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In this image from Science on Ice, graduate student Maria Tausendfreund collects a water sample from an Arctic melt pond during a brief period of 'ice liberty.' (photo by Chris Linder)

Find the perfect holiday gift for each person on your list can be difficult, especially if you don’t share the same interests or hobbies. What can you buy for someone who loves science? Here are some ideas from the Smithsonian staff; add your own in the comments below.

For the photography lover
Science on Ice: Four Polar Expeditions: Photojournalist Chris Linder has been documenting polar science expeditions for the past several years, and he’s collected his best photos in this new book. The beautiful photography is accented by essays from the science writers, including Smithsonian freelancers Helen Fields and Hugh Powell, who accompanied Linder on the trips (Helen’s trip may seem familiar to blog readers; she wrote to us from the ship Healy in the Bering Sea). What makes this book truly special is that Linder’s photos include not just adorable wildlife and stunning Arctic landscapes but also fascinating images of scientists at work and at play. “The scientists I know are as tough as they ships they sail on,” Linder writes in the book. “By photographing scientists working in the field, I hope to create a new stereotype…[and] by extension, I hope that readers, particularly students, will develop a stronger interest in science as a career.”

For the book lover who doesn’t need another book
The Origin of Species on a T-shirt: Out of Print Clothing sells t-shirts, tote bags, stationary and other items emblazoned with iconic book covers, such as Charles Darwin’s classic work. And for every item sold, the company donates one book through Books for Africa, so your holiday giving goes just a bit further.

For the animal lover
An “Ape-stract” Painting: Chimpanzees, Cheeta and his grandson Jeeter, use a paintbrush dipped in bright colors to create their abstract creations, which are available with a donation to the C.H.E.E.T.A. Primate Sanctuary in California.

For the stuffed animal lover
Biochemies DNA Molecule Plush Dolls: Chemical biology graduate student Jun Axup started making these cute little toys a couple years ago to promote science education. The cute little molecules, with smiley faces, come in a set of four: A, G, C and T.

For the neuroscientist or brain surgeon
Brain Freeze Ice Cube Tray: This silicone tray makes four brain-shaped ice cubes (or jello molds) at a time. Perfect for when you need a cooler head.

For the mathematician
I Heart Math T-shirt: Express your love of mathematics in a way only people who remember what imaginary numbers are will understand.

For the budding inventor
Reinventing Edison Build Your Own Lightbulb Kit: If someone wants to build a better lightbulb, she can start by learning how to build the kind Edison invented. Perhaps tinkering with the original model will lead to insights about where to go next on the inventing path.

For the budding biologist
Bacterial Growth Science Kit: This kit contains enough petri dishes, agar, pipettes and test tubes to run your own mini science lab. What kind of bacteria could you grow? It’s all around you, from your skin to your computer to your kitchen sink. Just be prepared to be grossed out when you discover just how many microorganisms are there to be found.

For the budding chemist/environmental scientist
Environmental Student Lab Test Kit: With this kit, your little scientist can perform five different tests on water and four on air, examining things like dissolved oxygen levels in the creek down the street or particulate levels outside your home. And unlike a standard chemistry set–always a fun buy for a little chemist–you may get some useful information from this gift.

And for yourself, to wear around your anti-evolution relatives
“My ancestors spent 3.8 billion years evolving out of the primordial ooze and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” T-Shirt: This tee, from the National Center for Science Education (it’s the last item on the store page), will let you promote the teaching of evolution while heeding your mother’s advice to keep your mouth shut on the topic during that holiday visit to Uncle Fred’s house. (And if you want to be sneaky with the gift giving on that trip, you could get your niece or nephew an Evolvem stuffed animal, which evolves from one creature to the next.)

To welcome the newest member of Smithsonian.com’s blog family, Just One More Story: What’s new and novel in children’s books, I’ve rounded up some of my favorite kids’ science books that have been published in the past year:

Pond Walk, by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace

Pond Walk by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace (ages 4 to 7)
This must be how biologists go to the park with their kids–pointing out all the interesting plants and animals, teaching about how these organisms interact, encouraging their children to document it all in drawings and telling silly jokes along the way.

11 Experiments That Failed by Jenny Offill and Nancy Carpenter (ages 4 to 8 )
Each bizarre experiment starts with a question–Can a kid survive the winter on ketchup-covered snowballs?–and presents a hypothesis, list of materials, set of methods and an outcome; they’re mini scientific papers and great for teaching the basics of the scientific method in a hilarious way.

In the Bag! Margaret Knight Wraps It Up by Monica Kulling, illustrated by David Parkins (ages 5 to 8 )
This is the wonderful story of of an early female inventor. Margaret Knight began inventing at the age of 12, when she was working in a cotton mill and created a device that made looms safer. But her most famous invention is one we’re all familiar with–she created a machine that made flat-bottomed paper bags.

