Getting kids involved in science, outside of the classroom. A conversation with a friend last night reminded me of some posts I wrote earlier about helping scientists connect to programs for helping students. My friend, as a parent, approached this idea, of connecting scientists with students, from a different angle. She wanted to know how you go about connecting students with science? What do you do if the science program at your kid's high school seems a little, well, uninspiring? If the teachers aren't interested, how do you help? How do you create opportunities for kids to get…
The grocery store magazine covers all say that home made gifts are big this year. So I thought, some of you might like to channel your inner Martha Stewart and make gifts with a science theme. Reposted in honor of the holiday and the economy. I'm here to help to you make a merry mug with one of our favorite molecules. Yep, we're talking caffeine. 1. First, we'll go to PubChem at the NCBI. It's not an exclusive (or even last) resort but there are lots of fancy molecules hanging around, just waiting to be discovered and put onto drinking containers. 2. Now, we'll look for a molecule. I'm…
It's a long, long, weekend; perfect for going outside and doing a few loud, messy experiments. Cooking-intensive holidays always remind me how much fun it is to do a bit of chemistry, especially when it comes to food. If you watched the video that I posted on Thanksgiving, you've probably been itching to try one of these experiments yourself. Some chemistry experiments are better in the spring, especially if you're using peeps, but experiments with candy and soda pop can happen anytime. If you'd like to give these sorts of experiments a try, the Disgruntled Chemist posted a truly…
A crystalline botanical fashion show. 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. Reposted for the holiday. Even though 75% of flowering plants make these crystals, no one knows why they make them and in fact, their functions may be as diverse as their shapes. Some crystals look sharp and dangerous, like thistles or thorns, suggesting that they…
Would you recognize your leftovers when they're magnified? Would you know turkey if you saw it at 40X? Make a guess and click an image to see the answer. Reposted from DigitalBio's greatest hit collection technorati tags: Thanksgiving, food science, microscopy Copyright Sandra Porter
Thanksgiving is a holiday (in the U.S. at least) when we're all reminded about the things we're thankful for. At our house, we're thankful for the opportunity to cook all day and share a meal with friends and young adults. And, even though I haven't given my turkey an IP address, this is still a meal that deserves some documentation. Here's the turkey soaking in brine. That large pink tongue belongs to our dog. Don't worry, we stopped her before she had a chance to stick her tongue in the brine, but she is a master of making the best of an opportunity. Here's the turkey, out of the…
If you're not cooking today, why not experiment? Here's something fun you can do with Mentos and Diet Coke - and for those of you who think these experiments are too messy, you can still watch the movie. Enjoy the music in the video, then go outside, and enjoy the show. Later, go to EepyBird.com and learn about the science behind the fountain effect. technorati tags: Mentos and Diet Coke, chemistry, science you can do at home
Our household is very excited about Thanksgiving. That's because this Thanksgiving, my husband is cooking a turkey in an egg. A big green egg. Check back later today, about 5:30 pm, Pacific Standard Time, to see a picture of the turkey. In the meantime, here are some other items that were cooked in the egg. We've had: Ribs Fish Zucchini Pizza If you can cook it in an egg, he will try it. I used to be the primary cook in our house, but that's all changed since we got the egg. Now, my husband cooks everything, just to see how it will work. But, now I've learned from Make…
I suppose I should have expected this. I thought it might be fun to see what the databases had to say about turkeys. Technorati Tags: Thanksgiving,, turkey,, mash-up So, I queried the NCBI databases, found a taxonomy reference, and started clicking related links to see pictures of the different species. Why? Because it would be great to see what the different species of turkies look like and compare them. Here's a species of wild turkey that I didn't expect to find. Wild turkey, humph!
