In support of science: this fuels my teaching.

A satellite for all seasons : TIROS

 There was a time when weather was studied without satellites, then in April 1960 that changed. It matters that we know this. 

When we choose to elect politicians that do not want to fund science we go backwards in time. Would we want to be less able to know where a Hurricane will make landfall in 2034 than we do today because our weather satellites have aged out and we did not fund new technology using what science has taught us?

There is beauty and awe in understanding science that fills me deeply, and thus I am saddened when it is treated with disdain. Science needs to be judged but not dismissed. Maybe I am more sensitive. The more we care; the more we take offense. To be able to view a tree and respect its beauty poetically, theologically, artiscally, and philosophically is important, but so it is to understand a tree and be amazed by the beauty of how it functions to survive. In fact, the tree is better likely to be treated with care if we view it in as many ways as possible. I dig trees.

The trees that have survived centuries could tell us how scientific breakthroughs do not happen in a vacuum.  Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Curie, Einstein did not just turn science about, but led to changes in world views. If we do not embrace science, we just may be lost in the intellectual view of our time.

So I have a job to do. My students deserve to leave my room with the basic vocab, facts, and concepts of science; while also knowing that it isn't science if it cannot be proven true and also if it cannot be proven false. They deserve to hear fascinating stories about scientists and their process, while also learning how to read graphs and data. And they need to do some science while their at it.

They need to be literate enough to face a news feed filled with articles about GMO's, Climate Change, Energy Policy... and understand the article to make their own informed opinion.

There is not enough time.

But science matters. 

Trees are amazing; exploring the path of water

Negative pressures. Avoiding spontaneous boiling. Surmounting great heights. And ever wasteful but important because of the waste. Love the enthusiasm shown for the splendid nature of plants.

 

Today's Hope ~ how about some cool fresh air

Temperature can be seen as the ability of a substance to transfer heat energy. The greater the temperature the greater the ability.

When two substances emerge into each others space. The one with a greater heat energy would like to share some with the lower temp substance.

I am tired of being walloped by hot air. It is not making me feel energetic and I seem to lack any desire to come to equilibrium.

 

Looking for super powers ~ Southern Fried Science inspires this week's homework

I came across this blog post that matched five organisms with comic book characters who have the same super powers.  The creature in the video is one of the five, which character can do this?

Thought it would be a fun homework assignment.  If anything I want my students to be amazed by life and learn the state assessment vocabulary along the way.

So here is the homework, after reading the blog post and answering some questions about those organisms.  Come on people, really the life form that emerged from Chernobyl, check it out.  Here is the part I hope to see some creative juices flowing, even if it doesn't flow from all of them. 

1. pick out five comic book heros and/or villains and find an organism with the same super power.  
2. choose a character and imagine up an organism that has the same power.  Write a paragraph describing the organism.  Or draw it and label its power.
3. find an organism that can do something which the average human cannot do and imagine a comic book character.  Write a paragraph describing the character.

I Dig Slime Molds

Photo by Lorraine Phelan

There are a few types of slime molds in this world.  I spoke of one years ago as an undergraduate.  I was discussing entropy at the time ~ how things tend to fall into chaos.  They spend their lives as individual cells but when motivated to reproduce they form into one collective being and work together to make spores.

The other type which I spoke of today can have millions of nuclei in their one celled slimy body, which allows them to do some advance thinking like figuring out the fastest way through a maze.  Think of all those nuclei communicating like all those neurons in your brain.  Cool stuff, which is why ~ I spoke of them today in my bio class and that always makes me happy.

Cool Show Moments ~ Kepler Poinsot Polyhedra and young super fans

Photo by fdecomite

The man enters my booth making it clear he was not shopping this year, but also saying how much he loves the three trivets he has purchased at the Kimberton Waldorf Show.  

So I say, "How was your year?"

