• Colgate Geology
• Karen Harpp's Homepage
• Volcanoes in the Classroom: A Simulation of an Eruption Column
• Dive and Discover: Interview with Geochemist Karen Harpp
• Polar Palooza
• Underwater Volcanoes of the Northern Hawaiian Islands Crew

• Mt. St. Helens Volcano Cams
• Mt Etna Volcano Cams
• List of Volcano Cams
• West Bend, WI
• SeisMac

• Science Friday Live Broadcast in Milwaukee, WI
• May 16:, 2008: Great Lakes Water Issues and The Science of Brewing
• Pictures from Science Friday Broadcast
• Cory Doctorow's Craphound.com
• Little Brother Book Tour
• Little Brother on Amazon.com

• National Center for Science Education
• Expelled Exposed: Flunked, Not Expelled - What Ben Stein isn't telling you about Intelligent Design
• Ben Stein: "Science Leads you to Killing People"
• Doonesbury Comic regarding medicine and Intelligent Design
• The Post-Crescent: It's Your Call

• PZ Myers (Pharyngula) gets expelled from Expelled
• Boston Globe: No Intelligence Allowed in 'Expelled'
• Scientific American: Expelled Explained
• Expelled Producers Accused of Copyright Infringement

For our contribution to Earth Day, we had the opportunity to chat with Bill Nye about his new show on the new Planet Green channel called Stuff Happens.

Preview from the Show:

Iâm doing this other thing called âStuff Happensâ? for the Discovery Channel.  Itâs strictly for a new channel Discovery is re-purposing â theyâre calling it "Planet Green".  So all the programming is green, or about environmental issues and stuff.  And so this show is about consumer choices that you can make to live a more environmentally responsible life.

I am a serious hobbyist.  I have four kilowatts of solar panels and I have a solar water heating system that I, if you will, designed â along with a guy whoâs worked in solar in southern California for many, many yearsâI hired him, and two very good plumbers, and these guys who were good with gas mains, and we re-rigged the whole house.  So now I have solar hot water that pre-heats the water before it runs through two tankless hot water heaters.  So my gas bill in the summer is less than $10.

Thereâs an old supply chain from the South American Western Coast to North American farmers.  And what is supplied is fish feed made from anchovies.  So, American bacon pigs are fed fish from South American oceans.  And so many fish are fished so aggressively that penguins are going out of business.  The penguin ecosystem has been devastated, and penguin populations have been decimated by this practice.  So we encourage you â the listener, the viewer â to buyâorganic, grain-fed bacon.  Thatâs what we want you to do to reduce the market for this anchovy feed.  And itâs just something that humans are kind of doing by accident, but on such an enormous scale thatâs itâs screwing up an entire ecosystem in the south western Pacific.

The baby steps are important.  The hardest thing for everyone to understand about the environment is that every single thing you do affects everybody in the whole world.  And the reason, nominally, is that we only have one atmosphere.  We can only breath from one source of air â we all share the air.  So this is a fundamental idea thatâs hard to get; it just doesnât seem possible.  I throw out this magazine and instead of recycling it, yeah â youâre lowering the quality of life of everyone on earth.

So you go to the store and you buy one [compact fluorescent light bulb].  Ok, but if you replace every lamp in your house, or every lamp in the main roomsâ Replace every one of those lamps, and you will see your power bill go downâ Now there are some whining, unbelievable-freakinâ whiners out there who tell you that we canât change to compact fluorescents because of the mercury - "thereâs no way to get rid of the mercury thatâs in those lights and itâs gonna kill everybody."  So letâs keep in mind that it was the year 1951 when American industry went to buying more fluorescent lamps than incandescent lamps.  That is to say, if you work at any sort of factory anywhere, they have fluorescent lights â âcuz itâs so much cheaper.  And so those lights are required by law to be recycled and the mercury recovered.  And there are services that recover the lights and recover the mercury.  So we just gotta do the same thing for domestic consumers â for people that buy âem for their houses.  For cryinâ out loud â this is not, if I may, rocket surgery.  This is actually a little more complicated that: trying to motivate everyone to do the right thing with regard to their old lamps.  And of course it can be done; itâs a metal.  Who doesnât want to recover a metal?  Itâs valuable, itâs shiny, you can see it â of course you can do it.

