Science Education
terrasig | September 10, 2008Despite having to employ biophysical methods in my day job, I must admit my woeful understanding of physics as a discipline. I wasn't like my high school grease monkey friends using torque wrenches on their cars with Springsteenonian dedication and my lowest grade in undergrad came in physics. For that reason, I rarely have the opportunity to link to fellow ScienceBlogger, Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles. Prof Orzel was one of the earliest science bloggers, coming online in June, 2002.
Chad posted about being on the programme of a meeting in Waterloo, Ontario, entitled, "Science in the…
sciencewoman | September 9, 2008My 19 month old Minnow is at the stage where she likes to name the things she sees. For some weeks now she's been particularly into telling me about all the water she notices. "Wa-we!" says she in her sweet little voice. There's wa-we in the bath, wa-we in the dog's bowl, wa-we in the toilet, wa-we in her cup, and wa-we in the wading pool ("poo" she says insistently). It was tremendously exciting for her when we had a few days of heavy rain and everytime she'd go outside there'd be wa-we in the air.
As we drive from home to school each morning, Minnow tells me about the lake ("wa-we") we…
clock | September 9, 2008From SCONC:
Saturday, Sept. 20
7:30 p.m.
"An Evening of Field Research and Exploration" Presentations by three National Geographic explorers discussing seals in the Juan Fernandez Islands of southern Chile; a 275-mile journey on foot through the Himalayas to the calving grounds of the Tibetan antelope; and Madagascar's endangered predator, the cat-like fossa.
Page Auditorium, Duke
clock | September 5, 2008...clone of Professor Steve Steve? Ehrm, the 900th Steve on the listing of the Project Steve?
clock | September 5, 2008Message from Sigma Xi:
You may know that Duke University is home to the Duke Lemur Center (http://lemur.duke.edu/), the world's largest sanctuary for rare and endangered prosimian primates. But do you know its research? For a glimpse, attend Sigma Xi's first 2007-2008 pizza lunch at noon, Wednesday, Sept 24. Center director Anne Yoder will speak on the "Historical bio-geography of Madagascar: Using genes to study the evolution of an island" as well as field your questions.
Pizza lunch is free. RSVPs required to cclabby AT amsci DOT org. Directions to Sigma XI: http://www.sigmaxi.org/about/…
clock | September 3, 2008Tuesday, Sept. 16
6:30-8:30 p.m. with discussion at 7:00
Science Cafe: Entomophagy
"Six-legged Solutions: Become Earth Friendly and Eat a Bug" with Dave Gracer - teacher, writer, and president of Sunrise Land Shrimp.
sciencecaferaleigh.blogspot.com
The Irregardless Cafe, 901 West Morgan Street, Raleigh, 833-8898
sporte | September 3, 2008PubMed 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 menu, type words into the text box, and start the search. Sometimes that's all you need to do. Sometimes you get several million results and need to use more specific words to limit the results the ones that you really want.
Many scientists use PubMed on a daily basis. But the NCBI has noticed that…
jlynch | August 30, 2008Sheril has just announced that Barak Obama has answered fourteen questions posed by the Science Debate 2008 team. I haven't had a chance to read his responses yet, so wander on over yourself to see what he has to say.
clock | August 29, 2008I have blogged about this a couple of weeks ago (and a couple of weeks before that) and you can see the ads all over scienceblogs.com about it, but let me ask you for one final push on this as there are just a couple of days left and still a few bucks to earn:
....the BigThink/DonorsChoose August campaign is coming along well; they've raised almost but not quite yet the maximum of $10,000......
And scienceblogs.com were a big part of that success so far!
Every click is worth a dollar - paid not by you but by Pfizer. As you can click on each one of the ten videos, with ten clicks you earn ten…
sporte | August 26, 2008Last night we went to a pub to hear about some new technology for diagnostic testing. A wonderful speaker, Karen Hedine from Micronics came and told us about the work that her company is doing. She brought along a demonstration machine and passed the machine and several plastic test chambers around the pub so we could all take a look.
The technology, microfluidics, is fascinating stuff. I've written about it a little before( "From Louis Pasteur to "Lab on a chip"").
