The Sylvia Shugrue Award for Elementary school teachers honors one elementary school teacher who creates and makes use of interdisciplinary, inquiry-based lesson plans. To qualify, teachers submit a lesson plan with fully referenced sources of information and any relevant National Science Education Standards and benchmarks found in The Atlas of Science Literacy. Since the award’s [...]
This morning in New Orleans, as part of the Urban Science Education Leadership (USEL) session, presenters from the Baltimore City Public Schools described their district’s Elementary STEM Teacher Clinic and how it transformed the teachers who participated in it.
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 [...]
The July 2011 release of the Framework for K-12 Science Education, from the National Academies, places new emphasis on the topic of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in the discussion of K–12 education priorities. The Framework recommends building science education in grades K–12 around three major dimensions: scientific and engineering practices; cross-cutting concepts that [...]
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 [...]
Activities that focus on food and cooking can help students see how relevant and fascinating science can be in everyday life. In a recent illustration of the enduring appeal of food’s scientific underpinnings, one of the most sought-after classroom slots for Harvard undergraduates is in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ course “Science [...]
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 [...]
