Includes answers to perplexing chemistry questions, and includes 12 experiments to try at home.

When it comes to chemistry, most kids have more questions than answers. Why do you get cavities when you eat too much sugar? How does sun block protect your skin from getting a sunburn? What makes soda so fizzy? And why do you need antifreeze in your car? Teenager Alexa Coelho quizzed her neighbor, chemist Simon Field, with hundreds of perplexing questions, and now she has the answers. Field covers a wide variety of concepts from simple to complex, but always with straightforward, easy-to-understand explanations. And for those readers who want to see chemistry in action, Why Is Milk White? also includes a dozen unique experiments to try at home. Lift latent fingerprints from a &“crime scene&” using super glue (for a glass or smooth surface) or iodine (for paper). Hollow out the zinc interior of a penny using muriatic acid, leaving only a thin copper shell. Conduct a paper chromatography experiment to separate food coloring into its component dyes. Or use easy-to-find chemicals to create plastic &“slime,&” Silly Putty, or a bouncing ball. This book is the perfect resource for budding scientists everywhere.

North Americans are some of the least healthy people on Earth. Despite advanced medical care and one of the highest standards of living in the world, one in three Americans will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime and 50% of US children are overweight. This crisis in personal health is largely the result of chronically poor dietary and lifestyle choices. In Whitewash, Joseph Keon unveils how North Americans unwittingly sabotage their health every day by drinking milk, and shows that our obsession with calcium is unwarranted. Citing scientific literature, Whitewash builds an unassailable case that not only is milk unnecessary for human health; its inclusion in the diet may increase the risk of serious diseases including: prostate, breast, and ovarian cancers osteoporosis diabetes vascular disease Crohn's disease. Many of America’s dairy herds contain sick and immunocompromised animals whose tainted milk regularly makes it to market. Cow's milk is also a sink for environmental contaminants, and has been found to contain traces of pesticides, dioxins, PCBs, rocket fuel, and even radioactive isotopes. Whitewash offers a completely fresh, candid and comprehensively documented look behind dairy's deceptively green pastures, and gives readers a hopeful picture of life after milk.

A moving and heartfelt story about the lengths one would go to help their family When Oyuna was a baby, a horse accidentally crushed her foot, cursing her family with bad luck. Oyuna vows to restore good fortune to her family...but how? One fateful day, soldiers from the great Khan's army invade her village to steal horses and gather new soldiers. In hopes of bringing honor to her family, Oyuna courageously disguises herself as a boy and joins the soldiers on their quest. With only her horse and her cat to keep her company, Oyuna sets off on an amazing journey across deserts and mountains—a journey that will change her life forever. "No ordinary horse story...Horse lovers or not, readers will be riveted."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Ambitious and fast-moving."—New York Times

The Maria girls from Bastar practise sex as an institution before marriage, but with rules-one may not sleep with a partner more than three times; the Hallaki women from the Konkan coast sing throughout the day-in forests, fields, the market and at protests; the Kanjars have plundered, looted and killed generation after generation, and will show you how to roast a lizard when hungry. The original inhabitants of India, these Adivasis still live in forests and hills, with religious beliefs, traditions and rituals so far removed from the rest of the country that they represent an anthropological wealth of our heritage. This book weaves together prose, oral narratives and Adivasi history to tell the stories of six remarkable tribes of India-reckoning with radical changes over the last century-as they were pulled apart and thrown together in ways none of them fathomed.

Women have shared breast milk for eons, but in White Gold, Susan Falls shows how the meanings of capitalism, technology, motherhood, and risk can be understood against the backdrop of an emerging practice in which donors and recipients of breast milk are connected through social media in the southern United States. Drawing on her own experience as a participant, Falls describes the sharing community. She also presents narratives from donors, doulas, medical professionals, and recipients to provide a holistic ethnographic account. Situating her subject within cross-cultural comparisons of historically shifting attitudes about breast milk, Falls shows how sharing “white gold”—seen as a scarce, valuable, even mysterious substance—is a mode of enacting parenthood, gender, and political values. Though breast milk is increasingly being commodified, Falls argues that sharing is a powerful and empowering practice. Far from uniform, participants may be like-minded about parenting but not other issues, so their acquaintanceships add new textures to the body politic. In this interdisciplinary account, White Gold shows how sharing simultaneously reproduces the capitalist values that it disrupts while encouraging community-making between strangers.

Describes what life is like for a dairy cow on a Wisconsin farm, telling how they are milked, what they eat, and what they produce besides milk.