Sandra Porter
sporte
Posts by this author
October 9, 2006
How can you extend a blood typing activity with an active learning approach?
The blood typing lab, part I. What went wrong? and why?
Blood typing part II. Can this laboratory be saved?
The learning objective: To understand the inheritance of blood type.
In this activity students:
1. Identify…
October 9, 2006
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there's a land that's fair and bright,
The handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarete trees,
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big…
October 7, 2006
The blood typing lab, part I. What went wrong? and why?
Blood typing part II. Can this laboratory be saved?
Those wacky non-major Zoo students are at it again! And this time they drew blood!
Mike's undergraduate students learned about blood typing, a common tool of detectives and real crime TV…
October 6, 2006
Many science experiments are carefully thought out. Often, the procedures we follow have been thoroughly tested. We measure everything we can at every point that we can, so that we can determine if a procedure, like isolating DNA, is working properly and if the procedure doesn't work, we can…
October 5, 2006
Many of you might take this for granted, and I know it seems amazing today, but I when first started teaching, our access to scientific literature was pretty limited. I could go to the UW and use Grateful Med to search Medline, but we didn't have anything like it at my college and web browsers,…
October 5, 2006
Zuska never fails to make people think. And she made me wonder this and made me think that perhaps we could pass some names along to future Noble committees - you know, just in case they're having trouble coming up with names of female scientists. Maybe we can be some help.
I have a few…
October 5, 2006
PZ tells us that the people in Kensington have strong opinions about who discovered North America, and you can learn about them at the Kensington Runestone Museum.
But I can top that. I saw an authentic Viking ship replica in Duluth, MN. And if you're ever in Duluth - better remember this (…
October 4, 2006
This may seem strange to anyone who hasn't lived in Minnesota, but when I was a child, kids in my elementary school used to have fist fights when it came to the question of which famous European discovered America.
To most children in the U.S., this is probably a very silly question indeed. Not so…
October 4, 2006
Awhile back Chemical & Engineering News published a fascinating article called "The Secret Life of Plant Crystals" with some wonderful photos of calcium oxalate crystals. Special cells (called "idioblasts") produce these crystals, with shapes that are unique to each type of plant.
Even though…
October 3, 2006
Some of my fellow ScienceBloggers have been hotly debating the role of male science faculty in perpetuating a climate that's chilly and hostile to women. From one end of the ring, we've heard the classic complaint "It's not my fault, I didn't do it." From the other end, we hear: "It is your fault…
October 1, 2006
Welcome to the fourth edition of Bio::Blogs!
This is the carnival where we explore topics at the intersection of computing, biology, and sometimes a bit human behavior.
In this edition, we consider issues with annotation, agonize over standards, explore the question of whether or not it's…
September 28, 2006
On Tuesday night, we learned about a new animal. It's shy, elusive, endangered, and a bad choice for a sixth grader's animal report.
It's the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.
They have an FAQ page and photos, so it must be true.
September 27, 2006
Over the summer, a few ScienceBloggers were pondering the question of why students disappear from science courses, never to return.
James Hrynshyn wrote that we're teaching youngsters the wrong thing. Zuska boldy pointed out the things that many of us think but don't say out loud. Chad Orzel…
September 27, 2006
We went on an excursion last weekend to see the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Pacific Science Center. None of us could resist going downtown to look at written texts over 2000 years old. Uncovered in 1946, by a Bedouin shepherd, the scrolls have had an interesting history over the past 50 years, most…
September 26, 2006
Razib inspired me to share some of the story behind why white people are considered derivatives.
Reposted from the Classic Digital Bio.
No red herrings, here! Lamason et. al. found a single gene that controls human skin color while studying pigmentation in zebra fish (1).
These zebra fish had an…
September 25, 2006
Like computers? Like biology? Want to find a way to combine the two worlds?
Bio::Blogs, a carnival at the intersection of biology, computing, and math, will be hosted here October 1st.
For those of you who are wondering what this all means, it means that on Sunday, I will post a collection of…
September 22, 2006
As they say, there's nothing like travel to learn new and unexpected things.
Especially from cab drivers.
One of my ScienceBlog Sibs, Shelly, spends time talking with cabbies about earwax, but I seem to invite other kinds of lectures.
Often times, my driver are Sikhs. So perhaps you can…
September 22, 2006
and what is the volume of the sea?
This sounds a bit like the beginning of a poem but it's really the answer to the question we posed last week on a Digital Biology Friday.
We can see, in the sequence window, that two strands are both labeled 5' on the left side and 3' on the right. We call this…
September 19, 2006
Modified from the original post.
Playing around with molecular structures is one of the more entertaining activities that you can do with digital biology. I've become totally entranced with molecular structures, both because they're a fascinating art form and because every structure has its own…
September 15, 2006
Today, we're going to look for rainbows in double-stranded DNA and see what they can tell us about DNA structure.
First, we're going to get a structure for a double-stranded molecule of DNA and open it in Cn3D.
1K9L
If you want to do this at home and you haven't already downloaded a copy of…
September 13, 2006
Reposted and slightly modified from Classic DigitalBio.
Some people say that science takes the magic out of everyday life.
Not me!
I've learned some things by reading Science (1) that might give some people nightmares, especially young children. Remember that scene in "The Wizard of Oz" when the…
September 12, 2006
The Ask a Science Blogger question of the week asks if organic foods are really worth the hype. I'm afraid my answer can't fit into one blog post.
Let me start by telling you about my garden.
This year my garden has been a home to local wildlife, but during the years that I do garden, I have a…
September 11, 2006
A long time ago, I saw a Star Trek episode where the crew encountered aliens who lived at a different frequency. I may have this backwards, but I think the aliens moved so quickly that no one knew they were there. And until problems struck, our heroes were happily oblivious to the existence of the…
September 9, 2006
"And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard, And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall. "
- BoB Dylan
Tired of Simpson reruns and the exploits of Friends?
[From the WSTA]
NOVA is broadcasting an entire series of shows on hurricanes, Katrina, and what the experts predicted…
September 8, 2006
Why do I love Cn3D? Let me count the ways.
What does Cn3D do? (Hint: say "Cn3D" out loud).
Seriously, Cn3D is a program that draws lovely pictures of molecular structures by using experimental data from techniques like X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.…
September 7, 2006
No biology course is complete these days without learning how to do a BLAST search.
Herein, I describe an assignment and an animated tutorial that teachers can readily adopt and use, and give teachers a hint for obtaining the password-protected answer key.
Development of the tutorial and the…
September 6, 2006
How can you win a nerd contest if you don't dress the part?
Last year, I started a shop at CafePress to help distribute lab materials and fund my adventures in science education. Part of the fun has been making molecular merchandise to help show everyone that molecular models are beautiful, in…
September 6, 2006
Do you ever imagine the presidential advisors doing the Basil Fawlty silly walk, looking crazed and confused, and quoting John Cleese whenever there's been a bad day in the Middle East?
I do. And this mental picture makes me think the title of Chris Mooney's book (The Republican War on Science)…
September 5, 2006
Ole and Lena's hot dish on a stick probably is explosive if you like to ride on a tilt-a-whirl afterwards. But what do you do if you're far from St. Paul?
Never fear.
There is more to life than hot dish.
I've always known that there were fun chemistry experiments that could be done with peeps…
September 4, 2006
or, better yet, enjoy the fine selection of summer carnivals.
In no particular order, we have:
Bio::Blogs#3
Hosted this month by mndoci (aka Depak Singh) at business|bytes|genes|molecules, Bio::Blogs is a carnival of articles at the intersection of biology and computation. If you are interested…