A few neat gleanings from my favorite blogs:

Over at Schooner of Science — Smelling the Moon. A fictional pregnant woman swears she can smell moonbeams.  Do pregnant women really smell things more strongly?

What’s really cool is that the women THINK they smell better now they are pregnant, but there’s not the evidence there to say that this is REALLY the case. Is it just that this test wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up the change in smell which seems so noticeable to the smeller, or do they just feel like things smell different now? Is there a change, and does it effect the nose or the brain? Science, alas, is yet to have an answer.

Smelling moonbeams seems a little far-fetched though. But if you’re curious on what the moon smells like, astronauts say it smells like burnt gunpowder. After a moonwalk the dust sticks to their clothes and they say it smells very strong (they’ve even, accidentally I’m sure, tasted some!) Once the dust gets back to Earth it doesn’t smell anymore. Weird, right?

From Cognitive Daily – Chocolate improves upon a positive mood. A group of volunteers watched either a happy, upsetting, or neutral movie scene.

Then half the volunteers were given a piece of chocolate, and the unlucky second group got a glass of water. 1 minute later, they reported their mood once again. This was repeated for each clip (the clips were shown in a random order for each participant)…. the effect of chocolate depends on the type of movie the viewers watched. If the movie was sad, then eating chocolate led to a significant improvement in mood, significantly better than water. For a happy film, there was no improvement in mood, and the difference between chocolate and water was only marginally significant. For a neutral movie, there was no significant difference in the effect of chocolate and water.

Derek Bruff in Teaching with Classroom Response Systems talks about his use of pre-class reading quizzes using clickers:

All that active learning during class must mean you can’t cover all the same content, right?  Although I find the term “cover” problematic, I understand these questions. …  One response is to move some of the learning that would have taken place during class to out-of-class time.  One way to do this is by having our students read their textbooks before class, which I’ve done in my math courses for several years now. …. However, since studies show that only about 30% of students will read their textbooks before class without some kind of incentive, it’s helpful to have students complete pre-class reading quizzes online.  This semester, I’m having my students do so via our course blog.

Cocktail Party Physics has a great set of tips for scientists to make sure that journalists report accurately on their science (spurred by the New York Times article suggesting that electrons are uncharged).  And Ms. Ouellette took a break from finishing her book to write about calculus anxiety and girls:

A geometry teacher tells the entire class that the girls would probably do the worst in his course because they lacked spatial reasoning ability. A guidance counselor shunts female students into “practical math” classes where they learn how many ham slices each guest would need at a wedding. A physics professor insists on checking his female students’ work before they can leave the lab, yet doesn’t feel the need to check the work of his male students. A computer science professor dismisses any questions from female students as “lazy little girl whining.” And a calculus teacher thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to measure his female students’ bodies and use those measurements as part of his volume calculations in class.

Dot Physics has a delightful rant about podcasting of university lectures:

If all you (as an instructor) are doing is stuff that could be a podcast, then why not have it as a podcast? …The above article mentions that some professors have their lectures on iTunes university, but limit the number of downloads to encourage students to come to class. I don’t get it. If they can get everything they need from the podcast, why come to class?

I think technology is cool. However, just using technology because you can is a bad idea. In this, case, I don’t think the technology is used incorrectly. If you have a class that is just a lecture, the podcast makes a lot of sense. You can pause it and replay it. That should be useful. The problem is (in my opinion) with classes that can be podcasted. Maybe there is a need for some classes that have very low level learning (like memorizing stuff), but I think there should be more classes that engage students at a higher level.

Hear hear!  He even advocates using clickers.  Go Rhett.  And more recently he has a nice post about clickers — how they’re used, and some low tech alternatives.

The Artful Amoeba has some beautiful pictures of fungi (and gorgeous prose to tell us about them).  She also writes about the (now somewhat old news) of the first video of giant squid:

Why is it incredible we only recently recovered images and film?

Scientists have known for over a century that giant squid from the beaks and pieces they dredged out of sperm whale stomachs. Dead specimens had washed up on shores in Newfoundland and New Zealand, from which one lucky specimen even made it to the Rev. Moses Harvey’s bathtub.

