of these bugs, and as fast as the owners killed them, they were replaced by new ones.  The sorcerer’s little apprentices. (They did finally reduce the population down to a manageable level somehow.) 

    Well, at least I’m not phobic about bugs, and the good news is that they don’t bite or sting.

OBJECT #6: T2 virus

    If you’ve never read about bacteriophages, I doubt you would ever be able to guess what this thing is.  This is a paper model of a virus.  When you think of viruses, usually what comes to mind is sneezing and coughing.  It’s easy to forget that viruses don’t just affect humans.  There are many types viruses, each one specialized to attack one particular part of one particular type of living cell.  The first virus ever discovered was in plants.  There are also viruses that attack bacteria.  These types of viruses are called bacteriophages (“phage” means “eat” in Greek).  This type of bacteriophages is known as the T2.  There are also T4s and T6s.  The T2 is my favorite “phage” and is the one most common one drawn by artists who are illustrating articles on these things.  The reason for this is pretty obvious-- they look bizarre.  Usually people say they look like a lunar landing module.

    This model is just made from paper (heavy card stock paper) and a few chenille stems.  (It’s one of my free downloads, so you can make one, too!)  I sprayed the top lightly with silver spray paint to try to make it look less like paper.   In a real T2, the top part is made of protein and has a piece of DNA inside it.  The legs are not called legs, but rather “tail fibers.”  The ends of these fibers are what grabs onto the outside of the bacteria cell.  After it latches on, the neck sort of retracts, pulling the head down and propelling the DNA into the cell.  Once in the cell, the DNA takes over the cell machinery and turns the poor bacteria into a T2-producing factory.  When the bacteria gets full of T2s, it bursts open and all those new T2s go out looking for more bacteria cells to infect.

    Sounds gruesome (and even more so when you think that the same process happens to our cells when we catch a virus) but we could use these phages to our advantage to fight unwanted bacteria in our bodies.  The phage cannot possibly attack your cells.  The tail fibers will only stick to certain bacteria.  They won’t stick to your cells.  So... why are we not using these things to fight infections?  Some countries are-- such as Georgia (the country in Asia, not the US state).  They’ve got quite a research program going on these things.  They’ve found that these viruses are able to keep up with the survival mutations of the bacteria.  Antibiotic resistance is a big problem when dealing with bacteria.  But the T2 can manage to counter these mutations with mutations of their own, constantly keeping their mode of attack up to date.  Whenever the research hospital in Georgia finds an antibiotic resistant bacteria, all they need to do is take a microbial culture from the hospital’s sewer pipes and they’ll find phages that have already learned how to attack this new resistant strain.  So why aren’t other countries pursuing this research?  My guesses are that most people would say “No” to any treatment that involved a virus, and, more importantly, I don’t think you can get a patent on them, which rules them out as a cash cow for pharmaceutical companies.  But it’s nice to know that there is a Plan B out there, when all the drugs stop working.

    A number of years ago, I made a very large T2 for a science fair I did with my homeschool group.  I don’t know why I do things like this.  One day I just got it into my head that I needed a huge T2 virus.  I can’t brag that the construction was anything to “write home” about.  The top was just cardboard covered with sequined fabric.  The legs (oops--tail fibers) were hard to assemble because of the angles in involved.  I used metal angles that I adjust to less than 90 degrees.  The legs could be unscrewed for storage, and poor T2 spent many months in storage, only coming out for special events now and then.  The last time I got it out I discovered that it had become very wobbly, and making the determination that rebuilding was easier that repair, I decided to retire the T2 from my collection of junk in the garage.  (But I have not made a replacement yet.  Space is getting tight in the garage.)  I decided a better replacement was a hands-on activity about phages, where kids could assemble and disassemble T2s.  I made dozens of little cardboard heads, plastic DNAs, wooden necks and chenille stem legs.  When the kids finish assembling the T2s, they go around to the other side and take them apart.  Kids think taking them apart is just as fun as putting them together, because there are little slots to stick all the parts into.  Kids love sticking things into holes and slots.  This exhibit is part of my traveling summer science museum.

OBJECT #5: A land planarian

    I have a very boring-looking terrarium sitting in my basement workshop.  It’s looks like it has nothing in it but some dirt, stones, leaves, and chunks of bark.  However, hidden under some of the rocks are some very bizarre creatures.  Last fall, during our “Simple Invertebrates” unit, I brought in some containers of dirt from my garden to use for a scavenger hunt.  The kids were given magnifiers and were told to find as many forms of life as they could.  Of course, they all found earthworms (some of them almost microscopic-- it is easy to forget that worms start out very, very small!), little gray “pill bugs” (or “rolly-pollies,” or whatever those little armadillo-like arthropods are called in your region of the world), and a selection of tiny millepedes, centipedes, spiders and insects. 

    Then one student found something amazing (and a bit alarming, as it turned out).  She called me over to looked at a strange worm she had found.  As soon as I saw it I was pretty sure it was not in the same family as the earthworm.  Its body was not segmented.  It was also too large to be a round worm.  As I watched it under our stereo-microscopes, I saw it extended its head far enough that the shape of the head became visible.  It was flat!  The head was round and flat, like a plate. I suspected that we had found a land planarium.

    As soon as I got home from my class, I began searching the web for pictures that matched what we had found.  It was definitely a land planarian, a terrestrial “cousin” of the famous freshwater planarian that regenerates body parts.  Cut a planarian’s head off and it will grow a new one.  Split its head down the middle and it will grow two heads.  Cut it lengthwise and each half will grow into a complete animal.  Planarians are very handy in biology labs that study tissue regeneration.  (You can get them from science supply companies like Carolina Biological. I had ordered some for this unit and the kids had a great time watching them slither around their jars.  I highly recommend them.) But this planarian lived on land, not in the water.

