Science Education
sporte | November 21, 2008There'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…
clock | November 18, 2008Chad Orzel and Jennifer Ouellette are chatting physics and stuff on Bloggingheads.tv:
clock | November 17, 2008 How To Make A Barometer In Few Easy Steps With Household Items - Celebrity bloopers here
sporte | November 17, 2008iGEM is all about synthetic biology, kids. It's the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition.
Each team in the IGEM competition has to make something using a kit of biological parts from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Teams of students use these parts to design, build, and operate biological systems in living cells.
IGEM began in 2003 with a course at MIT where students made cells blink. Now, this year had:
1200 participants,
84 teams,
and 24 awards.
Amazingly, two of those awards went to a team (UCSF) composed mostly of students from a public high…
sb admin | November 16, 2008
Population biologists often want to infer the demographic history of the species they study. This includes identifying population subdivision, expansion, and bottlenecks. Genetic data sampled from multiple individuals can often be applied to study population structure. When phylogenetic methods are used to link evolutionary relationships to geography, the approaches fall under the guise of phylogeography.
The past decade has seen the rise in popularity of a particular phylogeographical approach for intra-specific data: nested clade analysis (Templeton et al. 1995; Templeton 2004). Many of…
sporte | November 15, 2008If you're going to create a new life form (even if it's only digital), Sunday Saturday seems like the best day to give it a try.
Reposted from an earlier year.
Build-A-Virus is a quick, fun, and simple game that was created and put on-line by Bioreliance, now owned by Invitrogen. This game is lots of fun, even when your students are college instructors.
In this activity, you create a new virus by picking different physical characteristics.
The game works like this:
First, you choose whether the virus has an envelope or not.
Next, you choose whether the genome is single or double-…
clock | November 14, 2008Go here (requires a 5-second process of signing up for FriendFeed, a move you will not regret, if you want to comment instead of just reading) and participate in liveblogging as the Beagle Project crew visits the opening of the Darwin exhibition.
sporte | November 12, 2008What skills does a biotechnology technician need to know?
This seems like a simple question, but people have been struggling to define biotech skill standards since the early 90's.
Complicating this question is that many areas of biotechnology require somewhat different skills. Antibody work requires one set, plant or animal tissue culture, another; fermentation, another; manufacturing, another; DNA sequencing, yet another set. Even skills that you might think are universal, like using a microscope, are not. During my years in graduate school, I never used a microscope; I cloned genes…
gregladen | November 10, 2008Sandy Porter at Discovering Biology in a Digital World has got an interesting offer:
Want to learn more about Parkinson's disease? See why a single nucleotide mutation messes up the function of a protein?
I have a short activity that uses Cn3D (a molecular viewing program from the NCBI) to look at a protein that seems to be involved in a rare form of Parkinson's disease and I could sure use beta testers.
If you'd like to do this,...
... the click here and get going on it!
sporte | November 9, 2008It was a wet and rainy day yesterday, and we have a dissecting microscope, so I decided to see if I could find some tardigrades.
Tardigrade photo by nebarnix
Reposted from Nov. 2006
I went outside and scraped a bit of moss and some lichens off of our deck. Then I put the lichens and moss in a dish. We don't have distilled water in our house, so I added a bit of cool some tap water to the dish. I squeezed the moss and lichens in the water. Then I took a pipette and transferred a bit of the stuff in the water to a plastic petri dish and looked for tardigrades.
Sure enough, I saw one…
gregladen | November 8, 2008Earlier, I reported a poll indicating that "one third of British Teachers" support teaching creationism in the classroom. I thought this was vaguely interesting, which is why I mentioned it briefly on this blog, but I put the idea of pursuing this off for a later time.
Well, I have subsequently looked into it a little more and discovered that the poll is bogus. All of the links trace back to an entity known as "teacher's tv" and it is claimed that this entity conducted the poll. The only information provided by "teacher's tv" about this poll is a news item that looks kinda like a blog…
sporte | November 6, 2008Before mammals, before dinosaurs, before bacteria, or plants, there was something else; a protocell containing RNA.
The Exploring Origins Project has excellent animations of protocells, a timeline of life's evolution, and best of all- fantastic animations of the RNA world.
