Bats, caves, danger and exotic locales. That should catch your students’ attention! The big story here is the co-evolution of viruses and their nonhuman animal hosts, who seem to have a harmless, symbiotic relationship with viruses that cause deadly outbreaks in humans. Though this story is about Marburg virus and a fruit bat, the concepts […]

An oxymoron? Perhaps, but 500 million years ago, such a creature roamed the vast seas. That was before the dinosaurs and concurrent with the Cambrian explosion. Scientists who put the fossil parts together described the giant shrimp this way:

. . . this underwater predator had a segmented body, a pair of claws and a circular […]

When you conjure up an image of cells, what do you see? What do you think? You may see a snapshot of an animal tissue, perhaps with actively dividing cells. That’s understandable because, as animals ourselves, we’re aware that cells come from other cells, thus the need to undergo mitosis, or cell division, frequently.
But one […]

If you’ve taught plate tectonics at the middle school level, you’re probably quite familiar with the supercontinent Pangaea. But did you know that Pangaea was not the only supercontinent in earth’s history – just the last to date? Millions of years before Pangaea, another supercontinent known as Rodinia united all of earth’s landmass in an […]

Those of us born after World War II have take antibiotics for granted. Strep throat? Ear infection? Acne? Bronchitis? Not a problem. Take the full prescribed antibiotic dose and you are cured. The reality of antibiotic resistant bacteria however, disrupts that scenario. No longer can we always trust in a full recovery from a bacterial […]

No one wants to see pandas, polar bears, or penguins go extinct. Why have organizations like the World Wildlife Fund been so successful in garnering the general public’s support for their conservation efforts? Perhaps it is because we find these animals appealing on an affective level. In many people’s minds, they’re worth conserving for emotional […]

ScienceDaily has brought us yet another interesting article related to the NSES Life Science Content Standard. My guess is that middle school teachers’ and students’ olfaction capabilities might be a bit superior to the general public’s, given my personal experience in teaching middle school! Nonetheless, scientists from Northwestern University’s School of Medicine report that imperceptible […]

Looking for another opportunity to integrate math and science? How two researchers applied game theory to explain the coevolution of microbes and humans and to predict some “pretty bad epidemics” in our biological future was the subject of a story in ScienceDaily, October 20, 2007. The original model by microbiologist Martin J. Blaser […]