Science Education
clock | August 26, 2006Jennifer Ouellette and her commenters discuss how: Geek grrls: the next generation
clock | August 25, 2006First written on March 04, 2005 for Science And Politics, then reposted on February 27, 2006 on Circadiana, a post about a childrens' book and what I learned about it since.
When I was a kid I absolutely loved a book called "Il Ciondolino" by Ricardo Vamba - a book in two slim volumes for kids (how times change - try to publish a 200+ page book of dense text for children today!). I later found out that it was translated into English under the title The Prince And His Ants in 1910 (Luigi BERTELLI (M: 1858 or 1860 - 1920) (&ps: VAMBA) The Prince And His Ants [It-?]. Holt.(tr S F WOODRUFF…
tsmith | August 25, 2006The Iowa Academy of Science has released its summer newsletter online, and is available here (.pdf).
There's a lot going on for scientists and the science-interested at all levels (students, teachers, researchers), so for the Iowa folks (or, those of you in other states who are just looking for some good ideas), if you've not already checked them out or have a membership, give them a look (their homepage is http://www.iacad.org/). They also have new programs focusing on science education for the general public, which I know is an interest for many readers as well.
sporte | August 25, 2006Like biology, all bioinformatics is based on the idea that living things shared a common ancestor. I have posted, and will post other articles that test that notion, but for the moment, we're going to use that idea as a starting point in today's quest.
If we agree that we have a common ancestor, then we can use that idea as a basis to ask some interesting questions about our genomes. For, example, we know that genomes change over time - we've looked at single nucleotide changes here and here, and we've seen that large chunks of DNA can move around here.
So, it's interesting to consider…
scientificactivist | August 25, 2006...Or at least that's the impression that college freshmen with US Department of Education Smart Grants are getting, the The Chronicle of Higher Education reported Tuesday:
Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages....
The awards in question -- known as Smart Grants, for the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent program -- were created by…
evolgen | August 24, 2006A couple of people are talking about this Wall Street Journal article which claims that Republicans are popping out more babies that Democrats, and this disparity will lead to an relative increase in the frequency of Republicans. It's been pointed out that the statistics and logic behind this argument are flawed, and the math in the article is atrocious.
Depending on your political persuasion, the outcome suggested in the article may be viewed as a good thing or a bad thing. Regardless of the political direction you'd like to see our country take, however, I think we can all agree that we'd…
clock | August 24, 2006Hsien Hsien Lei is continuing her series of interviews of science bloggers, and today is my turn. As you have learned to expect by now, my answers are long and wordy. But the questions are interesting, so I hope you like the answers as well. Check it out here.
evolgen | August 24, 2006The Chronicle of Higher Education reported earlier this week that the U.S. Department of Education neglected to include "Evolutionary Biology" in it's list of eligible majors for the new Smart Grant program (the NYTimes and New Scientist also report on this, as does the NCSE). This drew extra attention because the omission left a blank space where the option had been removed. Blank spaces were also created when they eliminated the "Exercise Physiology" and "Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning Technology" majors from the list. This leads one to believe the Department of Education…
sporte | August 23, 2006We heard quite a bit about rainforest destruction in the 80's and 90's. Even the Grateful Dead joined the efforts to raise awareness and gather support for rain forest preservation. In the past, the Dead stayed away from political activism because (quoting Jerry Garcia):
Power is a scary thing. When you feel that you are close to it, you want to
make sure that it isn't used for misleading. So all this time we've avoided
making any statements about politics, about alignments of any sort.
But the Dead decided deforestation was too big of an issue to ignore and held a press conference at the…
sporte | August 23, 2006Did HIV become resistant to Atazanavir because of a genetic change?
Was that genetic change inherited?
Did HIV evolve?
Can we explain why genetic changes at specific sites might help HIV escape the effects of the drug?
Let's find out.
All of the sequences in the image below (except for the first) come from HIV strains that were isolated from patients who took Atazanavir and no other protease inhibitors. All of the strains of HIV from patients were resistant to the drug.
If an amino acid is different from other strains, the color at that position is changed. Since we see different…
clock | August 22, 2006Archy has a great summary of the history of planetary discovery, which puts the current question of Pluto and plutons in perspective. Did you know how Pluto got its name? Hint: it was not after Mickey Mouse's dog.
sporte | August 22, 2006Have you ever wondered how people actually go about sequencing a genome?
