Brady Haran of Objectivity Videos visits Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society to discuss the Society’s “Philosophical Transactions” 350th anniversary: The world’s first scientific journal. So its first edition is from 1665.
It shows people’s curiosity, sharing information and having it reviewed both before and after publication, building on each other’s prior work, and so on. Different times, but good science.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/06/150624143150.htm
The first species of yeti crab from hydrothermal vent systems of the East Scotia Ridge in the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, has been described. This Yeti Crab is famous for its body, which is densely covered by bristles — known as setae — and bacteria, giving it a fur-like appearance.
TED-Ed has created a set of videos with complete lesson plans, quizzes, discussion and further research topics for each of the elements in the periodic table. They’re called the Ted-Ed Periodic Videos.
The online system also allows you to adapt the lessons to your own needs and re-share that. This looks like an awesome resource, well worth having in your “toolkit”.
In a piece on a new OECD study in The Guardian it is noted that
school performance could be boosted by parents encouraging girls to consider careers involving subjects such as engineering
and quoting the report directly:
“Gender disparities in performance do not stem from innate differences in aptitude, but rather from students’ attitudes towards learning and their behaviour in school, from how they choose to spend their leisure time, and from the confidence they have,” the report said.
That quote gets, I think, closer to what’s actually going on. It also identifies that girls actually score higher on maths and science, yet fewer continue with it in the senior high school years, and study a STEM subject in university.
Indeed, parents and schools have an important role to play. From my own observations, lots of kids have an interest and potential for STEM topics, and the key is to enable and feed that interest and not sabotage it with unfortunate stereotyped remarks and many other unhelpful little things (that affect confidence).
You get the odd argument that maths & science are not cool. Well, kids these days play with all the cool technology, right? There’s the Internet, online games, tablets, and so on – and 3D printing, robotics, and much more. It would be rather odd to say that those things are cool, but the people who research and develop these things are not…
I think the issue with that originates with an idea that exists in some schools that it’s (for instance) science vs sports, and that does help us in exploring as to what’s going on there. With sport, you can see very directly what benefit kids get out of it, what they learn is directly applied and visible.
Often, STEM subjects are taught in a dry fashion, and kids indeed wonder what use it is learning all that stuff. We do appreciate that it’s a challenge for teachers to deliver an interesting program (let alone hands-on) program if the resources aren’t there to support it. This is of course even more problematic for kinaesthetic learners.
This is why we develop materials and programs for STEM subjects. With the use intrinsic to the process, kids want to explore more! Girls as well as boys.
A National Geographic news article from a few years ago, but awesomely interesting:
Along the warm coastal lowlands of New South Wales, the yellow-bellied three-toed skink lays eggs to reproduce. But individuals of the same species living in the state’s higher, colder mountains are almost all giving birth to live young.
Evolutionary records show that nearly a hundred reptile lineages have independently made the transition from egg-laying to live birth in the past, and today about 20 percent of all living snakes and lizards give birth to live young only.
So with this particular skink variety, we can see the transition as it’s happening. As the article explains, the transition causes a potential nutrient problem for the baby skinks (less calcium as there’s no egg), but the mother skink’s body solves this already:
“Now we can see that the uterus secretes calcium that becomes incorporated into the embryo—it’s basically the early stages of the evolution of a placenta in reptiles,” Stewart explained.
These observations also show how seemingly complicated transitions in life on earth turn out to in fact be relatively small changes that can be achieved with minor adaptations.
Sometimes, when you [have the opportunity to] look closer, things are actually simpler.
Cool yet so simple: just a long copper coil, some small strong (rare earth – generally neodymium) magnets, and an AA or AAA battery to create a very simple engine.
History and Geography are no longer boring and dry, and the material provides a wide variety of topics.
Laura Davidson, Teacher