Politically, [a scientific debate] is an unsophisticated idea.  None of the three candidates remaining would ever consent to a science debate.  None of them are scientists.  None of them would admit to being experts in any way about anything about science.  So of course they're going to say no; they have to say no.  This pursuit of science debate is an exercise in futility.  Instead, we need to rephrase it - in my opinion.  My best idea so far, is to rename it something else - the "nondependence on foreign oil" debate, the "health" debate, the "energy" debate, the "competitiveness" debate - that's pretty good...  But naming this thing the "science" debate sabotages it from the get-go.  And of course I support the idea, but the best correction I can think of it to rename it.  The "competitiveness" debate - yes.

Links:

• Planet Green
• Bill Nye the Science Guy
• Nye Labs
• Eyes of Nye
• Bill Nye on Wikipedia
• Greener Pastures from the New York Times
• The Science Channel: 100 Greatest Discoveries

Preview from the Show:
Our primary mission is to look at what is going on in the world every week and find some corner of the scientific enterprise that lends itself to a public conversation about science, and then we drill down into that, to contact the best experts that we can find to try to shed light on those dark corners of science - the places and things that people don't know about, and to provide more than what you're going to get in a straight-up treatment of science than one routinely encounters in popular media.  I think it's safe to say that after we complete our formal educations, most people only encounter science through popular media, and so a big part of the Why Files mission is to help people come to grips with science - what it is,  why it's important, why it makes a difference in our lives on a daily basis.

It's really essential that people in a democracy have some understanding of how we generate knowledge, because it impacts our lives in important ways every day.  

Links:
Why Files Educator Page
Why Files Classroom Materials
The Why Files Archives
Baseball Spring Training
The Science of Polling
CSI's: Cool Science Images

Subscribe to The Why Files with their RSS Feed

• Bad Astronomy Blog
• Contact Info
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• Standing an Egg on End on the Spring Equinox
• Are Apollo Moon Photos Fake?
• Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax"

• Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax"
• read NSTA's recommendation of the book
  
• Death From the Skies (pre-order from Amazon.com)

• The Skeptics Dictionary
• James Randi Educational Foundation
• PZ Myers: Pharyngula Blog
• Point of Inquiry Podcast
• Skeptical Inquirer Magazine
• Skeptoid Podcast
• Skepticality
• Skeptic's Guide to the Universe

• Articles by Steve Silberman from Wired Magazine
• United Nuclear
• see them on Wired Science in Dangerous Science
  
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• NYPD Seeks an Air Monitor Crackdown for New Yorkers
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• The Boy Scientist
• Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
• Julius B. Cohenâs 1910 Practical Organic Chemistry
• sciencemadness.org
• TED Talks Video
• 5 Dangerous Things Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

• Visit the NSTA Conferences Newcomer's Page
• Attend the First-Timers Session: Thursday, March 27th 8:00-9:00, repeated on Thursday, March 27th 3:30-4:30 free

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• PZ Myers on Richard Dawkins (from Seed Magazine)
• Interview with DailyKos
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• DarwinDay.org
• Darwin Day Celebration at Lawrence University - February 9, 2008

Books Discussed on the Show:

• Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
• The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen

Basler: Can you give us an overview of what the [Fermilab] does, and what the facilityâs goals are?

Lincoln: My own lab, Fermilab, accelerates protons and antimatter protons near the speed of light and collides them together. Fermilab has some other programs also where we accelerate protons and smash the protons into a target, which is usually some material - nickel or something. And from that, we extract other particles â which could be neutrinos â which is what weâre doing mostly - and experimenting with those as well.â?

Basler: What do you say to the person that says âI hated Physicsâ??

Lincoln: Well I ask them why they hated physics. Usually they say âwell, âcuz it was too math oriented and it was difficultâ?. And I say, âletâs talk about the world. Have you ever wondered why the sun came up?â? or things like that. And usually I can get them to talk about some aspect of the world that theyâre interested in, and show them that, in fact, the study of physics really is interesting in that it explains an awful lot, and shows these interconnections that they might not be aware of.

