Stay-at-home science project: Craft handmade blubber
Fatty (but warm) hands. (Purbita Saha/)Welcome to PopSci’s at-home science projects series. On weekdays at noon, we’ll be posting new projects that use ingredients you can buy at the grocery store. Show us how it went by tagging your project on social media using #popsciprojects.When a gray whale swims from Alaska to Mexico in December to start a family, it doesn’t stop for a single meal or snack. Instead, it survives off the foot-thick layer of fat it gains after eating oily krill all summer long. The cache lasts for months, giving the 90,000-pound creature the energy it needs to make the long trek and keep a stable body temperature the entire way.Lots of animals have fat reserves deep in their bodies, but marine mammals (with the exception of sea otters and polar bears) keep theirs right under the skin to insulate them against ice-cold waters. The tissue, known as...