Space.... and Aliens!

Have you ever wondered if we are alone in this Universe? Have you ever looked up at the stars and wondered this? This book I read called Life: an Astrobiologist's Quest, by Pamela S. Turner, answered many questions I had about this topic. She wrote this book to explain the work of Chris McKay, an Astrobiologist. His research focused on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but first, he tested to see if life could live or be found in the most extreme places on Earth.

Chris McKay at NASA

http://spacescience.arc.nasa.gov/staff/chris-mckay

His work was to discover if life, if any, could exist outside of Earth. In his work, he visited many different places with very different environments, in which temperatures could plummet or rise hastily(much too much for me, I'll stick to my nice, comfortable house, thank you very much).

The Arctic Dry Valleys

I think my favorite part of this book was his back story, and his reasons to become an Astrobiologist. It really was insightful into his motivation of pursuing Astrobiology. I would not be as interested in this line of work as others, but this book is still very interesting and informative! Overall, this is truly a great book that is worth the read!

Website of the book:

http://www.pamelasturner.com/life_on_earth___and_beyond__an_astrobiologist_s_quest_67466.htm

A bird that flew to the Moon?

The book Moonbird by Philip Hoose is about a rufa red knot bird called B95, who is the longest living wild shorebird and has migrated the distance of the Moon and back, earning the nickname "Moonbird". This book lists many scientific facts about the rufa red knot species, their long migratory routes from the top of the world to the bottom and things you can do to help endangered species like the red knot. The book also had an entire chapter dedicated to the horseshoe crab, a species that is dying out from humans, and causing the red knots, who eat the crab eggs, to be in danger. The book also had conservationist and scientist's profiles, so you could learn a bit about the people that are trying to help protect endangered shorebirds.

This is a picture of B95, from nature.org

I thought this book was fine. Usually I enjoy scientific books, but this one after only ten pages I was incredibly bored. It felt like a chore, and books should not feel like a chore. I did think the scientific facts about how the shorebirds find food and gather tons of fuel for their incredibly long journey from the arctic to the very southern tip of South America was interesting and all. I think that if the author sort of made a story out of this book, it would've been a lot better. I think it would've been easy to make a story out of the migration of the red knots, but the book instead seemed sort of jumbled up with random facts about B95 and his species appearing randomly in the middle of the book where that didn't seem to be related with what the author was currently talking about. Also, the facts about how far the birds travel or how they eat horseshoe crab eggs came up too much. The book was way to repetitive.

Out of a possible 10, I gave Moonbird a 7.

In general, if you want to learn about incredible birds and their long journeys, read Moonbird.

A large flock of Rufa Red Knots feeding, from abcbirds.org.