Basler: And you have a book that could help out teachersâ Tell us a little about that.

Lincoln: Well actually I have two books. The first bookâwas written intentionally for people who come to my public lectures, because the people who come to the science lectures are usually of course very enthusiastic about science, and theyâve read many of the popular books. This particular book that I wrote, was actually aimed at them, for those who wanted to go a little bit deeper. The second book is not even out yet - itâll be out in the summer of 2008 â details the new accelerator that is going to be turning on this year in Europe â the large hadron collider, and that one is also aimed at the general audience.

Lincoln: High School teachers can join the QuarkNet program. They will then go and work with the researcher, for perhaps a week during the summer, and get a sense of what research is going on. Then they bring that information back to their classrooms. And for many of the QuarkNet center - of which I think there are 50 currently in the country - they get funded to bring high school students in the laboratory to work for the summer â and they get paid to work even.

• http://particleadventure.org (just cool information about particle physics).
• http://quarknet.fnal.gov (details quarknet and how to get involved.)
• http://www.interactions.org/cms/ (a worldwide site for education and image resources)
• http://www.scied.science.doe.gov/scied/PST/choose.htm laboratory opportunities
• Slightly outdated database (geographically searchable): http://ed.fnal.gov/lasso/hep_search/search.html

• Fermilab (Illinois) education office: http://ed.fnal.gov/index.shtml
• Argonne (Illinois): http://www.anl.gov/Visiting/index.html
• Brookhaven (Long Island): http://www.bnl.gov/education/
• Jefferson Lab (Virginia): http://education.jlab.org/
• Stanford (California): http://www-group.slac.stanford.edu/com/ed_educators.htm
• Los Alamos (New Mexico): http://www.lanl.gov/education/
• US Department of Energy (national) http://www.doe.gov/foreducators.htm
• National Science Foundation (national): http://www.nsf.gov/news/classroom/physics.jsp
• CERN (Europe) http://education.web.cern.ch/education/

• CMS: http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/index.html
• ATLAS: http://atlasexperiment.org/students.html
• LHCb: http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/
• ALICE: http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/Public/
• CDF: http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/
• D0: http://www-d0.fnal.gov/

• Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007 (see #9)
• Producing primate embryonic stem cells by somatic cell nuclear transfer (Nature)
• Scientists Use Monkey Clones to Extract Stem Cells (NY Times)
• Researchers Clone Monkeys for Stem Cells (Reuters)
• Stem-Cell Researchers Clone Monkey Embryo (NPR)
• Scientists claim to clone monkey embryos (MSNBC)
• Scientists Claim to Clone Monkey Embryos (ABC News)
• Scientists Claim to Clone Monkey Embryos (CBC)
• Oregon Scientists Say They've Cloned First Primate and Generated Stem Cells (Wired Blog Network)
• If Cloning Humans is Wrong, So Is Cloning Monkeys (Wired Blog Network)

• WIRED Science 
• WIRED Magazine 
• Twitter 
• Dale's account 
• Brian's account 
• Dale's Twitter project 
• Other educators on Twitter

Preview from the Show:

Iâve been called the father of DNA fingerprinting - I think grandfather is more appropriate. So basically the baby has grown up and spawned its own offspring â so Iâm now granddad â and they are thriving. âBut obviously I keep a very, very great interest in watchingâ just how itâs being used, and indeed, on occasion how itâs being misused, or potentially misused. And on that point, I will certainly stand up and raise these issues.

BARTEL: Can you tell us a little bit about how you discovered the technology?
By glorious accident. The last thing on my mind in the lead up work to developing that first DNA fingerprint was any thought of forensic investigation.

[Later]: I went back that evening to my home and sat down with my wife Sue â very excited â and said, look this is what weâve come up with; I think we can use it for this, that, and the other. And she said âyeah â thatâs great, but youâve forgotten one thing.â? I said "whatâs that", and she said âimmigration disputes.â? âAnd at that point, I remember my blood running cold. Because I suddenly thought "immigration â that is seriously political; this not science anymore. This is getting dangerously into the world of politics." But as history would have it, the very first case was an immigration dispute, and the first application was in immigration.

