The Scientific Toolbox

Square of Life: Studies in Local and Global Environments is a collaborative project in which students investigate their local environment and share their data over the internet with other students from around the country and the world. Each group of students involved in the project will:

Although Square of Life is recommended for elementary school students, anyone who is interested may participate in the program. The Fall 2003 session has just ended, but keep an eye on the Project Information page if you are interested in registering your classroom for the Spring 2004 session.

Fun Science Gallery is a Web site for the amateur scientist created and maintained by Giorgio Carboni. He has posted instructions for building “scientific equipments from relatively cheap materials. Projects include instructions for making telescopes, microscopes, batteries, sidereal indicators, and several other instruments…” Included along with each set of instructions is a history of the original device along with ideas for experiments and activities. Be sure to check out the Fun Science home page for details of his copyright agreement.

If you know of any other similar Web resources, please let me know. Either send me an e-mail or leave a comment on this post.

I received the following press release from the NSF news mailing list yesterday. It is a good example of how basic research can be applied to real world problems:

TAKING CUES FROM MOTHER NATURE TO FOIL CYBER ATTACKS

ARLINGTON, Va.-Taking their cues from Mother Nature and biodiversity, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of New Mexico are collaborating on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported project to study “cyber diversity” for computer systems as a way to fend off malicious viruses, worms and other cyber attacks.

In nature, diseases are most devastating when an infection-causing organism encounters a “monoculture,” a vast swath of genetically similar individuals, each susceptible to the organism’s method of attack. In the same vein, computer viruses and worms exploit the same flaw on every computer running the same software.

“We are looking at computers the way a physician would look at genetically related patients, each susceptible to the same disorder,” said Mike Reiter, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Carnegie Mellon and associate director of CyLab, a Carnegie Mellon initiative focused on advancing cybersecurity technology and education. “In a more diverse population, one member may fall victim to a pathogen or disorder, while another might not have the same vulnerability.”

To read this press release in its entirety, click here.

1. Learn about the Human Senses at the BBC Science Web site.
   • Explore the human brain through an interactive brain map
   • Take the Senses Challenge to find out how much you know about how you perceive the world around you.
2. Check out the following article at the Education World Web site with ideas for activities you can use to teach about the five senses (includes links to other internet “senses” resources.
3. The New York Times’ Daily Lesson Plan offers a lesson plan entitled “Sense-itive Issues: Exploring the Relationships Among the Five Senses”:
   

   “In this lesson, students consider the difficulties of adapting to the loss of different senses. They then work in small groups, each developing a fictional superhero who experiences a loss of one of sense and must learn to compensate for it with his or her other senses.”

4. CyberSleuth Kids has a list of internet resources for teaching about the senses.

At The Exploratorium Web site, you can:

1. Learn about the science behind how to cook a turkey

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2. Check out the discussion on the Accidental Scientist Forum to find out if your method of cooking turkey safe or toxic?
3. Watch the recent webcast of “Fowl Science: Talking Turkey” given by the Red Herring Restaurant’s executive chef Marc Schoenfield and learn the answers to the following questions:
   

   “Why does a turkey continue to cook after it’s out of the oven? How can you be sure to thoroughly cook the dark meat without drying out the white meat? Is stuffing really a good idea? How do you make the skin golden?”

Check out Education World’s “The Human Body: An Online Tour”, a lesson planning article with information and follow-up activities related to the human skeletal, respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems.

Visit “Tissues of Life” and “Habits of the Heart” at the Science Museum of Minnesota Web site. These on-line exhibits have videos, animations, lesson ideas and diagrams.

Westchester Elementary Media Center has classroom resources and research tools for learning about “The Systems of the Human Body.”

The National Library of Medicine’s The Visible Human Project is “a digital image dataset of complete human male and female cadavers in MRI, CT and anatomical modes. “

Check out the following Web sites for some more insect-related resources:

1) Researchers at Arizona State University have a section of their Web site, “Chain Reaction”, devoted to urban ecology:

“What’s Urban Ecology all about? Birds moving to the suburbs… trees struggling in parking lots… drinking water that smells like dirt. These are just a few of the things that urban ecologists study. Join ASU scientists as they explore the relationships between people, animals, plants, air, and water in one of the most important environments on Earth - the city.

Learn more about urban ecology by following the links on the left-hand side of the screen of their Web site:

Read the rest of this entry »

Windstorms swept across the eastern U.S. today, with winds gusting as high as 70 miles per hour. Almost a million people are without power. Learn more about the wind at the following Web sites:

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The Exploratorium has instructions for miniature versions of some of their most popular exhibits, which they call Science Snacks. The experiments are indexed alphabetically or by subject.

Subjects include: Chemistry, Color, Electricity, Fluids, Heat, Life Science, Light, Magnetism, Math, Mechanics, Perception, Polarization, Reflection, Refraction, Sound and Waves.

Examples include:

The site also offers a list of resources for buying “snack supplies“:

…a collection of resources recommended by the teachers who created the original Snackbook. It includes sources for some hard-to-get items, for books and print materials considered exceptionally valuable, for unique suppliers, and for items that might not conventionally be considered to be science resources. It does not pretend to be all-encompassing, exhaustive, or universal, but we hope it will be useful.