Is this your first look at the Science of NHL Hockey? Welcome! This installment focuses on Newton’s laws of motion. It’s just one of series of ten video-lesson plan packages developed by NBC Learn in partnership with NSF and NSTA. What’s your fall-back position for helping students visualize Newton’s laws? Looking for something punchy that [...]
As we mentioned last time, NSTA and NBC Learn have teamed up with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch “Science of NHL Hockey,” an online video series that explores the science and math of the sport. Do your students sometimes confuse the concepts of speed, velocity, and acceleration? Look no further for a real-life [...]
NSTA has teamed up once again with NBC Learn and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to bring you another exhilarating video series with connected lesson plans that will excite your students and add to your hands-on repertoire. Science of NHL Hockey consists of 10 learning packages that will bring life to your STEM efforts. “Uh [...]
Oil is a stew of hydrocarbon molecules. Oil doesn’t sink, it floats, and when it spills, it spreads out in a thin sheen. Parts of the oil spill, asphaltenes, froth up and emulsify in waves, becoming tarry globules of hydrocarbon chains mixed with other molecules (nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, as well as trace amounts of [...]
Slippery, slathery, sparkly soap. We squirt a dollop on our hands, rub it in timed to the birthday song, rinse off, and our hands are squeaky clean. But what is soap, and why does it work? Soaps first appeared in recorded history several thousand years ago, and undoubtedly, the substance was around for some time [...]
What can be a poison in one form can be therapeutic in another, which begins to explain why researchers would look to the biotoxins produced by warm water dwelling snails for solutions to chronic pain and a host of other neurological conditions in humans. The venom of some snails has been shown to be 1000 [...]
In a sea of green vegetation, you’ll find reds, yellows, oranges, blues, and purples—a beautiful range of colors that pop out, saying to insects and other pollinators, “visit me, visit me, no, not that one…. me!” Flower colors have evolved to attract certain kinds of insects and birds, which ensures they can propagate the next [...]
“Though wholly fabricated from such common raw materials as coal, water and air, nylon can be fashioned into filaments as strong as steel, as fine as the spider’s web, yet more elastic than any of the common natural fibers and possessing a beautiful luster.” A Dupont Press Release announcing the development of nylon Strong as [...]
Reds and pinks, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, purples, browns, even grays and blacks, these represent a spectrum of colors that we take for granted thanks to synthetic dyes, but once weavers and fabric makers took great pains to extract these colors and fix them to textiles. Dyers made the colors from lichen, henna, rose madder [...]
Ammonia is one of the chemicals that feeds the world. No, you shouldn’t drink it from a bottle, and mixing it into your flan would be a bad idea, but about 83% of ammonia produced industrially is used as fertilizers, either as salts or as solutions, and it is estimated that fertilizer generated from ammonia [...]