First, DNA fingerprinting wouldnât have happened without basic blue skies research; it came out of nowhere â it was unpredictable. And secondly, science is a lot of fun. Without that sense of fun, I wouldnât have come up with this either. I think those are two important messages for the policy makers, but certainly for the young people of today â tomorrowâs future scientists.

Links:

• Professor Sir Alec Jeffries, University of Leicester

• The Gene Genius (publication from the University of Leicester)

• Sir Alec Jeffries entry on Wikipedia

• Discovering DNA Fingerprinting from the Wellcome Trust

• Pioneering DNA Forensics (from NPR)

• Privacy Fears Over DNA (article from BBC News)

• The Informer in your Blood (article from The First Post)

Quotes from the show:

âItâs commonly accepted that the U.S. is falling behind other countries because our children score badly on math and science test scores and so on. The National Academies has sited this data; the President alluded to it in his last State of the Union address in 2006, the U.S. Department of Education talks about it. Everyone seems to accept the fact that the U.S. is falling behind and there is something wrong with our education system...I had a suspicion this was wrong.â?

âWe actually added up the numbers, and we found that the U.S. graduates a comparable number [engineers] to India, and the Chinese numbers are bogus. Basically theyâre published from the Chinese government and you canât challenge it; the Chinese numbers are high, but there are huge quality issues in both India and China.â?

âThe U.S is in pretty good shape. Maybe there are a few small nations, like Latvia and Singapore that come in first place, but those are small countries and you canât compare a population of the size and the diversity of the U.S.A. with countries like Singapore, which are small and have a different system than we do.â?

âAlmost every indicator that they looked at showed the same trend â that the U.S.A. was improving; it wasnât getting worse. And that no other country in the world was improving like the U.S.A. was.â?

âIf you look at what spurred the sciences, it was Sputnik. The Manhattan project employed 100-200,000 engineers. Whenever thereâs been a crisis, the U.S. has responded to it by putting together national programs. The fact is that global warming is a critical national program. The fact that weâre consuming oil and burning up the world is a critical threat to the U.S.A. There are so many diseases that need to be eradicated. Instead of spending another 100 billion dollars on Iraq, why donât we take 100 billion dollars and spend it on doing constructive research on eliminating diseases, of improving the world.â?

âI think the U.S. really has to get its act together. We have to create the demand for engineers and scientists, and create the excitement, and create the motivation for our students to move into these fields. Just graduating more doesnât solve any it just creates unemployment. But create a demand, create an excitement, is how you solve one of the problems.â?

Links:

• The Science Education Myth, by Vivek Wadhwa from Business Week
• Assessing the Evidence on Science and Engineering Education, Quality, and Workforce Demand, by B. Lindsay Lowell, Harold Salzman; report by the Urban Institute
• Rising above the Gathering Storm; report from the National Academies Press
• State of the Union Address by the President; January 31, 2006
• U.S. Must act to Close Dentist Gap from Pure Pedantry
• A Silver Lining to Our Science Struggles by David Epstein, from SEED Magazine (article as podcast)
• In Science Classrooms, A Blast of Fresh O₂ by Natalie Angier from the New York Times
• Math and Science Education from NPR's Science Friday; November 9th, 2007

Preview from the show:

"We have been so incredibly lucky with this mission. I mean, to have that dead wheel, which we thought was a catastrophe at the time, turn up one of the most exciting discoveries of the mission, was very good fortune."

"The next big thing, at least in mars exploration, along with the continuing adventures of the rovers, is a mission called Phoenix. And Phoenix is a lander mission that's going to land near the north polar region of mars, and is going to dig down into the soil there, hope to find ice and then, scoop up some of that ice, and put it into a little chemistry set on top of the lander, and find out what's inside of that ice."

"What we've tried to do is provide images, provide curriculum materials, and provide information for educators as we go. And I think that's actually the best way to do it, because the thing that makes this exciting is not reading about it in the historical sense after the mission's over, so much as being an active participant - you know following the mission as it's going along. You can go to our website, and you can download the latest pictures from Mars that have come down in the last day or so."

