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The National Mall as viewed from the Capitol grounds (photo by Sarah Zielinski)

Those of you in the north may be laughing behind our backs (the D.C. region does tend to overreact in cold and snowy weather), but 18+ inches of snow is almost unheard of here in the nation’s capital. The Smithsonian Institution museums shut down this weekend, and the federal government closed on Monday (your intrepid blogger, however, did come into her office). Hundreds of people got stranded at airports.

What happened?

According to the Washington Post‘s Capital Weather Gang, it was a combination of two factors. First, high pressure has been building over the Arctic Circle region for the past few weeks. This pressure pushes very cold air south. You may have noticed that it’s been very cold recently throughout the United States, and Siberia, China and Europe have all had a lot of snow recently. Second, this is an El Niño year, the strongest since the winter of 2002-2003. El Niño is a pattern of warmer than normal waters in the Pacific Ocean along the equator. The Capital Weather Gang explains:

Those warm waters tend to feed moisture into a southern branch of the jet stream (known as the sub-tropical jet stream), which adds fuel to storm systems over North America, especially in the southern U.S. and along the Eastern Seaboard. There is significant evidence that our weekend powerhouse was fueled by El Niño. In fact, according to reliable records back to 1950, this is the strongest El Niño with the most negative Arctic Oscillation we have ever seen in the month of December. This powerful convergence of weather influencers appears to have bred such an impressive record-setting event.

Neither weather pattern seems likely to go away soon, which means there could be more snow days in the future for D.C. this winter.

For weeks, Smithsonian editor Kathleen Burke has been sifting through piles of kids’ books to put together her annual list of notable books for children, now online. I dove in behind her to pull out some of the wonderful science books that I would have loved to have read when I was young:

Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, by Tanya Lee Stone: They were the “Mercury 13″, the first women who were deemed tough enough to become astronauts but were never considered by NASA to be sent into space. (Ages 10 and up)

Charles Darwin and the Beagle Adventure, by A. J. Wood and Clint Twist: It’s all the extras that make this book special, like the fold-out map of the Beagle‘s path and the removable Darwin family tree, combined with extracts and illustrations from Darwin’s own works. (Ages 6-10)

Charles’ Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation, by Michael Keller, illustrated by Nicolle Rager Fuller: As the title says, this is Darwin’s book in graphic novel form. (Ages 10 and up)

Heroes of the Environment: True Stories of People Who are Helping to Protect Our Planet, by Harriet Rohmer: For the budding environmentalist needing inspiration, here are twelve stories from across North America, including a Mexican wrestler trying to save sea turtle habitat and a member of the Gwich’in people of Alaska who is working to prevent drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (Ages 10 and up)

Mission: Save the Planet, by Sally Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessy: The first American woman to fly in space (along with the COO of Sally Ride Science) gives kids tips on reducing carbon emissions at home and school. Includes references and worksheets. (Ages 9-12)

Mission to the Moon, by Alan Dyer: Jam-packed with information about and photos of Apollo 11, this book comes with a DVD containing footage from the actual moon landing. (Ages 8-12)

The Lives of Stars, by Ken Croswell: For the astronomy-mad child comes this detailed book about stars, filled with gorgeous pictures from Hubble and other advanced telescopes. (Ages 12 and up)

The Riverbank, by Charles Darwin, illustrated by Fabian Negrin: Beautiful illustrations accompany one of Darwin’s most lyrical passages from On the Origin of Species. (Ages 8-12)

The Secret of the Yellow Death: A True Story of Medical Sleuthing, by Suzanne Jurmain: This tale of four American army doctors who traveled to Cuba to find a cure for yellow fever is inspirational, in addition to being well sourced. (Ages 10 and up)

The Tiny Seed, by Eric Carle: This story of the life cycle of a seed is an older one, but a new version of the book comes with a piece of seeded paper for a child to plant in the garden. (Ages 3-6)

The Unusual Mind of Vincent Shadow, by Tim Kehoe: This tale of a kid inventor was written by a real toy inventor. (Ages 8-12)

What Came First? by Sandro Natalini: The classic chicken and egg question introduces the story of the universe, from the Big Bang to Charles Darwin. (Ages 6-9)

The atmosphere on Mars is very different from Earth’s. It is composed primarily of carbon dioxide, which condenses into dry ice at the poles during winter. And it’s thin, with only one percent of the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere. But it sure is pretty at times, especially as seen through the lens of the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait chose this image of the Mars atmosphere as his second best for the year (enjoying only a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image of the Apollo 11 landing site more) and described it as follows:

The image above shows a region of Mars near its mid-lower northern latitudes. It’s a close-up of the bed of a crater, and you can see the ripples of sand dunes, endemic on the Martian surface. The sand is similar to beach sand here on Earth, but is dark in color because it’s made of basalt, a greyish rock. Then why is Mars so red? It’s because of much finer-grain dust, which is reddish in hue. The dust lies on top of the sand, making everything look red.