Fifteen minutes later and after a few google image searches, I have become educated in the realm of the Kepler Poinsot Polyhedra.  He has spent the year constructing models and being drawn into mathematical beauty of them.  He apologizes for"boring me," but I reassure him that I love math, design, science, and history of such things.  Yes, this is the Kepler you hopefully learned about in Earth Science classes.  The man that came up with laws of planetary motion.

Later the very young man I celebrated two years ago came back for the third straight year to buy a suncatcher.  Clearly our youngest super~fan.

and with that our 2012 show season has come to an end.  We have commissions to finish and our etsy shop is open, feel free to browse.

Science Friday : why just Fridays and why not Friday

Photo by Jeff Potter 

Science Fridays on NPR airs during my 8th period class, which means I almost never hear it.  But a recent desire to boost my Twitter science list led to finding them on twitter, which led me to their website.  So now I can listen to a story here and there and quit bemoaning the fact that I miss it.

And the videos are great.  So I made my own science Friday moment this week.

I showed how plants need to be filmed to be able to watch them behave and went into a discussion tendrils...

and then it was to show them how the opposite had to be done to study bats...
I showed them a video that showed them just how amazing an octopus can be but also a close up of chromatophores.

and then to show the creativity of a man with a house boat... the first floating outhouse with a natural sewage treatment center...

facing the elemental end on Science Mondays

photo by Kiwi Flickr


the final quarter ends and we move into overtime soon at the school. Some see it as a place to wade upstream to graduation, I see it as a time to finish off the garden in horticulture and to explore something new in science.

Last year I had found a book on Game Theory and zoology took quite a left turn. This year I found the Periodic Table of Videos. In Space and Earth science we have come across an element or two, so this looks wonderful to my eyes. And I think the students will dig it too, at which point there is no upstream. There is just riding the flowing waters till the adventure ends:






So what is your favorite element? why?

...

7 for the weekend--- New Things

1. A new flower. The other night after walking under the most amazing wisteria at Rhoads Gardens to get a lilac for our garden, Mosaic Woman searched the annuals for home, while I searched for work. Lantana 'Radiation' is now brightening our front yard.






2. A client of ours decided her house needed a third mandala, and this time she chose one of mine. The only problem, it was for the outside of her house so I needed to make a new concrete crab mandala . I had the orange pieces cut, ground and glued; when I wanted to do something different. The idea of all the flat plain black glass bored me, so Mosaic Woman contacted the client and with some blue Youghiogheny glass it became an Illini crab mandala.


3. Yesterday we had a business meeting at home which extended to the West Main Diner (where they make a fine Greek omelet; and are still friendly even when their computer system crashes in the midst of a full restaurant). As soon as I got home I grabbed the user name, Nutmeg Designs, at You Tube and later in the day posted our first video. I have ideas for plenty that won't be animated, but Einstein may also have more to say in the future...




4. New Jazz...




5. New directions in energy. While Marcellus Shale made for an interesting story, it was one of those gloomy environmental ones as it ended. So we turned to global warming, but with the twist of looking at solutions not just all the news that would leave my students more distressed about their future. Nova, Power Surge has been playing all week in my classroom as we slowly make our way through hope for the future.

6. There is a new stained glass butterfly in this world, but since the client hasn't seen it, you will have to wait till later.

7. New pieces to fix our broken tent frame arrived this week. Guess what I am doing this afternoon.

Acadian to Marcellus on Science Mondays

photo credit


It was 390,000,000 years ago and mountains were forming around where the Hudson River flows today. This was before dinosaurs at a time when the first vascular plants were considering life on land and with any major disruption there was erosion. As the Acadian Mountains rose, they began to erode.

As the runoff hit the sea it floated and as the heavier stuff sank, the lighter load floated farther away from shore. But it too eventually sank joining with some dead aquatic plants on the way to an ocean floor devoid of oxygen, and thus the carbon content. Those dead plants did not decay properly. The muck became shale with a high carbon content.

Pressure and heat caused the carbon to be transformed into methane and a the slate above and below the shale kept in place. Eventually it would become buried deep below ground except for a few outcroppings including one close to Marcellus, NY.