Links:

• NASA's Mars Exploration Page
• Audio clips with Dr. Steve Squyres, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
• Transcript: Mars Rover Update with Dr. Steve Squyres
• Steve Squyres on NASA Direct
• Steve Squyres entry from Wikipedia
• Steve Squyres: Man on a Misson from NOVA
• Steve Squyres Interview on The Colbert Report
• Steve Squyres on NPR's Fresh Air from WHYY, March 29, 2004
• ABC News Person of the Week Article
• Father of Spirit and Opportunity, an article from Scientific American, October 2004
• Interview with Steve Squyres from The Cornell Daily Sun
• Mars Exploration Rovers Mission Update blog & Way Cool Scientist!
• UC Berkeley Distinguished Lecture in Astronomy Lecture with Steve Squyres on Google Video
• Roving Mars, written by Steve Squyres from amazon.com

"What I am very convinced of, from all sorts of experiences of trying to communicate science, is that storytelling is a really valuable ingredient of that. And I don't mean storytelling in sort of a simplistic way, but just engaging the audience, whether they are students or teachers or laypersons, with the drama of scientific exploration, scientific discovery, even scientific debate. Because it's pretty darn common that when scientists find something new, something unexpected, there's a wrestling match for a while, figuring out whether a new view is emerging, or whether someone else is off base. And all of this is a very human enterprise - there's a whole lot of human nature in the game of science."

-Sean B. Carroll, discussing a textbook adjunct from Benjamin Cummings that will be available next year

"I really wish that teachers had fossil collections...I think that when kids put their hands on fossils - something happens."

-Sean B. Carroll, on a wish he has for teachers

"Scientific Literacy is broader than just evolution. Evolution is perhaps the poster child for the acute problem that we have. But I think that it's really hard for a student to grasp, and I think it's really hard, I think for a citizen to grasp, when they are just getting the moving banner at the bottom of CNN - [like] "scientists say", "this fossil means that" or "this gene discovery means that." Those are just punchlines and don't really understand the size of the entire enterprise or the cumulative knowledge that's built up and how that's tested and things. Now you could say - how do you convey all that? Practically speaking, I think part of the way you convey all that is that those who are communicating to the public, and I would say especially the media - have to have a better grasp of it."

-Sean B. Carroll, on scientific literacy

"I think getting the scientific method, and knowledge of the scientific method across in the classroom is really more important than any particular science content."

-Sean B. Carroll, on teaching science

"I can't encourage anyone more strongly to read what the judge said about the intelligent design case in Dover... It's a masterful opinion."

-Sean B. Carroll, on intelligent design in schools

Links:

• Professional Information from UW-Madison:
  • Sean Carroll's Lab
  • Molecular Biology Department
  • Genetics Department
    

• SeanBCarroll.com
• Books by Sean B. Carroll (from Google Book Search)
• Sean B. Carroll Books on Amazon.com
• HHMI Holiday Lecture (FREE DVD!)

• The Science of Evolution video from the New York Times
• Interview from Discover Magazine
• "One of the most rewarding aspects of writing for a general audience has been the response of the biology teaching community. I think there is an urgent need to get new, illuminating material into the hands of teachers and their students. I am working on some new paths to do that."
• Charmed by Snakes - Profile in Nature.
• Q: Whatâs the one thing about science that you wish the public understood better? A: "The depth and breadth of evidence supporting scientific ideas: compared with, say, the absence of evidence in areas like astrology, UFOs and ghosts."
• PDF of decision of court in Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District
• Interview from Science Friday
• Interview from Talk of the Nation
• Article from The Scientist
• Q&A Sean Carroll from Library Journal

WSST

• The Wisconsin Society of Science Teachers
• WSST's Periodicity

• When Science Suddenly Mattered, in Space and in Class (NY Times)
• Sputnik Left Legacy  for U.S. Science Education (NPR)
• Sputnik heralded space race, focus on learning (USA Today)
• Science: Sputnik Redux (Edutopia)

• New Science Teacher Academy
• The Amgen Foundation
• The Science and Mathematics Teacher Shortage: Fact and Myth

• Home
• 2008 Online Proposal