Winter Fun--Do try this at home.

Here in the East, we have had a day of snow with more falling. Many businesses have been closed as well as all of the schools. While I was looking for gloves to wear for the shoveling, I remembered a science project Theo did when he was ten.

It was one he thought up on his own and it was just right for a boy his age. His question was, "Which gloves will stay dry for the longest time while playing in the snow?" He conducted his experiment by gathering up all of the gloves in the house and making snowballs with them until his hands got wet. He used gloves made from seven different materials. The worst pair got wet after 16 snowballs and the best pair got wet after 90+ snowballs. (He stopped counting after 90.) See if you can guess which pair performed the best and which pair performed the worst.

He had gloves made from:

Deerskin
Deerskin with knit lining
Polar fleece with no lining
Polar fleece with polyester lining
Acrylic gray knit
Acrylic brown knit
Acrylic knit with leather grip

He thought the leather gloves would perform the best, but they turned out to get wet the fastest. The acrylic knit gloves did the best even though they were thinner than the polar fleece. The polar fleece were about half-way in-between the leather and acrylic knit gloves.

Now while this experiment and its results were interesting, that was not the best part according to Theo. The best part was the snowball fight he had at the end with his brother. I do encourage you to try this at home.

Data Collecters Wanted

or Dog Owners Needed

I know there are many of you out there who are as interested as I am in experimenting and collecting data for scientific purposes. You may remember my ill-fated egg frying experiments, my potato chip size to bag comparisons, and the M &M taste test that is still getting off the ground. Well, I've heard about a new study that I would love to try to replicate if I only had a dog. But alas, I only have cats. So I'm hoping that some of you with dogs will collect data and report back so we can hear if your results agree with the findings of the study.

Miss Lander's dog that I may have to borrow.

The study I am referring to came out in the December 2013 journal of Frontiers in Zoology. It stated that for two years, German and Czech researchers watched a group of 70 dogs of various breeds poop* 1893 times and pee** 5589 times. What they discovered from their observations was that when there was a calm magnetic field (no sunspot flareups, etc.), the dogs preferred to poop with their body aligned in a north-south direction. At this point, the researchers don't know why, but they're pretty excited because this is the first time that they have actually seen that the earth's magnetic field affects a mammal other than for navigation.

Now if you're going try to do this experiment to be published in a peer-reviewed journal or for a grade in school, there are several things you should take into consideration like the daily activity of the magnetic field and whether or not your dog is on a leash.*** And to make your results meaningful, you should use circular statistics to norm this activity with your observations. But just for fun, you can just get a GPS/compass (or use the sun and moss on trees) to figure out which way is north and start paying attention when you're walking your dogs.

So who's going to start collecting data? Or have some of you already observed something like this in your dog's behavior already? I may have to borrow a dog. :)

*in the biology world known as defecate

**in the biology world known as urinate
***dogs on a leash didn't exhibit the N-S alignment

A little more:

Although I read a couple of news releases and the provisional abstract of the article in Frontiers in Zoology, the complete article was not yet available online. So I was left with many unanswered questions like:

Where'd they get the dogs and did they depend on owner reporting or was there carefully measured, unbiased observation?

What happened when the dogs peed? Any directional preference?

What was the actual statistical confidence in their numbers?

Was there any correlation in size of dog to the amount of magnetic field disturbance it took before it affected the pooping behavior?

Who thought this one up?

Good intentions

You may remember a while back I commented that my friend said she could definitely taste the difference between the red M&M's and the others. I had never noticed this before and wondered if it were really true for her and maybe others also. I thought of various ways to test this idea and decided that it was a really complicated hypothesis to test considering the number of variables involved and the number of taste memories our brain can hold at any one time. Nevertheless, the experiment held too much potential for fun for me to dismiss it. I came up with a couple of different test methods, and while they wouldn't hold up under close scientific scrutiny, I thought I could gleam some information from them. So I had a plan in place, but first I needed to try it out on a few people (Ward, me, and the boys) before I tried it on others.

With high hopes of an interesting experiment, I completed the first step. I bought two bags of M&M's. I even made it to the next step of sorting them by colors. Well, I almost made it through that step. It seemed that every time I sat down to work on this part, I got called away. And as I was leaving, I grabbed a handful of candies to eat, and scooped the rest into the bag so that cats wouldn't play with them while I was gone. And you know what? After two weeks of this, I ran out of M&M's before I ever got to any testing.

So I guess I will have to start this experiment all over again. I plan to do that as soon as I finish the taxes or when I want some more M&M's to eat. Wanna take a bet on which will come first? :)