I just love this title! It's nerdy and cute, all at the same time. I read about this in www.researchblogging.org and had to check out the paper and blog write up from The Beagle Project (BTW: some of you may be interested in knowing that The Beagle Project is not a blog about dogs.) The paper describes a class where students from Marseilles University investigate the function of unidentified genes from a Global Ocean Sampling experiment. All the sequences are obtained from the environmental sequence division at the NCBI. Students follow the procedure outlined below: This is a great…
It's funny but even though I work with data on a regular basis, I can't always predict the best way to manage data until I have my own data to manage. My classroom wiki site is no exception. Now, that I've been seriously using a wiki with my class, I've found that I should have set a few things up a bit differently. Technorati Tags: teaching, teaching technology, wikis, wiki, science education" The biggest challenge has been making sure that the right people can do the right things - or who gets to see what and upload what where. Not knowing what methods would turn out to be useful, I…
Now that I've downloaded really important applications like a timer for cooking, a program for playing with molecular structures, and an app that lets me listen to NPR on my phone, I'm ready for more. I'm seriously overwhelmed by the iTunes App store. I found a program for learning human anatomy, a laboratory calculator for making solutions, music programs, wow! Who knew? I know some schools are using iPhones for teaching, but I never realized how much was out there. Deepak recommends something called TouchPhysics. What are you using? What cool apps do you suggest? Technorati Tags…
Ebola virus has impressed me as creepy ever since I read "The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story some years back by Richard Preston. (I guess he has a new book, too, Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science but I haven't been in airport for the past couple of weeks, so I haven't read it yet.) Technorati Tags: blast, phylogenetic trees, Ebola, viruses Infectious agents that cause diseases with gruesome symptoms really excite those of us with an interest in microbiology. Tara has written about this paper, too, and summarized the details. I…
Some people, like Imelda Marcos and our new Dr. Isis, have a thing for fancy shoes. I go crazy for gadgets. technorati tags: iphone, DNA, molecules, molecular structure, molecular modeling, Science education For my birthday this year, my family bought me a new iPhone! Yeah! So, I've been killing several hours today filling it with cute little iPhone apps. Who knew one little phone could be so much fun? One app, I enjoy, is called Molecules. Molecules lets you download structure files from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and play with the structures on your phone! Spreading your fingers…
This wasn't in the lab, but it was an accident, and it was funny later on. Normally, I wouldn't think twice about storing bacterial cultures in a refrigerator. After all, bacteria on a petri plate, inside of a plastic bag, are kind of stuck. They can't get out of the plates, and even if they did, they certainly can't crawl out of a plastic bag. I thought soil bacteria, on agar plates, were mostly harmless. Reposted from DigitalBio's greatest hits.Technorati Tags: humor, bacteria, taste, funny, tasting, food, Streptomyces When my husband was finishing graduate school, he brought home some…
A loose spider on a space station. Technorati Tags: humor, 'snakes, on, a, plane', spider, spiders, 'space, station' Apparently the missing orb-weaver spider is gone from it's cage and can't be found anywhere. And for the record, I don't know what kind of spider is in my photograph. It's a spider that lives in Fairbanks, AK. From the Telegraph: It was hoped the missing spider might have sought refuge in its neighbour's tank, but the remaining spider has spun a web so thick, to cope with the zero-gravity conditions, that is is impossible to check. The runaway spider, which was meant to be the…
There's no question that the ability to work with information is one that will be required and valued for a long time to come. I think it's imperative for teachers to have students practice this skill whenever an opportunity comes about. The problem for many teachers is finding the time to identify good data sets. MRSA stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a serious problem for hospital patients. Six of out seven people who become infected with MRSA, get it from some kind of health-care facility. In 2007, the CDC issued a report claiming that 18,000 people die every…
Genome Web's Daily Scan noted an interesting blog post today from John D. Halamka, one of the people to get his genome sequenced through the personal genome project. I was interested to see his post since Genome Web wrote that he was discussing data standards and we have been writing quite a bit, ourselves, about data measurements for Next Gen sequencing (e.g. Next Gen-Omics) on our company blog, FinchTalk. But Halamka didn't write about standards for data. He wrote about standards for metadata, like family histories, and the things that are done with data after it's been collected. All of…
I'm sure everyone else thinks the big news today is the announcement by the Washington State Health department requiring hospitals to report MRSA cases to the state. I think the cool news is their on-line database. We'll get to that a bit later. What is MRSA? MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It's a serious pathogen that causes skin infections and greater damage if it enters the body. The Seattle Times report - a quick summary For the past three days the Seattle Times has been running a series on hospital-acquired cases of MRSA. According to the report, 6…
In our last episode, I wrote about embedding Google forms in my classroom wiki pages. Recently, we've been working on a project where students enter results into a Google Docs spreadsheet, via our classroom wiki. All the students were able to enter their results. Except for one. When other students went to the spreadsheet page, they saw this: When this student went to the same page, he saw this: We tried all kinds of things to see if we could remedy this situation. I checked and rechecked permissions, both in my Google account and in the wiki. We closed and reopened pages, we…