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Over the years, I've seen many biotechnology education programs at community colleges embrace outreach to high schools as part of their mission. This kind of enthusiasm for outreach seems unique to biotech. No other kind of science or engineering program seems to do this sort of thing, at least…

Okay, watching some of the other movies makes me realize that I've been very negligent in not uploading ours. Without further ado, here it is. Can you guess the age of the person who made the movie? I'll give you a hint. It wasn't me.

Long Branch, NJ, is a lovely town on the Atlantic Ocean, with long beaches and brand new shops and condos. It is also part of an area in, central New Jersey, where biotechnology education is entering an exciting time thanks to efforts of NJBEC, Bio-1, and a WIRED grant from the U.S. Department of…

ScienceBlogs and science bloggers, in general, have enthusiastically supported fund-raising efforts by DonorsChoose for the past two years, and we're doing it once again for 2008. DonorsChoose works like this: teachers write descriptions of what they want and how they'll use it for teaching, and…

I learned via e-mail yesterday that the biotechnology program, that I taught with for ten years during the 90's, is ending due to low enrollments. I also learned yesterday, via the Seattle Times, that a resurrected version of ICOS called CMC Icos Biologics is planning a $35M expansion of their…

HealthMap is a great site that could be an excellent resource when teaching a biology, microbiology, or health class. Not to mention, I can picture people using it before they travel somewhere or even just for fun. I learned about HealthMap awhile ago from Mike the Mad Biologist, but I didn't…

One time, I suggested in a list-serve that science teachers make more use of primary scientific literature. Naturally, I learned all the reasons why teachers don't do this-lack of access being one of the biggies- but I also learned something surprising. One teacher wrote that she re-writes a lot…

This First Annual Conference for New Jersey Biotechnology Educators will be held on Saturday, Oct. 4th at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. I'm excited about attending this conference, not only because of the biotechnology part, but because I've reading Sarah Vowel's book…

Calling all scientists and science-fans: you can help with science education by letting students know you're interested. How? Go and comment on classroom blogs and wikis. I've been gradually collecting some blogs from different classes and I've even had some brave volunteers offer theirs for…

Ozzie's will never be the same. The sun shone so brightly yesterday afternoon that it left us with no choice. We had to go outdoors. Luckily, Ozzie's has a wonderful upper deck in full view of the daylight and well-equipped with chairs. Photo footage below. The scene of the crime. Where do…

Then you need to head over to The Oyster's Garter and read Miriam Goldstein's incredibly funny post about the problems of male sea squirts. Apparently, if you're a sea squirt, the size of your sperm is related to your environment and mostly the number of other sea squirts in your environment.…

One of the holy grails of modern medicine is the development of a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDs. An obstacle to attaining this goal has been the difficulty in stimulating the immune system to make it produce the right kinds of antibodies. A recent finding in Science describes a…

Let's play anomaly! Most of this week, I've written about the fun time I had playing around with NCBI's Blink database and finding evidence that at least one mosquito, Aedes aegypti, seems to have been infected at some point with a plant paramyxovirus and that the paramyxovirus left one of its…

Lots of bloggers in the DNA network have been busy these past few days writing about Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, his blog, his wife's company (23andme), and his mutation in the LRRK2 gene. I was a little surprised to see that while other bloggers (here, here, here, and here) have been…

Dave, Maria, Grrl, and I will all be at Ozzie's in Lower Queen Anne on Saturday afternoon. I've never met the other three bloggers but after checking out Maria's wedding pictures and the liquid nitrogen, I'm really looking forward to this. We'll be upstairs in the mezzanine and we'll have a…

Do mosquitoes get the mumps? Part V. A general method for finding interesting things in GenBank This is the last in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes and a general method for finding other interesting things. In this last part, I discuss a general…

Would you like to win a cash prize and maybe an expense paid trip to New York City? If you're in grades 7-12 and like research, you might be interested in the 2009 Young Naturalist contest from the American Museum of Natural History. Winners (2 from each grade) will receive cash awards, from $500…

If you like cool and unusual photos be sure to take a look at the 2008 Nikon Small World competition site. You can view lots of lovely pictures of things found under a microscope and vote for your favorite ones. You don't even have to focus the microscope! One of my favorites is the tubeworm…

Part IV. Assembling the details and making the case for a novel paramyxovirus This is the fourth in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in a mosquito. In this part, we take a look at all the evidence we can find and try to figure out how a gene from a virus came to be…

Every fall, we had to confront it. People would let their dogs run around on the field in the morning and by the time soccer practice started, the field would be full of deadly doo. There's nothing that hurts soccer practice more than a soccer ball or shoes that went through a pile of dog poo…

Part III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink In which we find an unexpected result when we Blink while looking at the mumps polymerase. This is the third in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes. And yes, this is where the discovery happens. I. The back…

The National Girls Collaborative Project, as you might guess from the title, focuses on helping girls and engaging girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (aka "STEM"). photos used with permission from NGCP Quoting from the NGCP website, (the emphasis is mine): Numerous programs and…

Part II. What do mumps proteins do? And how do we find out? This is the second in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes, and a general method for finding interesting things. I. The back story from the genome record II. What do the mumps proteins do? And…

Wow! One of my commenters, Ms. Baker, suggested an entirely new way that scientists can help with science education. The only requirement is that a science class have their own blog. So, if your science class has a blog, let me know, so I can share the URL and maybe recruit some scientists or at…

Part I. The back story from the genome record Together, these five posts describe the discovery of a novel paramyxovirus in the Aedes aegyptii genome and a new method for finding interesting anomalies in GenBank. I. The back story from the genome record II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how…

What do you do if you're a scientist and want to volunteer in a classroom? How do you find the right place to go and right kind of activity that suites your talents? One of my commenters asked about this a few weeks ago. With the new school year up and running, it seems like a good time to tackle…

Hey high school teachers! Are your students interested in the brain? Who isn't? Three winners will win all-expense-paid trips to present their work in a poster session in Seattle at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. Their teachers get to come too! I can tell you,…

Every now and then, people hire me to travel places and give workshops for college instructors and teachers on using bioinformatics. In a couple of weeks, I'll go to Long Branch, NJ. This week, I went to Corpus Christi, Texas and gave two workshops at Del Mar College; one on using Cn3D to…

Okay, occasional readers, friends, and former students, the date is official. I walked over to Ozzie's, chatted with one of the waitresses (a Garfield grad, no less!), talked with a manager on the phone, and we're on for the party. You can find us on Saturday, Sept. 27th at 4 pm in the upstairs…

PubMed is an on-line database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) that contains information from scientific literature. Most of the information is related to medical research. To search PubMed, you use a program called Entrez. You go to the NCBI, select PubMed from the…