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Today's book trio covers a wide range of ideas regarding the human body.

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By Jonathan Crowe Each day of our lives is a battle for survival against an army of invaders so vast in size that it outnumbers the human population hugely. Yet, despite its vastness, this army is an invisible threat, each individual so small that it cannot be seen with the naked eye. These are the microbes – among them the bacteria and viruses – that surround us every day, and could in one way or another kill us were it not for our immune system, an ingenious defence mechanism that protects us from these invisible foes.

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A fun book for several reasons, the First Big Book of Why asks many of the great questions that occur to children, but grownups never ponder.  "Why can I see myself in a mirror?" "Why do the stairs seem to disappear on an escalator?" "Why does the moon change shape?" 

In addition, it's a great title to booktalk or share on school visits.  Just read a few pages and kids will want to know more.

And, it's a great browsing book.  Just leave it out and someone will find something interesting inside.

The questions are highlighted by large font in colored text boxes and the pages are brightly colored with photos of kids and the things which keep them wondering. The answers are short and sweet with bold font for the most important points,

Why does Grandma have wrinkles?
Skin grows and stretches as you grow from baby size to adult.  When you've been an adult for a while, skin stops growing and stretching.  It gets a little tired and a little less elastic.
The lines you make when you smile today are where your wrinkles will be when you are old.  A lifetime of laughter helps your skin wrinkle very nicely.

Nicely put!

Although this is a great browsing book, it is divided into four themed chapters, Amazing Me, How Things Work, Animals All Around and Wonders of the World.  In addition to the questions and answers, there are scattered text boxes and insets with interesting facts and experiments.  Little Kids' First Big Book of Why has a Table of Contents, a Glossary (albeit a very small one), Parent Tips, and Additional Resources.

Want to know why doughnuts have holes and why your toes get wrinkly in the tub?  You'll have to read it to find out! Nonfiction fun for lower elementary school grades.

Yes, it's Nonfiction Monday again and today's roundup is at proseandkahn.

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This is the second post in our latest regular OUPblog column: SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Today: What are genes and genomes?

By Jonathan Crowe

I described in my last blog post how DNA acts as a store of biological information – information that serves as a set of instructions that direct our growth and function. Indeed, we could consider DNA to be the biological equivalent of a library – another repository of information with which we’re all probably much more familiar. The information we find in a library isn’t present in one huge tome, however. Rather, it is divided into discrete packages of information – namely books. And so it is with DNA: the biological information it stores isn’t captured in a single, huge molecule, but is divided into separate entities called chromosomes – the biological equivalent of individual books in a library.

I commented previously that DNA is composed of a long chain of four building blocks, A, C, G, and T. Rather than existing as an extended chain (like a stretched out length of rope), the DNA in a chromosome is tightly packaged. In fact, if stretched out (like our piece of rope), the DNA in a single chromosome would be around 2-8 cm long. Yet a typical chromosome is just 0.00002–0.002 cm long: that’s between 1000 and 100,000 times shorter than the unpackaged DNA would be. This packaging is quite the feat of space-saving efficiency.

Let’s return to our imaginary library of books. The information in a book isn’t presented as one long uninterrupted sequence of words. Rather, the information is divided into chapters. When we want to find out something from a book – to extract some specific information from it – we don’t read the whole thing cover-to-cover. Instead, we may just read a single chapter. In a fortuitous extension of our analogy, the same is true of information retrieval from chromosomes. The information captured in a single chromosome is stored in discrete ‘chunks’ (just as a book is divided into chapters), and these chunks can be read separately from one another. These ‘chunks’ – these discrete units of information – are what we call ‘genes’. In essence, one gene contains one snippet of biological information.

I’ve just likened chromosomes to books in a library. But is there a biological equivalent of the library itself? Well, yes, there is. Virtually every cell in the human body (with specific exceptions) contains 46 chromosomes – 23 from each of its parents. All of the genes found in this ‘library’ of chromosomes are collectively termed the ‘genome’. Put another way, a genome is a collection of all the genes found in a particular organism.

Different organisms have different-sized genomes. For example, the human genome comprises around 20,000-25,000 genes; the mouse genome, with 40 chromosomes, comprises a similar number of individual genes. However, the bacterium H. influenzae has just a single chromosome, containing around 1700 genes.

It is not just the number of genes (and chromosomes) in the genome that varies between organisms: the long stretches of DNA making up the genomes of different organisms have different sequences (and so store different information). These differences make sense, particularly if we imagine the genome of an organism to represent the ‘recipe’ for that organism: a human is quite a different organism from a mouse, so we would expect the instructions that direct the growth and function of the two organisms to differ.

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I've just finished an unusual (for me) book for British publisher Frances Lincoln Ltd, a non-fiction lift-the-flap for young children on the human body. Outside-in was written by Clare Smallman and first released in the mid 1980's with illustrations by Edwina Riddell, but for this new edition I was asked to completely overhaul the book to appeal to a modern readership.

The text and layout were pretty fixed, but it was an interesting project to approach. Many spreads consist of pictures of children, with a flap to reveal the working body underneath, thus...






























































However there are also some vignette scenes like this.....














In the illustrations I tried to achieve a balance between accurate depiction of children with just enough character and distortion to make a fun book. Outside-in will be co-released in the USA by Barrons, I'm not sure of the exact release date yet.

This was an interesting project quite different from my usual output. In Japan I established my career illustrating fairy tales and dreamy aspirational images, the UK seems a lot more gritty. After researching wasps and fleas for the "Nasty" book, I'm wondering what other in-the-face projects might be next!

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