Archive for the 'Life Sciences' Category

Close Encounters of the Brainy Kind

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 […]

Posted in Topics: Educator Profiles, Howtosmile.org Web site, Human Body, Human Senses and Perception, Life Sciences

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Engaging all five senses in hands-on science

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 […]

Posted in Topics: Diversity, Educator Profiles, Life Sciences

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Allergic to his dissertation topic, Michael Edwards found a cure in informal science

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 […]

Posted in Topics: Educator Profiles, Engineering and Technology, Howtosmile.org Web site, Life Sciences

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NASA’s Jim Stofan on DIY rockets and the sixteen dialects of finch

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 […]

Posted in Topics: Earth and Space Science, Ecology, Educator Profiles, Outdoor and Nature

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Mapping data to change minds: a lesson from 1854

With free tools like Google Earth and mapbuilder so widely available, these days it seems that everyone’s a mapmaker.
But mapping data to location in an effort to reveal previously unseen connections—now that’s a taller order.
(To introduce learners to the concept, howtosmile.org’s data mapping activities are a good place to start.)
An excellent example of the power […]

Posted in Topics: Geography, Human Body, Medicine, Statistics, The Nature of Science

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Is water alive? Go outside and find out

Educator Cheryl McCallum talks about one of her favorite SMILE outdoor activities, and how to make it work even if you don’t have “an outdoor space teeming with living things.”
These days, I work in a museum. But before that I was an “outdoor educator,” taking 5th graders on hikes through the East Texas Piney […]

Posted in Topics: Earth and Space Science, Ecology, Outdoor and Nature

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Teaching to the oil spill (& helping with a solution)

Since April 20, people around the world have watched as millions of gallons of oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. We tune in to news accounts of oil-covered pelicans, tar balls on beaches, and underwater “plumes” that may be even more damaging that the oil washing up on our shorelines. An entire ecosystem, not […]

Posted in Topics: Citizen Science, Ecology, Engineering and Technology, General, Scientific Ethics

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