    I read some articles on land planarians and learned that what I had found was a recent invasive species.  These planarians are not native to North America.  They most likely had come over from Indo-China, hitching a ride on tropical greenhouse plants that had been shipped over.  Before they got to America, they had been discovered invading England.  They were first found in greenhouses at Kew Gardens in 1878, thus their scientific name, Biplaium kewense, and their nickname, the “Kew worm.”  They have been in America since 1901, but have stayed mainly in greenhouses.  But now they are on the loose.  Maybe mine came from potted plants I had bought from greenhouses and planted in my garden.

    I began looking around my property to see if I could find another of these rare flatworms.  To my surprise I found lots of them hiding under rocks or bricks in soil that was very damp.  Land planarians “breathe” by absorbing oxygen through their skin and they must have a layer of moisture around them to do this. Very wet clay seemed to suit them perfectly. 

    More research revealed that land planarians eat earthworms.  They’ve been known to tackle earthworms that are larger than they are.  And unfortunately, land planarians don’t till the soil.  They don’t harm the soil, but they don’t benefit it, either.   If the population of land planarians begins to increase and the population of earthworms begins to decrease, we could see the health of our soil declining.  So basically these weird little things are invaders we don’t want in our gardens.  Great-- I’ve probably got hundreds of them already.  My excitement about my discovery was gradually turning to horror.  These things should not be in my garden.  But how to get ride of them?  Researchers are still working on this problem.

    I found a website that tracks where these critters are showing up. They have been found in quite a few US states, but not all of them.  Apparently they have some really huge ones out in CA.  I prefer the tiny PA ones.

    I’ve lived in Pennsylvania most of my life and I’ve never seen one of these.  I guess I just got lucky on one of my trips to purchase to a greenhouse to buy plants.  Some people win the lottery.  I got land planarians.

Here’s one of the articles I read:
http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/misc/land_planarians.htm

(The close-up picture of the planarians was taken with my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS8 camera.)

OBJECT #4: My TARDIS

    How many of you have a TARDIS in your basement?  Okay, how many of you know what a TARDIS is?  My UK readers are laughing right now.  Shocking but true, a surprising small percentage of Americans know what a TARDIS is.

    TARDIS stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.  Time Lords use these things to zip in and out of time and space, meddling in the affairs of other planets and galaxies.  Only.. there’s just one Time Lord left, and we don’t know his real name.  We just know him as Dr. Who.  He’s Britain’s only superhero.  Dr. Who is as popular in Britain as Harry Potter is in the US.

    I’m not a hardcore “Whovian” because I haven’t seen ALL the old episodes from the 1960s, 70s and 80s.  PBS would run them late at night, and on the weekends, so I didn’t get to see very many of them.  The first time I got to watch the show with any consistency was when my two oldest children were very small.  It was a special treat to watch an “adult” show (funny how in America it was young adults who watched it, not kids) after the kids were in bed.  But I never made it to the end of a show.  I would inevitably doze off as the plot thickened.  My brain would then incorporate the sounds of the show into my dreams and I would be off chasing aliens half the night.

    I’ll never forget watching the first episode of the new-and-improved Dr. Who (written by Russel T. Davies) in 2005.  I was stunned.  The show had been completely regenerated into something that a body could never fall asleep in front of.  By this time I had kids old enough to watch along with me and we were all addicted by the end of the first episode.

    At first it was very hard to acquire the episodes.  The show had not caught on yet here in America and the only way we could get it was to rely on copied CDs that a friend very kindly burned for us.  When the next CD was dropped into our hands, we revered it as gold.  We’d make a big family night of it, with popcorn and soda and snacks.  Then somehow the parties started to grow with friends dropping in.  (And fortunately we found a way to torrent the episodes.) By the time we got to season 4, we’d have up to about 18 people at our gatherings.  And the menu grew, too.  Now, Dr. Who nights often involve full dinners.

    Then one day last summer, I decided we needed a TARDIS at our gatherings.  It had to be thin so it would fit against the wall as a decoration and could be stored easily in the garage.  But it also had to look 3D enough not to look like a large poster.  So I gathered some wood scraps, bought a few more, and started cutting and gluing.  The feature I am most proud of is the light fixture at the top.  I used a plastic peanut butter jar, a lid from a sports water bottle and a mayonnaise jar lid.  I cut them in half (lengthwise, so the fixture is flat on the back) and used epoxy to glue them together. I installed a nightlight bulb inside so the light really works.

    I think I painted this thing blue about 10 times.  I had purchased several shades of blue acrylic paint and did lots of experimental mixes.  Then I’d compare my results to photographs of the TARDIS.  I was somewhat relieved to discover, after a bit of Internet research, that the exact shade of the TARDIS had changed of the years.  So I couldn’t be all that wrong no matter what shade I used.  But I wanted my shade to be not-too-bright, not-too-dull, not-too-purple, not-too-gray.  After the final coat of paint I added a coat of matte finish so that the paint would be protected but without making the surface too shiny.  Shiny surfaces make photography difficult and I knew that one of the primary purpose of this prop was to provide a backdrop for some fun photos.  The final touch was the installation of some speakers in the back so it can make the famous TARDIS landing noise.

    I was fortunate enough to be able to travel to London a few years ago right when there was a big Dr. Who exhibition going on.  We got to see the original props used for the show (but not the TARDIS).  However, they didn’t need a TARDIS at the exhibition, as where was a permanent one on the street not too far from the convention center.  I wonder how many London natives have given directions to visitors using this TARDIS as a landmark?  It does stand out a bit!