National Science Foundation (NSF) Special Reports online feature topics that highlight scientific discoveries accomplished with NSF support. Topics include weather, evolution, mathematics, visualization, technology, polar, infectious disease, robotics, wild animals, earthquake engineering, cyberinfrastructure, tsunami, arctic and climate. Special reports are available as interactive resources or as text only versions. This collection has recently been added to NSDL.

NSF Special Reports look at aspects of cross-cutting topics from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The recently published “Climate Change” Special Report, for example, examines this complex issue throught the broad lenses of current research on Sky, Sea, Life, Land, Life and People.

These publications also take on topics that are of national significance such as the decline in mathematics educational acheivement by U.S. students. Research supported by NSF is highlighted in “Math, What’s the Problem” which looks at the role of teaching, curriculum and technology in math education, and demonstrates the importance of math education to all citizens.

Date Updated: January 26, 2009

Driving less, biking more, paying attention to vehicle fuel efficiency, and looking for economical transportation options are all worthy endeavors, especially right now.  American’s love affair with cars, however, and their utility as a platform for studying environmental engineering challenges is far from over. Two springtime events–the Indiana Super Mileage Challenge and the 2009 Green Grand Prix in Watkins Glen, NY promise to highlight advances in green auto engineering that will make automobiles run better, faster and farther on less.

A 1914 Woods Electric Dual Tiller Brougham, the last remaining example, owned by Golden Miles LLC will be exhibited at the Green Grand Prix in Watkins Glen, NY on May 2, 2009.

27 entries designed and built by Indiana high school students compete in the Indiana Super Mileage Challenge (SMC) on April 27, 2009 to help engineer solutions for our nation’s energy needs. The SMC is sponsored by the Indiana Mathematics, Science and Technology Education Alliance took place at O’Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis where SMC High School students applied Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) principles to design, engineer, construct, test and evaluate vehicles that obtain the highest MPG (http://www.oreillyracewaypark.com/apcm/templates/racedivisions.asp?articleid=36050&zoneid=95). Results are not yet in but check their web sites below to find out how they did: http://www.doe.in.gov/octe/technologyed/SuperMileageChallenge.html.

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On Saturday May 2 Hybrid & Alternative Vehicles will run the only the official Sports Car Club of America (SCCA). Time-Speed-Distance Road Rally for Hybrid and Alternate Fuel Vehicles in North America. The Fourth Annual Green Grand Prix rally is hosted by the International Motor Racing Research Center will be run over 60 miles of scenic roads concluding in the streets of Watkins Glen by midday. The first official Green Grand Prix was run by 34 cars following a course around the 78 mile perimeter of Seneca Lake in western New York State in 2006.

Post-rally activities are centered at the Racing Research Center in Watkins Glen. The Wayne Technical and Career Center in Williamson, N.Y., will showcase a student-made portable energy lab, which includes solar panels and a wind generator. Also featured will be an Electrathon electric race car from Baker High School in Baldwinsville, N.Y. Cars on display will include The Woods Electric Dual Tiller, a production electric vehicle built in 1914.

A panel discussion will address sustainability issues, and Cornell University’s X-Prize Team, which has been working on a 100 mpg mass-producible car, is expected to do a presentation on its project.

Earth Day has been an annual rite of spring in the U.S. since it was first celebrated by 20 million people on April 22, 1970. Back then, activists joined with citizens to revel in the experience of living on a green-blue planet while calling attention to environmental policies designed to keep it that way. This year you can celebrate Earth Day by participating in local events scheduled in communities nationwide on the Earth Day Network. A yearlong initiative called the Green Generation will be launched to lead up to the 40th anniversary of Earth Day in 2010. Next year’s celebration will focus on making a public commitment to take an environmental action. Doing, not thinking about buying green products, remembering to take shopping bags to the grocery store, and replacing energy-guzzling appliances are among many big and small actions you can take to “go green.”

Image courtesy of NASA “Astronomy Picture of the Day, February 4, 1998.” This view of Earth from space was taken by the NEAR Spacecraft Team.

Earth Day notables:

•The GREEN Schools Campaign aims to green up all of America’s K12 schools within a generation via policy reform, green makeovers, teacher grant programs and resources on the Educators’ Network.

•Join the Educators’ Network to find Environmental Education lessons, tips, grants for teachers, and more ideas

The month of May kicks off with a celebration of Astronomy Day on May 2–2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. Explore the news updates and projects located on the IYA site, or utilize the NSDL ComPADRE Digital Library for Physics and Astronomy and their Astronomy Center to find activities, learning resources, and more.

Tom Henderson has been teaching high school physics since 1989. ComPADRE, NSDL’s Physics and Astronomy Pathway hosts a popular online physics tutorial that Tom Henderson developed to help high school students at Glenbrook South High School in Glenview, Illinois on the Physics Classroom web site. Physics Classroom resources contain a tutorial with built-in self-assessment tools for checking comprehension, animations and QuickTime media that demonstrate physics in action, and relevant question-and-answer pages. Henderson’s hands-on, basic skill approach seems to be catching on. NSDL webmetrics reports that the Physics Classroom site received more than 600,000 page views during the first week of April.