It would be folded into the Appalachian Mountains.

And then a nation developed that needed energy to live their life style and the geologists saw so much natural gas potential that the Marcellus Shale is now one of the top rocks in the news.

I told my students about all of this, then explained the politics, the environmental concerns, and the daily news that broke.

The problem is the drilling has exploded with very little regulation and close watch. We know things can go terribly wrong. We don't know if things can be done safely.

It is in my state and while I would love for it to go away, the truth is it is here and unless we all decide to live in a much different way I have a hard time saying drill in another backyard. But can we please keep a closer eye on this and determine its true risk before we rush ahead any more? Can we clean up the mess we have made? Can we help those who have been hurt?

I would hope so.


...

Science Mondays: Z is for Zoogenesis, second definition

Back in the day when I studied Biology I was drawn away from the molecular to the ecological. I wanted to be pondering a wetland not looking at chemical reactions. I wanted to understand the relationship between a plant and an insect, not the human genome.

I wanted to understand evolution by studying how the environment created new species, not how molecules were involved.

Zoogenesis does mean how the first animal came into existence, but it can be applied to the first vertebrate, or bird, or warbler, or how the first Northern Waterthrush emerged.


photo by Orchidgalore



Zoogenesis is full of grays, it is not black and white. Life unfolded.

Two years ago I went in search of a book to help me teach evolution and found a great one at the Doylestown Bookshop: The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution by Sean B Carroll. And suddenly I was drawn into what I avoided as an undergrad. If you want to understand zoogenesis, it is a great place to start.

for example: Understanding mutations (you and I have many that came from the creation of the sperm and egg that formed us) became as simple as understanding my keyboard mistakes--- deletions, repetitions, copy and paste, additions. All the ways we can mess up the code of English, our bodies can do with our DNA.

I still find it a bit of a mystery, but less so than before I read the book. Here is a photo I took while taking notes in Doylestown's library (a great place to learn about many things including jazz-- they have an amazing CD collection)...

Z is for Zoogenesis

Lets end this month of a to z with a beginning, which is a mystery and though best guesses may approach what happened when the first "animal" emerged on the Earth, we will never know for sure. I dig that.

When my students enter into a biology class they sit as I tell 7 origin hypothesis/myths. Then I make my claim that it will always be a mystery. I say, "Even if life is created in a lab, that does not prove that that is the way it happened on the Earth." I encourage them to enjoy that some things will always be a mystery and then encourage them to feel free to believe what they want to believe.

Then I say, "Now lets enter the realm of what biologists have discovered about life ever since it mysteriously came into being."

and that ends it, with a beginning I love.

X is for xylem

why was it that for years I knew that trees got water from their root?

And then I knew that the water traveled by tubes called xylem, and that these tubes made up what we call wood and are responsible for the annual rings.

But why did I never ask... How does the water travel up the xylem?

short answer: it is pulled by the air outside the leaves

longer answer

T is for Tree Views

This photo showed up in my Oregon post this past Wednesday. It's back

I remember the amazement of coming across this scene. and that may be the best way to view it.

But I also have to wonder about the force it took for the water to place it there. The reoded hillside says more about that force. I wonder how intertidal critters have reacted to a tree being thrown into their space. Where did it die? What current brought it to this beach? Was it a storm or just a normal high tide that lifted it up.

And what would an artist make of this. How many other lifted cameras. What would happen if one lifted a brush to paint it on canvas? And a poet, essayist, or story teller would create what if that sat down and lifted their pencils to the scene.

But it is Easter and I am thinking about the spiritual force needed to lift up all men and women.

May scientific, artistic, and spiritual folk continue to see this world and share their responses with me.

And of course one must consider jazz too:

ahh, may your dreams tonight be filled with trees...



...

L is for Light Out of Darkness

Strange day at work. Something was happening that made many people think I should be happy, and maybe I could have been happy about it, but I was more on the bitter side of things. Then a student asked, "Why are we bothering to do this?" and hope emerged, "Because maybe in the future we will be ..." It was a moment of light that lifted me up a bit.