But then there’s that thin Martian air. Rising heat from the plains can blow through cooler air above, forming vortices like mini-tornadoes called dust devils. These then roll across the surface, picking up the lighter red dust but leaving behind the heavier, darker sand grains. What remains, as seen from above, are these gorgeous swirls, the fingerprints of the geology and weather of Mars.

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(Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Movie poster from The Core, courtesy of Paramount Pictures

Even a bad movie can be enjoyable under the right circumstances. Sometimes, though, you wish you hadn’t bothered. Here are eight clunkers from the last decade:

• Erin Brockovich (2000): Julia Roberts won an Academy Award for her work in this true-life story of a woman who fought against polluters in Hinckley, California. But the film glosses over the difficulty of making a connection between strange diseases in a community and the cause, prompting people (including some of my friends) to find pollution- or chemical-caused cancer clusters any time two or more people they know are diagnosed with a form of the disease.
• The Time Machine (2002): This is the remake of a 1960 film based on the novel by H.G. Wells but the story has changed so much—with the addition of new characters and plot holes—that the story no longer works. That hasn’t stopped the rumors, though, of a Time Machine 2.
• The Core (2003): Scientists have to travel to the center of the Earth to set off nuclear explosions that will restart the rotation of the planet’s core. The moviemakers took some basic geology and then went nuts in this film, which the New York Times called “monumentally dumb.”
• Day After Tomorrow (2004): Climate change causes the North Atlantic current to stop, plunging the Earth into a new Ice Age overnight. Mayhem ensues. Yeah, right.
• I, Robot (2004): This is really a decent movie to watch, but the moviemakers deviated too much from Isaac Asimov’s original stories. (As with The Time Machine, the lesson is that you shouldn’t mess with the classics.)
• War of the Worlds (2005): Yet another remake gone bad. It’s got cliches, plot holes and Tom Cruise.
• 10,000 BC (2008): There are mammoths helping to build the pyramids in 10,000 B.C. Hmm. The first pyramid wasn’t built until about 2630 B.C. And that’s just one of the many things the moviemakers got wrong in this film.
• 2012 (2009): Tentatively tied to the date when the Mayan calendar ends, this is another apocalyptic movie. This time, neutrinos from a solar flare trigger the heating of the Earth’s core. Natural disasters abound. Few survive. I guess 2012 isn’t quite the end of the world, though, since there are plans to make a TV-series-sequel, 2013.

What science-y movie of the 2000s did you hate? Did you like any of the ones we didn’t? Tell us in comments below.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, courtesy of Focus Features

The last decade has been a pretty good one for science in the movies (though there are exceptions, as we’ll see tomorrow). Here are 10 movies we enjoyed:

• A Beautiful Mind (2001): This is the nearly-true story of John Nash, the mathematician who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in game theory but later struggled with paranoid schizophrenia. The film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): Jim Carrey erases Kate Winslet from his brain. It may seem like crazy science fiction, but scientists know how to do it in mice, and this week New York University researchers claimed that they have figured out how to rewrite fear memories.
• Primer (2004): This $7,000 film about time travel was praised for its attempt to portray scientific discovery—even if it’s outlandish and impossible—in a realistic and down-to-earth manner.
• March of the Penguins (2005): We can forgive the anthropomorphization of Antarctic emperor penguins in this French documentary because not only was the movie beautiful and charming, but it also got thousands of people, especially children, interested in nature. The film won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
• An Inconvenient Truth (2006): The documentary about Al Gore’s slideshow woke up the United States to the issue of climate change. (And before the skeptics start arguing with us: Gore got most of the science right.) The movie won an Academy Award, Gore got a Nobel Prize and it looks like the country might be on its way finally to tackling the problem.
• Flock of Dodos (2006): Marine biologist-turned-filmaker Randy Olson explores the evolution-intelligent design debate, smacking down the proponents of creationism and intelligent design and chiding scientists for losing the message war.
• Idiocracy (2006): Two modern-day people have their bodies put into stasis by the military—which forgets about the experiment—and wake up 500 years in the future to find the human race has devolved. It’s crass comedy but one of the best examples of human evolution to be portrayed in a movie.
• Encounters at the End of the World (2007): This was acclaimed filmmaker Werner Herzog’s answer to March of the Penguins. While there are penguins in the movie, there are also volcanologists and physicists, maintenance workers at science stations and stunning footage of the Antarctic underwater.
• WALL-E (2008): The sweet love story of the only robot left cleaning up the Earth after humans have fled takes on the themes of environmentalism, technology and even human evolution. The film won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
• Star Trek (2009): There’s this one lovely moment at the beginning of the movie where there is silence in space, a rarity in science fiction films. So the movie makers got much of the rest of the science wrong. Who cares? We really like the reinvented Star Trek universe, especially the new Spock.

What was your favorite science-y movie of the 2000s? Tell us in the comments below.