Science Education
sporte | December 5, 2007Judging from their groans and moans, I think sometimes that it's hard for kids to grow up with two scientists as parents. Still, over the years our kids have come to accept (and ignore) that we seem to babble in some kind of strange code peppered with discussions of DNA, software, and lately something called "Next Gen."
We'll cook dinner and start reminiscing about PV=nRT.
Our youngest daughter will try to mix water and oil for brownies and one of us will contribute cheerfully: "Like dissolves like."
Now that our oldest daughter is taking freshman chemistry, she gets to hear some new…
clock | December 4, 2007For winning the second place at the Siemens science competition:
Mentored by N.C. State University professors Donald Bitzer and Anne-Marie Stomp, the students developed a computer model that helps scientists determine which gene sequences to use to produce specific proteins. The research could provide a cost-effective method of commercially producing useful proteins such as insulin.
clock | December 4, 2007David writes:
Community is no longer a dirty or scary word. Sciam, Seed, in the US, Germany and all over the world. Online communities are becoming understood and a valued commodity. When Google bought YouTube I said the price they payed wasn't for the technology (they already had Google Video) what they bought was the community. News organizations realize that creating niche communities is a way to stay relevant to advertisers and readers.
And science journalism, which de-facto covers a "boring" subject to lots of people, can only benefit by creating a vibrant community of people who have a…
clock | December 4, 2007Every first Friday of the month, there is something fun going on at the NC Museum of Natural Science. This week, Friday December 7th, the theme is Dinosaurs!!!
6 PM Parenthood and Life's Hazards for Dinosaurs - presentation by Dr. Dale Russell, Senior Curator of Paleontology
I took a class on Dinosaur Osteology with Dale Russell and went to the Carnegie Museum on a December trip as a part of the course some years ago. He took us down to the vaults at dawn before the museum opened and started pulling stuff out of drawers testing our knowledge on the spot. He pulled a little oval-shaped…
clock | December 4, 2007Sites with videos that are more serious than YouTube are proliferating - I get an e-mail about a new one about every week. This week's addition is SuTree. By clicking on pets and animals category and then on reptiles and then on care, I found, for instance, this video on the care of Leopard Geckos. It includes some text, as well as user comments (but no responses from the experts or authors of the video). The advice is good, standard pet-shop fare. As my lab-buddy Chris actually did a lot of research with Leopard Geckos, we know a bunch more about the husbandry and other neat tricks with…
revere | December 3, 2007Carnegie-Mellon is a great university and when it comes to robotics and computer science is always on the cutting edge. But does that cutting edge have to be so sharply lethal?
Unmanned aircraft are showing up in the skies more often and today the US Army awarded $14.4 million to Carnegie Mellon to build a remote-controlled unmanned tank.
A certain amount of the award will go toward significantly improving the Crusher, a 6.5-ton unmanned support vehicle Carnegie engineers developed in 2006 in conjunction with DARPA. Since its introduction, the Crusher has demonstrated unparalleled toughness…
sporte | December 3, 2007'Tis the holiday season and, according to ancient lore, the time when miraculous events are most likely to take place.
One of those well-known and miraculous events of ancient days was the birth of a son to a young girl, who, although she was married (Okay, I'm not sure about this part of the story) she was said to be a virgin and the birth to be a miracle.
Hmmm.
How do you think the news would be received if that sort of thing happened today?
Certainly, if the young girl were to produce a grilled cheese sandwich with a burn spot that vaguely resembled a woman in a robe, someone might be…
scientificactivist | November 29, 2007Dear Texas,
Let me first of all say that despite our differences, I still consider you my home, even if I only get to visit a couple of times a year these days. Friends, family, football: you have it all for me. And, as I watched it get dark here in Oxford around 4 pm this afternoon, I have to admit that I really miss that warm Texas sun.
But, Texas, I have to tell you--pal to pal--that your recent actions have been so stereotypical. I mean, yeah, we get it. You're conservative. Really conservative. And, you like Jesus. A lot. Tell me something new. But now I hear that you forced…
tsmith | November 29, 2007Like the gift that never stops giving, the Discovery Institute is taking its dog and pony show on the road, and heading right here to Iowa in order to plead (via press conference) Discovery Institute fellow Guillermo Gonzalez's case for tenure. You may recall the Iowa State assistant professor of astronomy was denied tenure there this past May, and he and the DI have contended that this was due to his support for intelligent design, rather than any other issues with his performance or scholarship.