You can see how RNA folds, ribozymes (RNA that catalyzes chemical reactions), and learn about the role of RNA when the Earth was young.
BTW- I made this ribozyme image with Cn3D. The RNA is synthetic - made by humans with machines, that is, and this molecule can cut chemical bonds.
clock | November 6, 2008In today's News and Observer:
Mary H. Schweitzer, associate professor of paleontology at N.C. State University, will talk about how paleontology can help determine whether life ever existed on other planets.
She will speak at a Periodic Tables event sponsored by the Museum of Life and Science in Durham on Tuesday.
Periodic Tables is a regular program that gives adults a chance to learn and discuss the latest in science. Schweitzer will share her expertise in the field of astrobiology and explain how we can use the tools of molecular paleontology to detect biomarkers not only in fossils but…
sporte | November 4, 2008This quarter, I'm using a wiki with my bioinformatics class and posting sometimes about the things that I learn.
Two things I've been experimenting with are:
Setting up pages for individual students so they can take notes while they're working.
Embedding a Google form into one of my wiki pages for student assessment.
Here's a diagram showing some of the pages in my bioinformatics class wiki site.
Syllabus: I suppose this reflects on my own lack of organization, but I use the syllabus as a dynamic document, making changes and adding information throughout the course. There are…
clock | November 4, 2008The next Sigma Xi lunch pizza in RTP will be noon MONDAY, Nov. 17. Come hear Rob Dunn, assistant professor of zoology at NC State, talk about "Climate Change and the Neglected Majority." Dunn, among other things, is interested in insects and how changes in their distribution affect ecosystems.
Sigma Xi's Pizza Lunch speaker series is free and open to science journalists and science communicators of all stripes (feel free to forward this message to anyone you would like to be included). RSVPs are required to cclabby@amsci.org.
sporte | November 3, 2008Want to learn more about Parkinson's disease? See why a single nucleotide mutation messes up the function of a protein?
I have a short activity that uses Cn3D (a molecular viewing program from the NCBI) to look at a protein that seems to be involved in a rare form of Parkinson's disease and I could sure use beta testers.
If you'd like to do this, I need you to follow the directions below and afterwards, go to a web form and answer a few questions. Don't worry about getting the wrong answers. I won't know who you are, so I won't know if you answered anything wrong.
If you have any concerns…
sporte | November 2, 2008I heard some intriguing presentations this week about education in Second Life, but I happen know that there is an open-source, free (?) alternative called "Croquet."
Do any of you have experience with Croquet vs. Second Life? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
I attended two talks, hoping that someone would compare different platforms, or at least give the audience a chance to ask questions, but no such luck.
I think these multi-user virtual environments are really interesting, but I have some reservations about educational institutions making substantial investments in building…
sporte | November 1, 2008I was in in Washington D.C. this last week attending the National Science Foundation's Advanced Technology Education conference. During the conference, I attended one workshop and one talk on Second Life. Both of the presentations were focused on Teen Second Life, which was interesting, but neither presentation did a very good job of illustrating how I would use Second Life as a teaching tool.
Julian Lombardi's blog has a short YouTube movie that comes pretty close. Be patient, the marketing pitch doesn't last forever.
skookumchick | October 31, 2008My colleague Donna Riley just sent me a way-cool call for papers: inclusive science, for a special issue of the National Women's Studies Association Journal. Get your writing hats on -- papers are due January 15! The rest of the call is after the fold.
INCLUSIVE SCIENCE: ARTICULATING THEORY, PRACTICE, AND ACTION
Call for papers for a Special Cluster of Papers in the
National Women's Studies Association Journal
It is no secret that there is a national crisis in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), particularly in terms of the involvement of women and people of…
sciencewoman | October 30, 2008It's the very last day of our DonorsChoose Reader Challenge for 2008. I just want to say how amazed I am by the generosity of our readers. I'm particularly proud that we have far more donors than many of our more widely read competitors er, Sciblings.
By the time we add in the contribution from Seed and the matches promised by Alice and I, we'll be well over our $2000 goal.
Yay, us!
So in these waning hours of our pledge drive er, reader challenge, there's only four reasons remaining to donate.
4. A chance to win a fabulous Yellow Ibis t-shirt, hopefully one of our Sciencewomen custom tees.…