Coral Reefs by Jason Chin (ages 5 to 9)
What makes this book special is the premise of the illustrations–a little girl goes to the New York Public Library and opens a book on coral reefs only to have the library, and then the entire city, turn into a vibrant reef for her to explore.

How the Dinosaur Got to the Museum by Jessie Hartland (ages 6 to 9)
By following a Diplodocus from its discovery to its eventual display in the Smithsonian Institution, Hartland has created a lovely tribute to all of the people who help to make a museum’s dinosaur exhibit possible.

Nature’s Adventures by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom (ages 6 to 9)
Anyone can have an adventure in nature, no matter where they live. Manning and Granstrom giving budding naturalists a head start with some simple advice on what to bring and what to look for, whether you’re at the beach, in a forest or at home in the city.

North: The Amazing Story of Arctic Migration by Nick Dowson, illustrated by Patrick Benson (ages 7 to 10)
Dowson follows birds, whales, caribou and other animals as they migrate from as far away as New Zealand to the Arctic in the spring, and sees them through fall, when the weather turns for the worse.

The Secret World of Whales by Charles Siebert, illustrated by Molly Baker (ages 8 to 12)
A comprehensive look at the whale world, including whales in literature, the history of whaling and highlights of current whale science. For example, one page mentions the work of Hal Whitehead, who was featured in the recent Smithsonian story about sperm whales.

Far from Shore: Chronicles of an Open Ocean Voyage by Sophie Webb (ages 9 to 12)
Webb, a naturalist and artist, documents a four-month research voyage in the Pacific on the NOAA ship McArthur II with fascinating diary entries (marked by latitude and longitude so readers can map out her journey for themselves) and beautiful illustrations of the creatures she saw along the way.

There are 200 million European starlings in North America (courtesy of flickr user goingslo)

If you live in North America, you probably recognize European starlings, those little black birds with white polka dots that chirp and chatter and, in the winter, hang out in flocks of thousands. There are 200 million of these birds on the continent, and they can be found as far north as Alaska and as far south as Mexico. Numerous though they are, starlings are actually non-native invasive species. And we can blame Shakespeare for their arrival in America.

Steven Marche explains in How Shakespeare Changed Everything:

On March 6, 1890, a New York pharmaceutical manufacturer name Eugene Schieffelin brought natural disaster into the heart of [New York City] completely without meaning to. Through the morning snow, which congealed at times to sleet, sixty starlings, imported at great expense from Europe, accompanied Schieffelin on the ride from his country house into Central Park—the noisy, dirty fulfillment of his plan to introduce every bird mentioned by Shakespeare into North America. Schieffelin loved Shakespeare and he loved birds….The American Acclimatization Society, to which he belonged, had released other avian species found in Shakespeare—the nightingales and skylarks more commonly mentioned in his plays and poems—but none had survived. There was no reason to believe that starlings would fare any better. Schieffelin opened the cages and released the birds into the new world, without the smallest notion of what he was unleashing.

For someone who apparently loved birds, you have to admit this was a pretty daft plan. There was every reason to believe that the birds would die—it was bitterly cold and sleeting, and attempts with other species had led to dead birds. But the tiny flock found shelter beneath the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, just to the west of the park, and they survived the winter. And then they began to breed, and spread, and breed some more.

It seems that the starlings some special characteristics that gave them an advantage over other bird species, Marche writes:

The protractor muscles of their beaks allow them to pry and to probe better than other birds. They can open their bills after pushing them into the soil, which allows them to forage for invertebrates easily and in drier areas. The starling’s eye have evolved to the narrow front of its face, giving it the perfect view for prying. Its binocular vision combined with its open-bill probing ability means that starlings can find insects in colder climates better than other birds, which means that starlings do not have to migrate to warmer climates in winter, which means that they can take the best nesting holes during the breeding season.

Starlings will bully other birds, kicking bluebirds, flickers and woodpeckers out of their nests. They can consume whole fields of wheat and transmit avian, animal and human diseases. A fungus called Histoplasma capsulatum can grow in the soil beneath roosting starlings; the fungal spores can become airborne if the soil is disturbed and cause the disease histoplasmosis, which, in rare cases, can cause blindness or death.

People quickly realized what a pest these birds could be and tried to get rid of them. In Hartford, Connecticut, in 1914, residents tried to scare the birds away from their nests by fastening teddy bears to those trees and firing rockets through the branches. The White House tried speakers that emitted owl calls. Columns around the U.S. Capitol were outfitted with electrified wires. People have tried shooting, poisoning, trapping, repelling and frightening the birds, but the population still grows. They have plenty to eat and lots of habitat to live on—what else does a species need?

These birds are a prime example of why it can be so difficult to control an invasive species once it has become established—no matter how many you wipe out, there’s still plenty to take their place.