“A blue car moving at a constant speed of 10 m/s passes a red car that is at rest.” Investigate this animated problem at the Physics Classroom: http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/kinema/stl.cfm

Teaching physics comes with a built-in set of challenges. In this 1996 article the issues behind helping students through basic physics comprehension as a building block to fascination with, and further study of the precise nature of the physical world is discussed.

“The dominant public perception of physics is that it is tedious, abstract, and fundamentally irrelevant; the challenge in an introductory course is to convince the audience that physics is rewarding, fun, useful, and most of all a worthwhile endeavor.” (Freedman, R., Challenges in Teaching and Learning Introductory Physics) 

Most of us think we know how our world works in relation to our daily lives, like, for example,when we stop at a traffic light. Taking a fresh look at the Physics Classroom web site (http://www.physicsclassroom.com/) may provide a few surprises and insights for students of all ages.

It’s a big month for good news in the “Triangle” region of North Carolina whether you are a fan of college basketball or computational science. The Raleigh News & Observer (N&O) has published a “Tar Heel of the Week” feature since January 19, 1950. In that time 2,500 North Carolinians have been named “Tar Heel of the Week.” Honorees have included politicians, business leaders, teachers, athletes, and activists. This week Dr. Robert Panoff, founder and director of the Durham educational foundation, Shodor, and PI of the NSDL Computational Science Education Resources Pathway, joined the ranks of N&O superlative tar heels for championing the idea “that to get better math and science students you need to teach their teachers.” Panoff said, “My goal was not to cure cancer but to do what I could for science education.”

Dr. Robert M. Panoff is the founder and executive director, Shodor Education Foundation in Durham since 1994. He also serves as consultant for the education program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Panoff latest endeavor is to make sure that students are prepared to participate in sustained petascale computing by participating in the Blue Waters Project. Blue Waters will provide a computational system capable of sustained petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications. The project also includes intense support for application development and system software development, interactions with business and industry, and educational programs such as Shodor.

Read the N&O article here: http://www.newsobserver.com/166/story/1472490.html.

ComPADRE, NSDL’s Physics and Astromomy Pathway announces the Statistical and Thermal Physics (STP) Collection of web-based resources for teachers and students of statistical and thermal physics. The resources in this Collection include curricular materials, theory, problems, and simulations on topics ranging from thermal equilibrium to the Ising model. The STP Collection is organized by topic and resource type and highlights sample collections of materials for classroom use. Registered users of the library (registration is free) can build personal collections of materials, comment on resources, and submit materials for consideration by the STP Editors.

Science360, published by the National Science Foundation (NSF), aims to deliver the full-spectrum of what’s new in global science to everyone who has ever wondered what’s going on in scientific research and discovery.  The news service gathers news from wherever science is happening–scientists, college and university press offices, popular and peer-reviewed journals, dozens of National Science Foundation science and engineering centers, and funding sources that include government agencies, not-for-profit organizations and private industry–and makes it widely available on the Web, via email and RSS.

The Science 360 Web site makes science news available in multimedia audio and video.

• Access the Science360 Web site (http://news.science360.gov/) for breaking news and in-depth reports.

• Use Science360 content for your Web site. Send an email to editor@science360.gov to find out how.

• Subscribe to a daily email blast for a one-stop shop source of science news.

Portable media devices such as iPods are changing the way people learn. Educational podcasts allow educators an easy way to keep current on research and materials for teaching. NSDL on iTunesU has new podcasts on climate change and other episodes in the Beyond Penguins and Polar Podcasts. Also new on NSDL on iTunesU: the Exploratorium features fun, hands-on activities with step-by-step videos specifically geared to bring creativity and science into afterschool play. You can also find these on the Exploratorium website.

Ice and snow come to mind for most people when conjuring up mental pictures of the polar regions. The idea that plants grow in harsh arctic and antarctic environments seems unlikely, but Antarctica is home to two species of plants while at the opposite end of the earth, over a thousand plant species grow on the Arctic tundra along with algae and lichens that are not classified as plants. Learn about all things pertaining to polar plant life in the new issue of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears magazine.

The Polar Plants issue of Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears highlights surprising facts about what grows at the poles. 

Issue 12 features K5 teacher interactive activities and resources that include:

Information about the plants, fungi, algae, and lichens of the polar regions and their adaptations for a cold and harsh environment.

High quality lesson plans for integrating literacy and science while teaching plant classification, life cycles, and adaptations.

 Downloadable informational text about lichens, written especially for students, in text, book, or e-book form.

A guide for how to help your elementary students organize research.

A report on a surprise discovery in Antarctica and how it shaped our understanding of the continent’s past climate as well as a podcast featuring Dr. Andy Monaghan, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

And much more! Check out Issue 12 - Polar Plants - today.

The Engineering Pathway (EP) “In the Spotlight” feature highlights timely resources from their collections. The February focus on Engineers Week, noted the winners of the 2009 NAE Gordon Prize in Engineering Education, the Grand Challenges of Engineering, and the “Vision” campaign message that engineering requires creativity, imagination and vision.

This month and next, browse EP resources on African American scientists, engineers and inventors and gender equity. Visit computing diversity website and engineering diversity pages as well!