Not content to simply leave it at that, Gonzalez has appealed his tenure denial, and is…
gregladen | November 26, 2007If they are so OK with the spiders, why are they all wearing protective face-wear?
Anyway, this is a potentially useful video for teaching genetics. Captivating, good graphics, a balance of the icky and the cute, etc.
gregladen | November 25, 2007A new bunch of math text books slated for implementation in Texas was werefound to have 109,263 errors. Apparently, in Texas, the publishers are fined $5000 per error. That comes out to $546,315,000.
The publisher, Houghton Mifflin, is working hard to correct the errors....
[source]
sciencewoman | November 25, 2007My mom has been frenetically cleaning out her house the past few months, in order to make up for saving everything for the past few decades. (un)fortunately for us, she's not making many decisions about what saved stuff should be passed on and what should just be tossed. So the end result is that Minnow (and Fish) have now had a chance to examine the remains of my 6th grade science project.
Original title: Insulating with snow
clock | November 23, 2007...the computers and the Web:
If you are not clear about the difference between the Net (aka Internet), the Web (aka World Wide Web) and the Graph (aka Social Graph), then this post is a must read (via Ed). He explains much more clearly what I had in mind before, e.g., here.
In order to use the Net, the Web and the Graph, you do need some kind of a machine, perhaps a computer, and Greg Laden puts together a dream (or nighthmare) setup for you!
Speaking of dream computers, I could not resist... as you may have seen before, Professor Steve Steve and I got to play with the XO laptop back at…
clock | November 21, 2007It's been a while since I came back from Boston, but the big dinosaur story kept me busy all last week so I never managed to find time and energy to write my own recap of the Harvard Conference.
Anna Kushnir, Corie Lok, Evie Brown, Kaitlin Thaney (Part 2 and Part 3) and
Alex Palazzo have written about it much better than I could recall from my own "hot seat". Elizabeth Cooney of Boston Globe has a write-up as well. Read them all.
So, here is my story, in brief....and pictorial, just like the first part (under the fold).
The Keynote
About an hour or so before the conference, we started…
sporte | November 20, 2007Which read(s):
1. contain either a SNP (a single nucleotide polymorphism) or a position where different members of a multi-gene family have a different base?
C
2. doesn't have any DNA?
B
3. is a PCR product?
A, B, and C. All of three reads were obtained by sequencing PCR products, generated with the same set of primers.
The quality plots that I refer to are here.
sciencewoman | November 20, 2007After class today, my best student confides to me that the most recent assignment was the toughest thing he's had to do in college so far. I take that as a tremendous compliment.
Why? The students had to get out into nature and observe at least four -ology features. Then they had to succinctly describe the features in 300 words or less.
I like the assignment because it does two things: (1) makes students apply what they've been learning in class to a real-world environment; and (2) learn to write more clearly and concisely. These are the two things that I think college first-years struggle…
sporte | November 19, 2007Since DNA diagnostics companies seem to be sprouting like mushrooms after the rain, it seemed like a good time to talk about how DNA testing companies decipher meaning from the tests they perform.
Last week, I wrote about interpreting DNA sequence traces and the kind of work that a data analyst or bioinformatics technician does in a DNA diagnostics company. As you might imagine, looking at every single DNA sample by eye gets rather tiring. One of the things that informatics companies (like ours) do, is to try and help people analyze several samples at once so that they can scan fewer…
gregladen | November 18, 2007Wiley has a cool web page with "interactive concepts in biochemistry" animations. Check it out.
sporte | November 16, 2007As many of you know, I'm a big fan of do-it-yourself biology. Digital biology, the field that I write about, is particularly well-suited to this kind of fun and exploration.
Last week, I wrote some instructions for making a phylogenetic tree from mitochondrial genomes. This week, we'll continue our analysis.
I wrote this activity, in part, because of this awful handout that my oldest daughter brought home last year. She presented me with an overly photocopied paper that showed several protein sequences from cytochrome C in several creatures. She said she was supposed count the…
sporte | November 15, 2007DNA sequence traces are often used in cases where:
We want to identify the source of the nucleic acid.
We want to detect drug-resistant variants of human immune deficiency virus.
We want to know which base is located at which position, especially where we might be able to diagnose a human disease or determine the best dose of a therapeutic drug.
In the future, these assays will likely rely more on automation. Currently, (at least outside of genome centers) many of these results are assessed by human technicians in clinical research labs, or DNA testing companies, who review these data by…