We always enjoy home science experiments and it was fun the other night to learn about a new experiment we could try with our teenage daughter and an iPhone. As it turned out, the joke was on us. My husband is an enthusiastic fan of the iPhone store. Last night ...
Last fall, this blog got nominated for the 2008 Edublog awards, in the Best resource sharing category. I was a bit distracted in December so this information came and passed without any acknowledgement. Now, I would like to thank whoever nominated Discovering Biology in a Digital World. I'm especially thankful ...
tags: 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 ...
A couple of years ago, I answered a reader's question about the cost of genome sequencing. One of my readers had asked why the cost of sequencing a human genome was so high. At that time, I used some of the prices advertised by core labs on the web and ...
About mid-morning, my 16yr old daughter called me from school and asked me to help her get an interview transcript that was on her computer. Four years ago, when my older daughter was in high school, I would have printed that document and driven to the school to deliver it ...
This First Annual Conference for New Jersey Biotechnology Educators will be held on Saturday, Oct. 4th at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. I'm excited about attending this conference, not only because of the biotechnology part, but because I've reading Sarah Vowel's book Assassination vacation and I'm looking ...
Reposted from Halloween 2006. Since Ben shared his family's taxonomy of candy types, and it's Friday, after all, I thought I'd share some of things that we do with candy around our house and describe some fun things that you can do with candy at home. Materials and methods. First ...
Scale, proportion, and quantity belong to one of the cross cutting concepts in the next generation science standards (NGSS). According to Volume 2 of the NGSS, "in engineering, no structure could be conceived much less constructed without the engineer's precise sense of scale." The authors go on to note that ...
Okay OpenOffice fans, show me what you can do. Earlier this week, I wrote about my challenges with a bug in Microsoft Excel that only appears on Windows computers. Since I use a Mac, I didn't know about the bug when I wrote the assignment and I only found out ...
Bill Gates, Eric Lander, Maynard Olson, Leena Peltonen, and George Church fielded questions last night at a fascinating panel discussion on personal genomics at the University of Washington. We were fortunate to be in the audience. I'll share some of the questions and answers, in some cases shortened and paraphrased ...
Previously, I wrote about students using science blogging as a way to develop an on-line portfolio and document their skills. One friend wrote me this morning and asked if my instructions to our students were really as simple as I described. Well, no. In fact, it wasn't easy to persuade ...
One of my favorite web 2.0 technologies is the webinar. When you work at a company and not a University, with constant seminars, it gets a bit harder to hop on a bus and travel across town to learn about new things. Webinars are a good way to fill that ...
Would you like to win a cash prize and maybe an expense paid trip to New York City? If you're in grades 7-12 and like research, you might be interested in the 2009 Young Naturalist contest from the American Museum of Natural History. Winners (2 from each grade) will receive ...
These are the real things that give nightmares to post-docs and graduate students. One thing that you don't learn, until you either do a research project in a lab or you start graduate school, is that science isn't really the straightforward cut and dry process of: we do this step ...
Know your biology! I get asked often about the type of bioinformatics training that students should get and whether it should be a special course or not. And I answer that I think teaching bioinformatics in the absence of biology is like teaching Microsoft Word in the absence of writing ...
Trade publications; such as catalogs, technical bulletins, and web sites; are a valuable source of information for students in biotechnology-related courses. Not only do catalogs and technical publications provide current information, but they also contain a wealth of useful facts and physical constants that biologists need on-the-job. Further, using catalogs ...
"And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard, And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall. " - BoB Dylan Tired of Simpson reruns and the exploits of Friends? [From the WSTA] NOVA is broadcasting an entire series of shows on hurricanes, Katrina, and ...
By now, many of you have probably seen the the new BLAST web interface at the NCBI. There are many good things that I can say about it, but there are a few others that caught me by surprise during my last couple of classes. tags: Because of these changes ...
What skills does a biotechnology technician need to know? This seems like a simple question, but people have been struggling to define biotech skill standards since the early 90's. Complicating this question is that many areas of biotechnology require somewhat different skills. Antibody work requires one set, plant or animal ...
I just love this title! It's nerdy and cute, all at the same time. I read about this in www.researchblogging.org and had to check out the paper and blog write up from The Beagle Project (BTW: some of you may be interested in knowing that The Beagle Project is not ...
The first research assignment for our Alaska NSF Chautauqua course has been posted. Your task is to find a wound-inducible plant gene, learn something about it, and post a description in the comment section. We've already had one excellent answer, but I know there are at least 54 wound-inducible genes ...
When can a really bad virus be used to do something good? When we can use it to learn. The human immunodeficiency virus, cause of AIDS, scourge of countries, and recent focus of ScienceBlogs; like humans, evolves. As one of my fellow ScienceBloggers noted, few biological systems demonstrate evolution as ...
Let the experiment begin. We're experimenting with HIV in this series. And yes, you can try this at home! If you want to see where we've been and get an idea where we're going, here are the links. Part I. Meet HIV and learn how we're going to use it ...
In which we see the results and come to our own conclusions. If you want to let other people tell you what's right and what's wrong, they will surely do so. Turn on the TV and hordes of happy actors bounce around, only too happy to help you purchase the ...
Did HIV become resistant to Atazanavir because of a genetic change? Was that genetic change inherited? Did HIV evolve? Can we explain why genetic changes at specific sites might help HIV escape the effects of the drug? Let's find out. All of the sequences in the image below (except for ...
There's no question that the ability to work with information is one that will be required and valued for a long time to come. I think it's imperative for teachers to have students practice this skill whenever an opportunity comes about. The problem for many teachers is finding the time ...
The Galápagos islands rank high on my list of places that I really, really, really want to visit. But for many reasons, it's always looked like a trip to the Galápagos would be at least a decade or two away. Now, I'll be able to go in January and so ...
What do you do if you're a scientist and want to volunteer in a classroom? How do you find the right place to go and right kind of activity that suites your talents? One of my commenters asked about this a few weeks ago. With the new school year up ...
The National Girls Collaborative Project, as you might guess from the title, focuses on helping girls and engaging girls in science, technology, engineering, and math (aka "STEM"). photos used with permission from NGCP Quoting from the NGCP website, (the emphasis is mine): Numerous programs and initiatives seek to create gender ...
Want to learn more about Parkinson's disease? See why a single nucleotide mutation messes up the function of a protein? I have a short activity that uses Cn3D (a molecular viewing program from the NCBI) to look at a protein that seems to be involved in a rare form of ...
tags: 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 ...
It's hard sometimes when you're out of synch with the rest of the world. While my fellow ScienceBloggers have been obsessing about breasts, I've been really amused by the genetics of ear wax. Eh, what's that you say? Yes, it's true. Back in March, when Nature Genetics published this paper ...
How can you win a nerd contest if you don't dress the part? Last year, I started a shop at CafePress to help distribute lab materials and fund my adventures in science education. Part of the fun has been making molecular merchandise to help show everyone that molecular models are ...
If you're going to create a new life form ( even if it's only digital), Sunday Saturday seems like the best day to give it a try. Reposted from an earlier year. Build-A-Virus is a quick, fun, and simple game that was created and put on-line by Bioreliance, now owned ...
Well, probably getting a stipend to help you do it. And, the really cool thing is that's part of the deal! Hustle, hustle the deadline is March 7th, and all the contact info is below. The NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates program in Environmental Microbiology at UNLV is accepting applications ...
Our new Scibling, Jane, is a real life computer scientist. If you've ever wondered what computer scientists really do during the day, Jane will set you straight ( I guess they're not playing Nintendo. Darn! Another illusion shattered, just like that.) Jane has also promised to explain why computer science ...
Some of them work for Bayer. The San Francisco Chronicle has a nice article on a 15 year old education program in Berkeley that serves students from Berkeley High and Life Academy. Over 1500 students have participated in this program, with 862 placed in internships. I really liked reading about ...
In the effort to help us define a few basic concepts, PZ started out by giving us a nice simple definition of a gene, but as he, rightly noted: I tell you right now that if I asked a half dozen different biologists to help me out with this, they'd ...
and what is the volume of the sea? This sounds a bit like the beginning of a poem but it's really the answer to the question we posed last week on a Digital Biology Friday. We can see, in the sequence window, that two strands are both labeled 5' on ...
Experimenting with on-line worksheets I know some people who always teach their classes the same way, semester after semester, year after year.. Not me. I always want to experiment and try new things. This fall, I'm experimenting with using a wiki in the classroom, in addition to my blog. This ...
How do microbiologists determine which microbe caused a disease? As Tara has eloquently described ( I, II), we are covered with bacteria and other microbes. A reasonable question then, is when we get sick, how do we which little devil deserves the blame? In many cases, pathogens ( disease-causing organisms) ...
Jonathan Eisen (@ phylogenomics) shared this wonderful Lady Gaga lab spoof on Twitter the other day. It rocks. And, it makes me wonder if my pals who've been thinking about getting students interested in careers by having scientists talk on camera might be going at this the wrong way. Sure ...
Have you ever wondered about Cheeze Whiz? why new cars have a distinctive smell? or what makes golf balls so springy? Chemical and Engineering News, published by the American Chemical Society, has a wonderful section that you will certainly appreciate. " What's that stuff?" is a collection of entertaining stories ...
A long standing debate in my field is whether or not biologists, who work with computers, need to learn how to program. I usually say "no." Let the programmers program, the biologists interpret the results, and let everyone can benefit from each other's expertise. Well, I've changed my mind in ...
The blood typing lab, part I. What went wrong? and why? Blood typing part II. Can this laboratory be saved? Those wacky non-major Zoo students are at it again! And this time they drew blood! Mike's undergraduate students learned about blood typing, a common tool of detectives and real crime ...
Razib inspired me to share some of the story behind why white people are considered derivatives. No red herrings, here! Lamason et. al. found a single gene that controls human skin color while studying pigmentation in zebra fish (1). These zebra fish had an unusual golden color that turned out ...
We'll have a blast, I promise! But there's one little thing we need to discuss first... I want to explain why I'm going to use nucleotide sequences for the blast search. (I used protein the other day). It's not just because someone told me too, there is a solid rational ...
It's funny but even though I work with data on a regular basis, I can't always predict the best way to manage data until I have my own data to manage. My classroom wiki site is no exception. Now, that I've been seriously using a wiki with my class, I've ...
When does a little artistic license go a little too far? We don't always expect the truth in science journalism imagery. We've all seen the newspaper pictures of the famous scientist wearing a lab coat and gazing intently at a gel, looking through a microscope, or contemplating an agar plate ...
