NASA’s Space Shuttle program may be ending, but astronauts still face the challenge of spending long periods in space on the International Space Station (ISS) and future planetary missions.
Astronaut Sandy Magnus knows the rigors of working and working out in space. A mission specialist on the final shuttle mission, she also spent more than four […]

Ingredients: graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate, SUN!
With the days getting longer until June 21 (the summer solstice), there’s plenty of sun for solar fun. One recipe for sweet solar success (now or this summer) is melting s’mores in a Solar Oven —no campfire needed!
A cardboard-box solar oven that you make yourself, placed in a very sunny […]

Marian Diamond keeps her brain in a hatbox—not her own brain, but the preserved human brain she shows in her famously popular anatomy lectures at the University of California, Berkeley. Holding the brain gently in her gloved hands, Professor Diamond introduces her students (including 1.5 million YouTube viewers) to this cell mass that weighs only […]

Quick, picture DNA. Chances are you’ll call to mind a diagram you’ve seen meant to represent this microscopic ‘blueprint of life:” twin helixes running in opposite directions and connected by horizontal bars.
But what if you’ve never seen such a diagram, and indeed never will? What if the sense upon which so much of science teaching […]

When Michael Edwards moved from Aberdeen, Scotland, to New Brunswick, Canada, he intended to earn a PhD in biology. But he had to abandon that plan when he developed an allergy to the potato beetles he was working with.
The doctoral program’s loss was informal science’s gain; reasoning that he had enjoyed the teaching aspect of […]

Q: What started Jim Stofan on the path of science education that eventually landed him at the DC headquarters of the country’s premier space agency?
A: The story begins with a bang–and a tweet.
From a young age, Jim was fascinated with rockets. But it was a seed-eating songbird that first sparked his interest in science.
Now NASA’s […]