Category Archives: Education

Inner Life of a Cell: Full Version

This is an extremely cool 8 minute movie on the inner workings of a Cell. The earlier version we posted about back in September of last year has been one of our most popular posts – see our most popular posts. They have added the scientific explanation that I mentioned I would love to see in the last post.

update: Unfortunately Harvard seems to want to prevent people from seeing this educational webcast. Why they don’t want to promote science education is beyond me. I guess they have better uses for their $35 billion endowment than promoting science. I sure wish they would hurry up and realize this isn’t the 18th century. They say their mission is “The advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences; the advancement and education of youth in all manner of good literature, arts, and sciences; and all other necessary provisions that may conduce to the education of the … youth of this country…” (Jun 2008). You don’t have to just educate a few privileged soles in ivy covered buildings. You can do that any provide great education material for others around the globe.

Animation created for Harvard’s Molecular and Cellular Biology program:

Harvard University selected XVIVO, LLC, a Connecticut based scientific animation company, to customize and develop an animation that would propel Harvard’s Molecular and Cellular Biology program to the next level of undergraduate education. XVIVO’s recently completed animation, titled “The Inner Life of the Cell”, has already won awards. The eight minute animation transports Harvard Biology students into a three-dimensional journey through the microscopic world of a cell.

Winter Air Refrigeration

From Freeaire:

“Free Cooling” In colder climates, the Freeaire taps into the greatest source of refrigeration ever created: winter. The Freeaire can use cold outside air to cool the space, simply using what Nature has so kindly made available, to give the entire compressor system a winter vacation.
…
In cold climates, this innovative option allows you to utilize a natural resource we have in abundance up here in the North: outside winter air. Rather than relying on the compressor system to produce cold air it simply moves the cold from outside to inside, using just a fraction of the energy.

Seems like a smart idea to me. Their systems are for large walk in freezers.

DNA Repair Army

Analysis Reveals Extent of DNA Repair Army

Elledge’s group studied human cells in culture and mapped their response to ionizing radiation and ultraviolet light. Specifically, the group looked to see which proteins in the cell were chemically altered by the enzymes ATM and ATR, finding 900 sites on 700 proteins that changed in response to DNA damage. The discovery that so many proteins are involved in the process, Elledge said, was a big surprise.

Also see: Cell Cycle Regulation and Mechanisms of DNA Repair:

Despite the abuse our DNA endures, our individual genomes usually stay basically intact because DNA has a remarkable capacity for repair. Our cells have built-in, highly efficient machinery that finds and fixes “genetic typos.”
…
Researchers have learned much about the complex genetic machinery that cells deploy to fix broken, cut, mutated, and misplaced genetic materials. Out of that evolving understanding has emerged a deeper awareness that DNA is truly dynamic and that responses to genetic damage are nearly as fundamental to life—and health—as is the genetic code itself.

Communicating Science to the Public

Webcast above: Speaking Science 2.0 by Matthew Nisbet, School of Communication, American University, and Chris Mooney, Washington Correspondent, Seed Magazine, speak at the AIBS annual meeting, May 2007, in Washington DC. They discuss how to improve the transfer of science knowledge to the public (an important topic and one I am interested in). More on The American Institute of Biological Sciences conference: Evolutionary Biology and Human Health.

via: Framing Science

Open Source Education Curricula

Curriki Global Education and Learning Community

Our mission is to improve education around the world by empowering teachers, students and parents with user-created, open source curricula, and it’s all free! We believe that access to knowledge and learning tools is a basic right of every child. Our goal is to make curricula and learning resources available to everyone.

Another promising looking effort, though they do need to improving the editing of content. They also need to add tools to make it easy to find the content others have found most beneficial. And they should improve the accessibility of the content – all of it should be available using a browser (now some content is presented only as zipped files, some are word documents…). 200 science and 150 math documents are available now including: Big Cats and Intro to Electricity . The site includes content hosted itself and links to content hosted on other sites.

Robots Renew Computer Science

Robots put the cool back in computer science (page deleted by CNN so I removed the link):

Georgia Tech, which has branded the robot the “new face of computing,” is hoping that the class can be a new national model to teach students computing. To Microsoft Corp., which is investing $1 million to jump-start the program at Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr, it’s investment in what could become its work force.

Outside groups have applauded the effort, too. “In fact, computing is a tool that can be used for virtually every application — from entertainment to medicine,” said Virginia Gold of the Association for Computing Machinery. “And the Scribbler helps show how pervasive computers are in everything.” The computing industry has a reason to be concerned about the future.

The number of new computer science majors has steadily declined since 2000, falling from close to 16,000 students to only 7,798 in fall 2006, according to the Computing Research Association. And the downward trend isn’t expected to reverse soon. The association says about 1 percent of incoming freshmen have indicated computer science as a probable major, a 70 percent drop from the rate in 2000.

High School Students Interest in Computer Programing

Interesting post on Keeping students interested in Computer Science by an 11th grader:

Most students coming into a high school computer science course are expecting to be able to program mind blowing 3D games within a semester. When most find out that they won’t be able to come close to doing so within their single course of computer science class, most bid adieu to it and move on. Students learn that playing video games is a very small subset of computer science, and find this fact discouraging. This is where many students also lose a lot of interest in computer science. They don’t care about sorting through arrays or lists of data, or coming up with algorithms to solve problems. For this reason, a balance must be found between teaching computer science concepts, and applying the learned concepts in an engaging manner.

Very true. Engaging students, as with all teaching, is critical to making learning not just tolerable but fun.

Lego Autopilot First Flight

Chris Anderson continues his progress with the sub $1,000 autonomous flight vehicle (using lego mindstorms at the core). He has created a site to track the progress and provide information resources to others: DIY Drones. Very cool.

Lego autopilot first flight:

My kids and I actually had the first successful test flight of the sub-$1,000 UAV two weekends ago, but I haven’t had time to edit the video properly until now. The good news is that a) it didn’t crash, and b) it works. We tested stabilization, autonomous navigation (only using compass headings this time, although GPS is in the works), and the real-time video downlink. Everything worked well enough that we’re able to see what we have to improve, which is the definition of a successful test.
…
The main aim of this project is to both make the world’s cheapest full-featured UAV and the first one designed to be within the reach of high school and below kids, as a platform for an aerial robotics contest. Like the Lego FIRST league, but in the air.

Evolution In Action

the way they watched the process was to sequence the whole genome of each bacterial isolate. What they found were a total of 35 mutations, which developed sequentially as the treatment continued (and the levels of resistance rose). Here’s natural selection, operating in real time, under the strongest magnifying glass available. And it’s in the service of a potentially serious problem, since resistant bacteria are no joke. (Reading between the lines of the PNAS abstract, for example, it appears that the patient involved in this study may well not have survived).

The technology involved here is worth thinking about. Even now, this was a rather costly experiment as these things go, and it’s worth a paper in a good journal. But a few years ago, needless to say, it would have been a borderline-insane idea, and a few years before that it would have been flatly impossible. A few years from now it’ll be routine, and a few years after that it probably won’t be done at all, having been superseded by something more elegant that no one’s come up with yet. But for now, we’re entering the age where wildly sequence-intensive experiments, many of which no one even bothered to think about before, will start to run.

Very interesting. He is exactly right that the technology advances continuing at an amazing pace allow for experiments we (at least I) can’t even imagine today to become common in just a few years. And the insights from those experiments will allow us to think of new experiments… Wonderful.

Finding Open Scientific Papers

Sandra Porter has posted a series of posts on finding scientific papers for free: A day in the life of an English physician – What’s the best way to find free scientific publications? – My new favorite method – one more experiment

via: Finding scientific papers for free