Category: 2011
In a project sponsored by the Noyce Foundation, teachers at an innovative new high school will adopt and modify our probe- and model-based science activities. Schools for the Future Academy opened this month in Jacksonville, Florida, serving students who are behind academically.
Today’s Wall Street Journal ran a story about using beavers to raise the water table and rehabilitate natural areas. Beavers? How can beavers do this? Photo by Walter Siegmund Beaver dam of Hat Lake and Hat Creek in foreground. Bridge over Hat Creek on highway 89, Lassen Volcanic National Park. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeaverDam_8409.jpg Beavers are rodents that live […]
For the past five days, Hurricane Irene affected the weather for residents on the East Coast. For the Northeastern United States, the forecasts of the storm’s intensity turned out to be wrong; the storm weakened more than meteorologists had expected. At the same time, the prediction of where the storm would go was very good. […]
Graphs are often used to show data; they provide a very powerful way to show numerical trends. But graphs can also be done poorly and be misinterpreted. (Source: http://xkcd.com/925/) In the comic, the man in the hat has made a graph that shows the incidence of cancer in the United States with the number of […]
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that “Snow White,” a dwarf planet officially named 2007 OR10, is actually red. Time to come up with another name! But why was it called Snow White to begin with? It was originally called Snow White because Mike Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, […]
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This week 11 students of different ages (10-17) participated in our three-day summer school for the Engineering Energy Efficiency project. They were charged with using Energy3D to design their own model houses on a computer first and…
Senior Research Scientist Andy Zucker comments on the U.S. Department of Education’s “misguided” and “irrational” policy requiring security screenings of education researchers working under contract. Sociological and psychological research sheds light on people’s behavior when faced with requirements such as these screenings.
One way to tell if a plant is a plastic fake or not is to touch a leaf. If it feels cool, the plant is a real one. Have you ever wondered why a leaf feels cool? (A leaf of an indoor plant always rests at about the room temperature, plastic or real. It …
Is a moth warm-blooded or cold-blooded? If you google this, some would tell you it is cold-blooded. They are not completely right. This infrared study shows how a moth warms up before it flies. So at least a moth is warm-blooded when it moves.Click to …
Energy3D is a free, open-source tool we are developing from scratch to empower students to design, make, and test energy-efficient model houses.Today we had some students design and make their own houses. One student succeeded in designing a model h…