A biological sample (blood, poop, urine, saliva, a vaginal smear) is drawn into the card. Molecules move into the card via…
clock | August 25, 2008Science promotion is not science outreach, damn it!:
We've all encountered this: the science communication department at a large university is usually devoted to marketing the research of that particular university. The so-called "outreach" products of such departments - the public talks, articles, and events for school groups - are all forced to suit this purpose. Mediocre research is described in glowing terms as "world-class" or "ground-breaking". Poor communicators are put forward again and again so that they can be seen as a leader in their field.
This is promotion, not outreach.…
sporte | August 25, 2008A few days ago, I wrote about a cool project that some high school students did where they used DNA sequencing to identify seafood.
One question that came up from one of my commenters was how a school would start a project like this. I'm totally biased, but I think DNA sequencing (well, actually the data analysis) is one of the most interesting things that a class can do as part of a research project. These days, getting started with this kind of project, wouldn't be so hard.
Here's are some ways that I would get started:
Find an existing project where my students could collaborate and…
gregladen | August 25, 2008David Campbell is a life science teacher in Florida who was recently profiled in the New York Times because of his involvement in the debate between Creationism and Evolution. This discussion is being picked up in the Blogosphere, and this is very timely, as this is the time when teachers in most US school districts are just heading back to class.
My "back to school" contribution is a repost of one of my more popular bits on the problem of the bible thumping student. This is revised and reposted from my old site. Enjoy:
.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own…
sporte | August 22, 2008Two teenagers, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, carried out their own science project over the past year. They visited 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores and gathered 60 samples of fish and sent them off to the University of Guelph to get sequenced.
I like this story. One of my former students did a project like this for the FDA years ago, sampling fish from the Pike Place Market and identifying them with PCR. He was an intern, though. Here we have students identifying sushi on their own!
Quoting the New York Times article:
They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with…
clock | August 21, 2008Working to empower students nationwide to experiment with science and technology, Discovery Education and 3M are hosting the 10th annual Young Scientist Challenge (YSC). Moving closer to recognizing "America's Top Young Scientist of the Year" and "America's Top Science Teacher of the Year," Discovery Education and 3M announce this year's finalists.
See them here.
clock | August 21, 2008The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) announced the winner of its 2008 "Science Idol: Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest," which draws attention to the growing problem of political interference in federal government science.
Justin Bilicki, of Brooklyn, New York has earned the title of America's "Science Idol" with his winning cartoon. It depicts a scientist presenting his research findings that conclude: "We are destroying the Earth." Two government officials look on. The official holding a briefcase with money spilling out of it, says, "Could you kindly rephrase that in…
sporte | August 21, 2008One of the things that drives me crazy on occasion is nomenclature. Well, maybe not just nomenclature, it's really the continual changes in the nomenclature, and the time it takes for those changes to ripple through various databases and get reconciled with other kinds of information. And the realization that sometimes this reconciliation may never happen.
One of the projects that I've been working on during the past couple of years has involved developing educational materials that use bioinformatics tools to look at the isozymes that metabolize alcohol. As part of this project, I've been…
clock | August 18, 2008When I got a job a year ago, I decided not to quit teaching, but just to "ease up" a little bit. So, I taught the lab (BIO102) my regular 4-5 times per year on Saturday mornings, but took a break in teaching the lectures (BIO101). I have been teaching introductory biology at NC Wesleyan College for eight years now, in adult education on their Triangle campus.
Last week I finished teaching - both lecture and lab again - and turned in the grades this morning. I have to say that it has been nicer and nicer teaching there over the years. I think the students are getting better and better (…
terrasig | August 16, 2008CORRECTION: The following was to be a part-sincere/part-serious sendup of my buddy Bora's penchant for monitoring the entire Internet. Bora did indeed host the first edition of Praxis, the new blog carnival of academic life.
However.
The Praxis experimental carnival of "the experience of living the scientific" was established, founded, and otherwise continues to be led by Martin, author of The Lay Scientist blog.
Mini Bio:
Well I'm Martin, I live in Cambridge, England, and this is me on the Amazon in 2007. I did a frankly weird Ph.D. looking at the relationship between models from ecology,…