******

In 1801 Thomas Young theorized that humans could not see all the wavelengths of light. He was right. There are animals that can see what we can't, but we can see more than most mammals, which as a group lost color vision--- don't use it, you will lose it--- because they were nocturnal. But a mutation gave us the chance to emerge from darkness, and a primate took it and made a run for it.

******

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12).

*******

In 1993 Shirley Horn released a CD called Light Out of Darkness. Can you imagine a better title to a tribute to Ray Charles? Can you imagine Ray Charles singing with a frog?

tectonics part 2

by Malloreigh

Yesterday I spoke of tectonics.

I would love to say that the inner temperature of the Earth is constant which has created perfectly flowing convection currents which cause frictionless movement of perfectly delineated plates which cause no death or destruction when they move.

that ain't where we live. Peace to all those who had to deal with what can be quite a catastrophic planet.

This morning my students and I watched a news video of the minister of this church, who was hoping and praying but sadly doubting that no people would be found under the spire which is pictured above and was now in rubble on a street in New Zealand.

Science Mondays--- tectonic

Driving Into the Fault Line
by Giant Ginko

I am going to venture into plate tectonics this week at which point I may say, since I have said it often before,

What happens when India met Asia? Instant Himalayas, geologically speaking.

What I want to happen of course is for my students to ponder the amazing planet on which we live and for them to know that if one wants to feel the earth quake or see it spew, it is best to stand upon on a boundary crack.

and as far as humans causing quakes: Here are the top 5 ways according to Wired Science.

...

Science Mondays--- ALL

Mosaic Woman gave me All of Science for Christmas. She just may know me very well.

In the past few years, I have taught the following courses: Biology, Physics, Anatomy, Geology, Ecology, Earth & Space, Zoology, and something I have come to call Social Science.

"What, no Chemistry'" you say, well you would have to go back to my very first year of teaching to see that on my resume.

"No Meteorology, no Botany, no .... " well give me time I do have to keep the horticulture program flowing.

I dig science. And I have a job where a small group of students, who need a bit more attention than the average group, get to spend a few or several years experiencing my passion. Maybe it is a good thing I never got that doctorate I planned on but never even started.

Science Mondays --- Now!

photo by Greehawk68


I am digging Nova Science Now and the host Neil deGrasse Tyson is a wonderful host. Is he the Carl Sagan for this time? An astrophysicist with passion and a desire to have the universe speak to us.

When he was 9 years old he was taken to a planetarium and when the lights dimmed the universe "called to him." And he has been in love ever since.

I also dig Nova's The Secret Life of Scientists which highlighted Dr. Tyson and he tells about that day as a nine year old hearing his calling, about his passion for wearing art inspired by that very same cosmos, about his science, and answers 10 questions.

Apparently he is one of the faves on Colbert:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

anyway, my students and I are digging it and I wish the man in front of the camera keeps being joyful and passionate about science

Science Mondays--- stumbling onto a real shooting star, Mira

photo by Darek Smid

Entering my classroom I had my plans set for the week, but I wasn't sure what topic I would be teaching in 90 minutes. I knew that I wanted the students to practice taking notes from an article and I knew I would head to Science Daily , click on video, click on time & space...

And I would pick something and go from there.

Mira is a star with a tail, a Red Giant that is spewing hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen into the universe as it moves rather quickly to its future home as a White Dwarf. We have known about Mira for hundreds of years, yet we have only known about its tail for a few of them. It all has to do with how we are blessed that the atmosphere blocks so much UV light. It took a satellite mapping the universe's UV light to see the tail. Which is long, way long.

When I told my students that Mira was a variable star, many impressed me by saying "Cepheid." But I told them they were wrong and then explained to them that the universe has more variables than the Cepheids and in fact the others are called Miras.

So I stumbled upon a truly shooting star, which is planting seeds into a universe ready to create new stars and planets: