June 2008

Myth 9: It’s a matter of taste…

June 26, 2008

Hey all, I just posted a new episode to my Science Teaching Tips podcast… a bunch of fun activities having to do with taste, and debunking some common myths about taste. Check it out — Episode 41. It’s a matter of taste. This activity is from the Exploratorium’s Human Body Explorations: http://explo.stores.yahoo.net/humbodex.html The Nose Knows [...]

Read the full article →

Homemade USB fan….!

June 24, 2008

For those do-it-yourselfers out there, here’s a pretty neat hack — make a USB fan out of two CD’s and a toilet paper tube (and a few wires). Of course, as the comments suggests, it might take off an ear. But what’s an ear in the service of experimentation? Or, as another commenter exclaims, ” [...]

Read the full article →

Myth 8: The Big Bang

June 21, 2008

There are a lot of myths about the “Big Bang” — the theoretical rapid expansion of space giving rise to the universe as we know it. One of the biggest ones is that the universe expanded from a point, and thus has some edge. Many of us picture the Big Bang as an explosion, throwing [...]

Read the full article →

Activity: Take it from the Top

June 20, 2008

Here’s something for the K-12 educators out there (or just those who like to play around with large chunks of wood. I mean, who doesn’t?). I just posted a new episode for my Science Teaching Tips podcast. Check out the new episode – “Take it from the Top”. Don Rathjen was a K-12 science teacher [...]

Read the full article →

How to make hyperbolic coral

June 20, 2008

This is a follow-up to my original post on Margaret Wertheim and her hyperbolic coral project. There’s also a little more about Margaret Wertheim’s hyperbolic crochet project from the Exploratorium, and a live webcast from the Exploratorium with her, to learn how to crochet coral critters (scroll down to July 2007). Margaret Wertheim is a [...]

Read the full article →

What a beautiful moon last night…

June 19, 2008

Photo credit: The full moon rising over Manchester, Maryland. Credit: Edmund E. Kasaitis. I went hiking under the full moon last night, without even knowing that it was something special (other than a beautiful big pink full moon over the lights of Boulder). Last night was the solstice moon, as one of my fellow hikers [...]

Read the full article →

Fun and free science!

June 19, 2008

Here’s a totally cool output from my old “alma mater”: the Exploratorium Digital Library Afterschool Project. This website has fantastically simple videos on how to do a selection of cool activities that the creative folks at the Exploratorium have come up with over the years. The point of this particular website is to promote activities [...]

Read the full article →

Physics rules

June 17, 2008

A fantastic play on the “it’s all physics anyway” mantra, posted from xkcd webcomic. Thanks to Dave at Damn Lefties for posting a link to this.

Read the full article →

Talking to scientists about the media

June 16, 2008

I was pleased to see a post on Framing Science outlining an upcoming workshop that he’s teaching to postdocs and grad students on how to communicate their work to the public. This post is cross-posted there. I’m a scientist-turned-journalist who has given several talks on this subject to other scientists, and really appreciate hearing that [...]

Read the full article →

Photos of ovulation!

June 15, 2008

Here are some fantastic photos from the New Scientist website — accidentally captured the clearest picture of a woman’s ovary in the process of ovulation. Pictures and articles here I guess it’s pretty hard to get pictures of an event that happens for just a few minutes at one poorly determined time each month. They [...]

Read the full article →

Godzilla meets the New York City Blackout

June 14, 2008

Rajasaurus was the king of the dinosaur pile, but he didn’t make the cutting room floor. The blackouts in DC yesterday reminded me of my own sad blackout story, when I was a lowly intern at NPR. One of our most famous dinosaur experts, Paul Sereno, had just discovered a new species of dinosaur. Pretty [...]

Read the full article →

Give me Sharks or Give me Cigarettes

June 13, 2008

I just had to repost from the Deep Sea News blog, which points out an alarming 300% increase in the number of shark attacks in the last year in a particular town in Mexico: Aren’t statistics wonderful things? That’s why when you read something in the medical news about “50% fewer heart attacks” or some [...]

Read the full article →

Blogs on education

June 13, 2008

Hey, I just stumbled upon this very useful list of blogs from the National Science Digital Library — all having to do with education, digital technology, and inquiry, among other things. If you’re a STEM educator (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering & Math education, definitely check out this list. What a find! Also check out the [...]

Read the full article →

Science 2.0

June 12, 2008

I’ve been hearing a little about Science 2.0… The idea being that it’s time to spawn a second-generation of science (like the second generation of the web…. web 2.0). This is part of the Open Access and Open Data science movement, like Public Library of Science (publishing freely available scientific works) and Science Commons (making [...]

Read the full article →

This so-called life…

June 10, 2008

Yesterday’s post in Engineering Life talks about the questions that are raised by genetic engineering, and whether we ought to be more worried than we are. I wanted to take the chance to point you to WNYC Radio Lab’s (So-called) Life episode, which talks about just this — what is life, what counts as natural? [...]

Read the full article →

The science of death

June 9, 2008

Another masterful post on Cocktail Party Physics on burial rites in olden times Paris and Rome. And it made me remember one of my favorite popular science books, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. This was an absolutely delightful book. Mary Roach definitely has a deadpan dark sense of humor, but [...]

Read the full article →

Amber waves of grain…

June 8, 2008

I was out hiking today (on a looong climbing trip up the Flatirons) and in the beautiful early portion of the hike, before I knew the exhaustion that would be mine at the end of the day, we saw the wind rippling across the grass, making waves. It looked much like this: And the question [...]

Read the full article →

Myth 7: Blood is blue

June 7, 2008

I saw this on a teachers’ listserv, and realized that I had been told the same myth as a child, and it was one of those many things that worms its way into your knowledge base and then you never question it again. It’s funny how this happens, because with any thought, you often realize [...]

Read the full article →

Science & the Housewife from an age gone by…

June 6, 2008

The World’s Fair blog just published a post highlighting a study from 1946 — Scientific Analysis Simplifies a Housewife’s Work. They used motion-tracking to analyze the most movements leading to the most efficient method for making a bed. In a similar vein, check out this “Good Wife’s Guide” from Housekeeping Monthly 1955. I originally thought [...]

Read the full article →

We’ve got 10X more bacteria than cells

June 6, 2008

check out this item from Science Daily… Humans have Ten Times More Bacterial Than Human Cells: How do Microbial Communities Affect Human Health? ScienceDaily -Jun. 5, 2008 — The number of bacteria living within the body of the average healthy adult human are estimated to outnumber human cells 10 to 1. Changes in these microbial [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries