You Are Stardust: Teaching Kids About the Universe in Stunning Illustrated Dioramas

“Every tiny atom in your body came from a star that exploded long before you were born.”

“Everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was … lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” Carl Sagan famously marveled in his poetic Pale Blue Dot monologue, titled after the iconic 1990 photograph of Earth. The stardust metaphor for our interconnection with the cosmos soon permeated popular culture and became a vehicle for the allure of space exploration. There’s something at once incredibly empowering and incredibly humbling in knowing that the flame in your fireplace came from the sun.

That’s precisely the kind of cosmic awe environmental writer Elin Kelsey and Toronto-based Korean artist Soyeon Kim seek to inspire in kids in You Are Stardust (public library) — an exquisite picture-book that instills that profound sense of connection with the natural world. Underpinning the narrative is a bold sense of optimism — a refreshing antidote to the fear-appeal strategy plaguing most environmental messages today.

Kim’s breathtaking dioramas, to which this screen does absolutely no justice, mix tactile physical materials with fine drawing techniques and digital compositing to illuminate the relentlessly wondrous realities of our intertwined existence: The water in your sink once quenched the thirst of dinosaurs; with every sneeze, wind blasts out of your nose faster than a cheetah’s sprint; the electricity that powers every thought in your brain is stronger than lightning.

But rather than dry science trivia, the message is carried on the wings of poetic admiration for these intricate relationships:

Be still. Listen.

Like you, the Earth breathes.

Your breath is alive with the promise of flowers.

Each time you blow a kiss to the world, you spread pollen that might grow to be a new plant.

The book is nonetheless grounded in real science. Kelsey notes:

I wrote this book as a celebration — one to honor the extraordinary ways in which all of us simply are nature. Every example in this book is backed by current science. Every day, for instance, you breathe in more than a million pollen grains.

But what makes the project particularly exciting is that, in the face of the devastating gender gap in science education, here is a thoughtful, beautiful piece of early science education presented by two women, the most heartening such example since Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive.

A companion iPad app features sound effects, animation, an original score by Paul Aucoin, behind-the-scenes glimpses of Kim’s process in creating her stunning 3D dioramas, and even build-your-own-diorama adventures.

Pair You Are Stardust with particle physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss’s explanation to kids of why we are, indeed, all made of stardust.

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Isabella Rossellini’s Kooky Educational Films about Bees

What Shakespeare and Aristotle got wrong, how bee spit becomes honey, and why having sex all day makes one totally helpless.

As the granddaughter of a beekeeper, I’ve always found bees to be utterly amazing and their social organization remarkably intelligent, so it breaks my heart to see their future so woefully precarious in the grip of colony collapse disorder. Yet despite their marvels and recent newsworthiness, bees remain largely misunderstood. Luckily, the ceaseless talents of Isabella Rossellini are here to help: After her delightful Green Porno series — fascinating, funny, kooky, and illuminating short films, in which Rossellini, clad in various bodysuits, reenactments the sex lives of the animals most biologically different from us with comically incongruous scientific accuracy — Rossellini has joined forces with Burt’s Bees to produce three equally kooky educational short films about bees, mixing goofy live-action with lovely lo-fi animation.

In the first, “Burt,” played by Rossellini herself, talks to the worker bees and shows us, among other things, why Aristotle was wrong and how honey is actually made. (Bee spit + plant nectar = deliciousness.)

In the second film, “Burt” meets the queen bee, also played by Rossellini, and learns about her utilitarian nymphomania, why Shakespeare was wrong, and how male bees are born fatherless from unfertilized eggs:

In the last, “Burt” meets a male drone — representative of just 11% of a bee colony — who is only capable of having sex and is otherwise helpless:

For more of Rossellini’s endearingly quirky science education, treat yourself to her Green Porno.

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