Science Education
sporte | May 21, 2007tags: evolution, science education, Alliance for Science
A few months ago, I wrote about a contest, sponsored by the Alliance for Science, in celebration of Darwin Day. High school students were asked to write an essay on the topic: "Why would you want your doctor to have studied evolution?"
The winners have been announced and you can read their essays.
Congratulations winners, teachers, and all participants!
sporte | May 21, 2007tags: moon, lunar geology, NASA, astronomy, computer games, learning through computer games
NASA researchers are learning how to design video games and they're looking for high school students to help. They want students between the ages of 13-18 to play an online computer game about lunar geology and they want high school teachers to help recruit the students.
What's in it for the students?
Players are guided through Selene by the director of the Center for Educational Technologies, Chuck Wood, an internationally known lunar geologist who writes a monthly column on the moon for Sky and…
clock | May 21, 2007No more blogging until late tonight or tomorrow morning as it is a Monday and on Monday evenings I teach. Today's topic is Biological Diversity, from its origins through its evolution to its current state. Fun!
sporte | May 21, 2007tags: PubMed, PubMed Central, medical informatics, bioinformatics, finding scientific articles
This three part series covers the problem of finding scientific articles, compares results from a few different methods, and presents instructions for the best method.
A day in the life of an English physician
In April, I had the great fortune to attend (and speak at) a conference on scientific publishing sponsored by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. One of the first speakers was an English physician who described his trials and a typical ordeal in trying to use the…
sporte | May 18, 2007tags: plants, bioinformatics, sequence analysis, viruses, fungi
Quick synopsis: A type of grass grows in Yellowstone National Park in hot (65° C), unfriendly soil. How the plant manages this feat is a mystery. What we do know, is that the grass can only tolerate high temperatures if it's been infected by a fungus, and the fungus has to be infected by an RNA virus. In the paper describing this discovery, the researchers provided the GenBank accession numbers for the viral sequences. I decided to see if I could find out more about the proteins and what they do. Read part I, part II, and part…
evolgen | May 17, 2007Keith Robison, at Omics! Omics!, asks and answers the question, "What math courses should a biologist take in college?" His answer: a good statistics course is a must (one where you learn about experimental design and Bayesian statistics), and a survey course that covers topics like graph theory and matrix math would provide a nice introduction to important topics (that course probably doesn't exist at most colleges). He also advocates taking a programming class and turning math education into something more stimulating rather than rote drilling (easier said than done).
This being a blog, I,…
clock | May 16, 2007When I teach BIO101 I usually give at least one assignment that entails finding a biology-related article, writing a short summary of it and explaining the gist of it to the rest of the class. We did that this Monday and the students picked, as usual, some interesting topics (including some that take us way outside of the scope of the course, e.g., game theory and Evolutionarily Stable Strategies). The sources, as usual, are popular science magazines like American Scientist (the last one that is still of high quality, I'm afraid to say), Scientific American, Discover, Natural History, etc.…
clock | May 15, 2007Seed Magazine sent two intrepid reporters to Albuquerque to cover this year's Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (you may remember those under the old name of "Westinghouse"). They are busy filing their reports and you can find them all on the special scienceblogs Intel ISEF blog.
We never had science fairs in Yugoslavia - the science competitions were all in a paper-and-pencil style (like Math Olympiad), nothing to make or do, just theory and solving problems. I usually did better in math and English (as ESL) than in physics, chemistry and biology championships. But my…
evolgen | May 14, 2007
The Canadian research organization Genome BC has unveiled a science education website, Genomics Education. One of the features of the website is Floyd the Fruit Fly, who, we can only presume, is some sort of cartoon drosophilid. Or maybe he's a tephritid, but I highly doubt it. When you hear "fruit fly" and "genetics", you think Drosophila, even if they really aren't fruit flies.
In the accompanying illustration, we see Floyd with smelly feet. Apparently, Floyd thinks that his foot stank is due to mitosis. He then learns, via a disembodied voice backed up by a soundtrack from an early Ron…
sporte | May 11, 2007Do you want to learn how to use some cool biotechnology and bioinformatics methods in your college or high school class?
If you're on the East coast, the best place to go is the Fralin Biotechnology Conference at Virignia Tech, July 18-21st.
(Yes, it's the same Virgina Tech, and that's why I waited to post this announcement).
There's something for everyone at this conference. For beginners, there's a pre-conference Biotech Boot camp where you can learn to run gels and clone genes. For instructors with more experience, there are great talks, new techniques to test, and plenty of…
sporte | May 10, 2007tags: moose, bioinformatics class, willows, plant genes
PZ's morning post about a bear killing a moose in someone's yard (they do live in Alaska, after all), reminded me that it's time to make an announcement about our upcoming course.
No, no, no! We're not going to kill any moose on the premises. We're going to learn about the moose and its food, not the moose as its food.
But, if you take the course that precedes ours, you might get to see some moose, and you might get to see some bears eating salmon.
The class before ours is entitled "Ecology of South Central Alaska " and they have…
clock | May 8, 2007If you are idle, retired or rich, if you live in (or are willing to move to) Oakland, California, if you have decent computer skills and if you want to help fight against Creationism, then this job is perfect for you:
From the National Center for Science Education:
Information technology technician needed by the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the teaching of evolution in the public schools, to maintain and expand NCSE's web presence, including maintenance of hardware platforms, determining software needs, and overseeing migration of content to a…
clock | May 7, 2007Yup, I am teaching my accelerated BIO101 class tonight again. It is all about figuring out what is really important, stripping away everything else, trying not to fry the students' brains, and keeping one's own sanity in the process. I'll probably spend about 30 minutes on cell division and DNA replication, about 45 minutes on development, about 30 minutes on genotype and phenotype and about an hour on evolution, taking breaks between each two topics. In the end, if there is time, I may show an old movie. How old? Well, Steve Jones is in it and he looks young and he talks about his -…
clock | May 6, 2007Three out of ten Republican presidential candidates raised hands in the recent debate indicating they do not believe in evolution. Jason has an excellent round-up of responses (Arianna Huffington rocks!) with some good comments by readers as well. How can you help combat scientific ignorance? If your blog is NOT a science blog, try to do what Mike suggests and link to five science-related posts every week.
There is plenty of stuff here at scienceblogs.com, but you can also use this page when you are looking for science posts, especially the science-related carnivals listed at the very…
clock | May 4, 2007Making the second Science Blogging Conference even bigger and better, we are happy to announce that the January 19th, 2008 meeting will be hosted by Sigma Xi (publishers of American Scientist) in their gorgeous new building in the Research Triangle Park. Their conference facilities can house more people (225 as opposed to 170 we had last time) and provide more space for shmoozing between and after the sessions.
For those who arrive early, there will be Friday afternoon events, sessions and meals on or close to the UNC campus. We have tentatively secured two excellent session leaders so…
evolgen | May 3, 2007Here's some interesting science:
A commonly used medicinal leach may have been misidentified as the wrong species.
Here is a description of the Human Variome Project, which seems more focused on mapping disease genes than doing cool population genetics. That's too bad.
Science has an article on the benefits of undergraduate research. The most important one: to get into grad school.
You can use molecular markers to determine that a lonesome tortoise has no reason to feel alone.
The central nervous system is homologous across all animals.
What is the greatest innovation? I've tackled this…
clock | May 3, 2007NPR has started a year-long series on climate called Climate Connections. The other day, they broadcast the first in a series of their educational segments, starting at the very beginning: the carbon atom. You can read the intro here and watch the video here but just listening to the audio in the car was absolutely fascinating (the video is close, but much shorter and not identical to the first quarter of the audio segment for which the podcast is at the "listen" button).
The science was very basic yet completely correct and the entire segment was so fun to listen to. It was fast and…
clock | May 2, 2007This was released to public today:
Conceived by Mathematica creator and scientist Stephen Wolfram as a way to bring computational exploration to the widest possible audience, The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.
Its daily-growing collection of interactive illustrations is created by Mathematica users from around the world, who participate by contributing innovative Demonstrations.
Interactive computational resources have…
clock | May 1, 2007Jake, Chad, Rob, Janet, Chad again and Chad again. have already written everything important about today's Buzz topic - the undergraduate research. What I will do is add a few examples and you draw conclusions why this worked (or not) for each one of them.
A Self-Starter
Kevin Messenger loved snakes all his life. He did his own research in high school, a standard survey of herps in the Sandhills area of North Carolina. He presented that at a meeting of the Herps society while a high-school senior. He went to college to NCSU because he wanted to work with Hal Heathwole. He got his own…
clock | April 27, 2007I am starting my BIO101 for adults course again on Monday and this time I am deteremined to use a blog in the classroom. To begin with, I copied my lecture notes here (still needs some fiddling and editing before Monday) and we'll see how it works out.