Bathtub technology has advanced considerably since 1873.

Because these creatures live in one of the most inacessible habitats on Earth — the cold, black benthic zone — live specimens eluded photography (and, for the most part, capture) for another 125 years.

As worrisome as all I’ve said so far may be to consider were one, say, out on a pleasure swim at 1,500 meters in squid-infested waters, consider this: not only is the colossal squid considerably larger and bulkier than the giant squid (although its arms are generally shorter), it also possesses hooks on its tentacles. Some swivel. Some have multiple prongs.

*Shudder*

And lastly, the Science and Entertainment exchange found a neat YouTube video with a review of clips of special effects since 1900. Very neat.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

My friend and fellow science writer Jen Frazer has started a new blog (well, two actually, but let’s start with the first). I don’t know how she can spend a whole day at work writing copy, and then come home and spin out gorgeous and witty prose, but, hey, she didn’t win the AAAS Science Journalism Award for nothing!  In the Artful Amoeba she explores charismatic microfauna, or the “weird wonderfulness of life on Earth.”  By way of explanation, she says:

I say: it’s not the taxonomy that’s important. It’s the learning about the diversity of life on Earth. We don’t have to go to Mars to find living wonders, and though I respect those that want to, I wish the 100% real living organisms on Earth could get half the attention the putative creatures on a planet millions of miles away do. The curiosity cabinet is long gone, but the curiosities are still here, just waiting for us. All 10,000 ferns. All 70,000 known fungi. All untold millions of species on Earth. I want to show you. I’m passionate about this stuff, and I like to make it fun. Please join me.

Go on.  Check it out. You know you want to.

Her other blog is Home Cooking Well - A blog about how your kitchen can enrich your life, your wallet, and your sense of humor.
As a teaser, here’s one of her recent posts on Moss That Swings Both (all?) Ways

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I’m sometimes greatly amused by the quality of press release science writing that is taking the place of professional science writing these days, since no one will pay for us to do it full time anymore (Science Daily, a major source of internet science news, is made almost entirely of press releases reprinted verbatim. And you’ll notice that this very blog is, so far, gratis).

For instance, a press release on one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time includes this sentence, seemingly lifted from Timmy’s 3rd grade report on mosses:

At first glance, mosses and human beings have little in common.

Gee, ya think? I’m imagining myself at a coffee shop holding a cup of steaming tea and sitting across the table from a noticeably uncomfortable bryophyte.

Cough.  *blink*

Me: So, read anything interesting lately?

Moss: No.

See? Not much in common. Strangely, this doesn’t differ greatly from most of my actual dates.

I don’t want to seem too hard on the author here, since 1. the release was probably first written in German, and 2. this is actually one of the clearer and more helpful press releases I’ve read. In any case . . .

Scientists from ETH Zurich and the University of Freiburg im Breisgau report that they were able to insert DNA from humans and bacteria into the moss Physcomitrella patens (sounds suspiciously close to “patent”) and the moss was able to manufacture human proteins without any further help. Yes, they basically cut and paste. And the moss said: OK! Cool!

For those of you unfamiliar with the Way of the Cell, DNA makes RNA (with the help of proteins called RNA polymerases), and RNA makes proteins (with the help of cell organelles called ribosomes). The reason this moss-cular feat is astounding is that doing the same thing with flowering plants will get you nada. The mammalian gene start and end sequences have evolved themselves right out of business when placed in a similarly much-modified flowering plant. Not that there’s much of a reason that that would *ever* happen in nature. Now in an evil mad plant scientist laboratory, on the other hand . . . Belgians + petunias = Brussels sprouts. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha . . . . .

How is it mosses can do what so-called “higher” plants cannot? It’s a mistake to think of mosses as “primitive” in the sense of “inferior”. Both mosses and flowering plants have ancestors that were alive at the same time. What mosses are is “less-derived”, in biologist-speak. The lineage that gave us mosses just didn’t change as much over time as the lineage that produced flowering plants, because they found they were well-adapted as-is to their particular niche (forests, rocks, sidewalk cracks, and the sets of “Lord of the Rings” adaptations). Like sharks, they found a sweet gig and they stuck with it.

According to Ralf Reski, botanist and co-author of the paper announcing this discovery, as part of this cozying into a niche relatively early on for multicellular life (moss seem to have sprouted out of the ocean and then pretty much called it a day) mosses have stayed genetic generalists. And this easy-going gene-set enables them to translate a wide range of DNA. In fact, hold on to your hats . . .

This cross-kingdom conservation of mammalian and moss protein production machineries is phylogenetically profound, and has several implications for basic and applied research. Comparative genomics, as well as functional studies, have recently established major differences in metabolic pathways and gene function between flowering plants and P. patens, and have suggested that a substantial moss gene pool is more closely related to mammals than to flowering plants (Frank et al., 2007; Rensing et al., 2008).

–Plant Biotechnology Journal, Volume 7, Issue 1, 2009. Pages: 73–86

Dude! An article in the Plant Biotechnology Journal just blew my mind!

Who knew? Well, maybe John Wyndham.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at what on Earth possessed these scientists to stuff human genes into a soft, green, cushiony object and at why biology is WAY cooler than nuclear physics. Stay tuned.

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Read more on Jen’s blog here.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

Here’s some link love for the last few weeks…

Ms. Ouellette has a delightfully morbid post about preserving corpses (including those from the Body World exhibit) over at Cocktail Party Physics. If you’ve got a morbid streak (like I do), here’s also my little post about the science of death (which, not surprisingly, refers to another of Cocktail Party Physics posts).

Skyguy gives video answers to kids’ questions about the universe, like why are galaxies swirly and how many galaxies are there? Any K-12 teachers (and any kids!) will want to check out his video blog.

Uncertain Principles gets down to the gritty to answer just what he would do to fix science education.

Built on Facts talks about how the safety of robot cars is just a matter of statistical perception

Female Science Professor on the weird list of guidelines given to her at a PTA meeting, and how such a list could be productively used for clueless students visiting her in office hours.

Cycling scientists are a duo from my alma mater (UC Santa Cruz) cycling around the wilds of Australia to bring science to remote outback schools.  You can see their blog here.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

Sciencewomen just posted a fabulously detailed blogroll of all the women blogging on science topics.

A great resource.  I wonder how the proportion of women blogging about science compares to the proportion of women employed in the sciences?  There certainly seem to b a decent number of us blogging about physics, considering the dismal number of women in physics.

See my next post for some thoughts about being a minority in the sciences and how it makes me feel stupid.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

OK, ok, I’ll start a blogroll. It seems to be the happenin’ thing to do, and I do read so many great articles on other blogs and want to acknowledge them in some way! So here’s Steph’s geekgirl picks for the last handful of weeks:

Cocktail Party Physics – Pretty Poison -- on how men don’t believe a woman can kick their ass (until she does) and takes us back to a history of bad-ass women whose weapon of choice was arsenic. And for those of you who, like me, read and were understandably puzzled by the climate-change denialism piece in the Physics & Society newsletter of the American Physical Society, she comments in detail on this climate change kerfuffle. And finally, she writes a really interesting post about teeth and her recent root canal and why you might feel tooth pain in your eye.

Built on Facts is my new favorite blog and he’s got some real zingers this month, such as the temperature inside a microwave oven (not as hot as you’d think!), how a rope hangs perfectly to minimize energy (yes, the lovely catenary), and the physics behind the fact that hairbrushes don’t burst into flame when we drop them.

NPR – The Center for Inquiry (which has a fantastic podcast, called Point of Inquiry focusing on rationalism and critical thinking), holds a summer camp for skeptics called Camp Inquiry. Framing Science explains why this is a better face of atheism than angry hostility — “Rather than attacks and ridicule, the camp kids are focused on learning, reflection, and dialogue.” Sounds good to me.

Deep Sea News posts a disturbing chart about ocean species decline worldwide. It’s stunning.

Active Learning blog posts a great wealth of ways that you can test student learning in constructivist classrooms.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.