Ask Science and Arts Magazine for Kids and Children November/December 2016

Thirsty? Not This Plant A moss called Syntrichia caninervis lives in deserts around the world. The plant can grow where there’s hardly any rain. Some desert plants survive using spread-out root systems that suck extra water from the soil. But this desert moss has a different trick: it waters itself. The moss has a tiny hair, called an awn, sticking off the end of each leaf. Each awn has microscopic grooves on it. Overnight, dew forms in these grooves. Then the dewdrops run down the hairs and toward the plant. Droplets of fog can catch on the hairs too. That means even without rain, this plant can always find something to drink. LOST CITY FAKE-OUT In 2014, some tourists diving near a Greek island made an exciting discovery. It looked…

Look, our bees have been busy. Sweet honey, and wax for candles too! Maybe this will go all the way to Rome, to make delicacies for the rich folks—honey ham, dates in honey, baklava... Gift of the Bees In ancient times, the sweetest tastes people knew were fruit and-sometimes, if they were lucky-a little honey. Honeybees make honey from the sweet, sugary nectar of flowers. As the bees fly from flower to flower, they sip a little nectar from each. They suck it in and out to make it thicker. Then they fly back to the hive and spit the nectar into a little wax cell of the honeycomb. Many more bees add their nectar. Other bees beat their wings to fan air over the comb. As the…

Before Europeans came, North America had no honeybees. But some native American peoples figured out how to get sugar from trees instead. In the early spring they cut gashes into the bark of a sugar maple tree. Then they caught the sap in a bucket, left it out to freeze, and broke off the watery ice. At the bottom was a sweet brown liquid—maple syrup. They may have learned this trick by tasting the sweet icicles of frozen sap that formed on broken branches.…

In the 1700s, English people wanted lots of sugar to sweeten tea and cocoa and cakes. But some people felt that cheap sugar did not justify slavery. In 1792, they started a campaign to get shoppers to stop buying slave-made sugar and switch to sugar grown by free farmers in India. They wrote about the horrors of plantations and advertised their cause with sugar bowls like this one. Their work helped convince the British government to outlaw the slave trade in 1807 and abolish slavery throughout its empire in 1837.…

From chocolate cookies to crisp, juicy apples, we humans are sweet on sugar. And that’s only natural. All plants and animals need sugar to live. It’s the fuel that powers our cells. So it’s not surprising we’re hard-wired to crave the sweet stuff. Building Sweet “Sugar” is the name for many different sweet-tasting molecules. They’re all made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. There are three basic sugar building blocks, or “simple sugars.” These are called fructose, glucose, and galactose. All of the simple sugars can be found in plants. Fructose is what makes fruits taste sweet, for example. Combining these simple sugars makes other kinds of sugar. The most common is sucrose, also called table sugar. The sugar your family keeps in the kitchen for baking, or in the…

“Added sugar” is any kind of sugar that doesn’t start out in your food. By 2018, food makers will have to tell you how much sugar they add to your snack. Even if you read the list of ingredients, it can be hard to spot! Look for anything with “sugar” in the name (date sugar, brown sugar, palm sugar). But some are sneaky. See if you can find any of these in your kitchen or lunch box—they’re all different names for sugar. Agave Barley malt Cane juice Caramel Carob syrup Corn syrup Dextrose Fructose Fruit juice Fruit nectar Glucose Golden syrup Grape juice concentrate High-fructose corn syrup Honey Lactose Maltodextrin Maltose Maple syrup Molasses Muscovado Nectar Refiner’s syrup Rice syrup Saccharose Sorghum syrup Sucrose Syrup Treacle…