Flood debris on the Ohio River is halted by a dam (Photo by Michael Mooney; courtesy of flickr user LouisvilleUSACE)

When the post-hurricane floods drain away, there will be tons of debris left behind. More may be washed away and never seen again. Whole buildings may flow down rivers into the oceans. But what happens then?

Some insight into this phenomenon can be found in Flotsametrics and the Floating World, the 2009 book by oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer and science writer Eric Scigliano:

Today the evening news reports excited on all the houses, cars, and other flotsam washed away in floods. Rarely, however, do we learn what happens afterward to this diluvial debris. Some of the trees washed away in the great 1861-62 flood stranded on nearby shores. Coastal eddies, observable from earth-orbiting satellites, spun others a hundred miles offshore, where the California Current swept them on westward to the Hawaiian Islands. In September 1862, Charles Wolcott Brooks, secretary of the California Academy of Sciences, reported “an enormous Oregon tree about 150 feet in length and fully six feet in diameter about the butt” drifting past Maui. “The roots, which rose ten feet out of water, would span about 25 feet. Two branches rose perpendicularly 20 to 25 feet. Several tons of clayish earth were embedded among the roots”—carrying who knows what biological invaders to vulnerable island habitats.

Any logs that got past Hawaii without being snatched or washed up would, over the next five to ten years, complete a full orbit around the Turtle and/or Aleut gyres.

It might also be possible for flood debris to form a floating island. Not just a fantasy in fiction, floating islands are a fairly common lake phenomena:

The influential early-twentieth-century paleontologist William Diller Matthew estimated that a thousand islands drifted out to sea during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and 200 million during the Cenozoic era. Such islands, formed when soil collects on dense mats of fallen trees and other debris, were known on the lakes of Europe, the marshes of Mesopotamia, and the log-jammed rivers of the Pacific Northwest….Today engineers and harbor authorities clear out such accumulations [from rivers and inlets] before they block passage and menace shipping. But untended, they would pile up until enormous floods washed them out to sea, there to drift, taunting mariners and bedeviling mapmakers, until they broke apart on the waves or crashed onto new shores.

The most famous floating island on the ocean was spotted in the spring of 1892 off the east coast of Florida:

It was a season of extreme weather: hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods violent enough to uproot whole sections of forest. One such section became the only wooded island ever observed transversing an ocean. Thirty-foot trees enable mariners to see it from seven miles away. The U.S. Hydrographic Office feared it would menace transatlantic steamers, and inscribed it on the monthly pilot charts that marked such threats as icebergs, underwater mines, burning vessels, and floating logs. Many captains stared in disbelief when they received their November 1892 chart for the North Atlantic; it showed an island floating in the stream. But this was no cloud or mirage; it had been sighted six times along a 2,248-nautical-mile course.

(Read more about ocean currents and how they brought lost Japanese sailors to America in this except from Flotsametrics.)

Great White Egret, by Antonio Soto, photographed March 2009, South Florida

When I first saw this striking photo, the winner of the Reader’s Choice award in Smithsonian magazine’s 8th Annual Photo Contest, I was certain that the bird’s plumage had to have been faked; after all, the photo was in the Altered Images category. But all that the photographer, Antonio Soto, had done to his image was darken the background. Those feathers were real.

I’m not the only one who has been dazzled by the egret’s feathers, though. At the turn of the 20th century, these feathers were a huge hit in the fashion world, to the detriment of the species, as Thor Hanson explains in his new book Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle:

One particular group of birds suffered near extermination at the hands of feather hunters, and their plight helped awaken a conservation ethic that still resonates in the modern environmental movement. With striking white plumes and crowded, conspicuous nesting colonies, Great Egrets and Snowy Egrets faced an unfortunate double jeopardy: their feathers fetched a high price, and their breeding habits made them an easy mark. To make matters worse, both sexes bore the fancy plumage, so hunters didn’t just target the males; they decimated entire rookeries. At the peak of the trade, an ounce of egret plume fetched the modern equivalent of two thousand dollars, and successful hunters could net a cool hundred grand in a single season. But every ounce of breeding plumes represented six dead adults, and each slain pair left behind three to five starving nestlings. Millions of birds died, and by the turn of the century this once common species survived only in the deep Everglades and other remote wetlands.

This slaughter inspired Audubon members to campaign for environmental protections and bird preservation, at the state, national and international levels.

The Lacey Act passed Congress in 1900, restricting interstate transport of wild fowl and game. In 1911 New York State outlawed the sale of all native birds and their feathers, and other states soon followed suit. Passage of the Weeks-McLean Act (1913) and the Migratory Bird Act (1918) took the protections nationwide and mirrored legislation in Canada, Britain, and Europe, effectively ending the fancy-feather era.

The egret population has recovered in the last century and is now thriving in North America, even in some wetlands near urban and suburban areas.

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