If they're sequencing a chicken genome, do they raise chickens in the lab and get DNA from the eggs? Does the DNA sequence come out in one piece? Why is there so much talk about computers? What are Phred, Phrap, and Consed? What is the Golden Path?
Wonder no more!
You too, can take a virtual tour of the Washington University Genome Center.
I found this really excellent series of short videos that follows two genetics students, Libby and Bryce, as they meet on the bus to the Genome Center and learn about all the steps…
clock | August 21, 2006Several ScienceBloggers are reviewing Coming To Life today (see reviews by Janet, Shelley, RPM, Nick and PZ Edit: Razib has also posted his take), each one of us from a different perspective and looking from a different angle, so go read them to get the full scoop.
PZ Myers reviewed the book a few weeks ago. Someting that struck me was that PZ said that the book :
"....assumes nothing more than that the reader is intelligent and curious. Seriously, you don't need a biology degree to read it!"
...while a reviewer, Edward F. Strasser (a math PhD whose hobby is reviewing books from this angle…
sporte | August 21, 2006In which we see the results and come to our own conclusions.
If you want to let other people tell you what's right and what's wrong, they will surely do so. Turn on the TV and hordes of happy actors bounce around, only too happy to help you purchase the right deodorant. Open your e-mail and everyone wants to share the best on-line pharmacy and investment guide.
Ugh.
I prefer making my own decisions, thank you very much.
So, I want to give you a chance to look at the data and decide for yourself, if the data show HIV protease sequences changing over time.
Let's see the results.
We're…
sporte | August 19, 2006Let the experiment begin.
We're experimenting with HIV in this series. And yes, you can try this at home!
If you want to see where we've been and get an idea where we're going, here are the links.
Part I. Meet HIV and learn how we're going to use it look at evolution. An introduction to the experiment and a link to a short flash movie on HIV.
Part II. Instructions for doing the experiment.
Part III. Look at the sequence results.
Part IV. Look at protein structures and see if we can explain why the experiment worked the way it did.
Let's move onward.
1. I made a data set of amino acids…
tsmith | August 18, 2006As the conference wraps up, I just want to be sure to point you to some other areas where AIDS is being covered on ScienceBlogs.
Every week, our Seed overlords pose a question to us (originally titled, "Ask a ScienceBlogger.") This week's question is:
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?...
You can find the collection of responses here.
In more basic science, Sandra of Discovering Biology in a Digital World is starting a series on using HIV to prove some points about evolution. Looks like a great start to the series;…
sporte | August 18, 2006The past few Fridays, we've been comparing human mitochondrial DNA with the mitochondrial DNA of different apes.
We started doing this here, where you can find directions for getting started.
And, we've found some interesting things.
In this installment, we found that humans have practically an entire mitochondrial genome stuck in chromosome 17.
Last week, we found that human mitochondrial DNA is more similar to that of chimpanzees than to gorillas. We found that 90.6% of the bases in human mitochondrial DNA match bases in the Bonobo chimp and 90.7% match bases in the Chimpanzee.
This…
clock | August 18, 2006Allen McNeill's Cornell course on Evolution and Design is now over and the student papers have been posted online.
Dan comments on some of them.
scientificactivist | August 18, 2006It has been known officially since 2002 that the sciences are hard, and, as much as we scientists love it when our friends and family tell us how smart and wonderful we must be since they could never understand what we do... is this elevated position going to cost us in the end? Big time?
Addressing this issue, an article by Emma Brockes in yesterday's Guardian explores the plight of the physical sciences in the UK, taking a humorous look at the question of whether a lack of interest from students will spell their eventual demise:
It is presumably never easy being a physics teacher, what…
sporte | August 17, 2006When can a really bad virus be used to do something good?
When we can use it to learn.
The human immunodeficiency virus, cause of AIDS, scourge of countries, and recent focus of ScienceBlogs; like humans, evolves. As one of my fellow ScienceBloggers noted, few biological systems demonstrate evolution as clearly as HIV. In this series, I'm going to guide you through some experiments on HIV evolution that you can do yourself. You won't even have to put on any special clothing (unless you want to), wash glassware or find an autoclave. And, you don't need to any UNIX commands or borrow a…