Science is a Verb Now

You know, like Google.

[teded]

How to get kids to love science

Maybe your kids already love science. If so, great! If not, these creative strategies can help. Ready to spark a love of science in the students near you? Here are five ways to get started. Encourage students to pick one action from the list below and try it out.

Animation by Karrot Animation

1. Upgrade the science fair project. Before you create that foaming tabletop volcano, check out these curiosity-powered experiments from Make, the Exploratorium, and mad scientist Grant Thompson. Which one will you try next? Science fair optional.

2. Join the citizen science brigade. ”Citizen scientists” are volunteers who help to collect and analyze research data in fields ranging from archaeology to zoology. Explore citizen science project options here, here, and here.

3. Invent a solution to a real-world problem. In Kenya, student Richard Turere invented a solar-powered way to prevent lion attacks. In Malawi, a young William Kamkwamba harnessed the wind to power his family’s home. In Hong Kong, students in Cesar Harada‘s class work together to address environmental threats to the ocean. Now it’s your turn. What problem do you care about enough to solve — and how will you do it? To filter options quickly, try the Google Science Fair’s Make Better Generator.

Animation by Augenblick Studios

4. Research quirky, open-ended questions. Science is the story of humans asking ”why?” “how?” and “what if?” about what they observe. What questions will you ask of the world? To get inspired, check out these questions no one knows the answer to (yet).

5. Explore science fiction. Futurists believe that science fiction can predict the future — or at least provide us with a way to imagine and prototype the future. Do you agree? Before you decide, read one of the short sci-fi excerpts shared here, or watch a video from the Superhero Science series.

Animation by Jeremiah Dickey / TED-Ed

Article from the TED-Ed Blog

[coffee-and-studying]

Biochemistry for days! I truly love this class 🤓

[scientificphilosopher]

[misbehavedscientist]

This is my answer to everything, and why I keep a large stash of chocolate above my desk in lab

[asapscience]

Cell Wars! [Via @amoebasisters]

[amoebasisters]

Happy National DNA Day! We’ll be posting all things DNA today. :D

[buzzfeeduk]

[asapscience]

It’s okay to ask for help! [Via theupturnedmicroscope]

[fuckyeahphilosophy]

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (via fuckyeahphilosophy)

[ohstarstuff]

“The night is even more richly colored than the day… . If only one pays attention to it, one sees that certain stars are citron yellow, while others have a pink glow or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expiating on this theme, it should be clear that putting little white dots on a blue-black surface is not enough.” - Vincent Van Gogh

[futureofscience]

Spinach Leaf Transformed Into Beating Human Heart Tissue

“Scientists have found a way to use spinach to build working human heart muscle, potentially solving a long-standing problem in efforts to repair damaged organs.

Their study, published this month by the journal Biomaterials, offers a new way to grow a vascular system, which has been a roadblock for tissue engineering.

Scientists have already created large-scale human tissue in a lab using methods like 3D printing, but it’s been much harder to grow the small, delicate blood vessels that are vital to tissue health.

“The main limiting factor for tissue engineering … is the lack of a vascular network,” says study co-author Joshua Gershlak, a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, in a video describing the study. “Without that vascular network, you get a lot of tissue death.”

One of the defining traits of a leaf is the branching network of thin veins that delivers water and nutrients to its cells. Now, scientists have used plant veins to replicate the way blood moves through human tissue. The work involves modifying a spinach leaf in the lab to remove its plant cells, which leaves behind a frame made of cellulose.”

[science]

[cancerbiophd]

what do you mean this isn’t what prism is for

[sixpenceee]

8 Earth years are roughly equal to 13 Venus years, meaning the two planets approximately trace out this pattern with amazing symmetry as they orbit the Sun.

[currentsinbiology]

 Spinning toy reinvented as low-tech centrifuge

Growing up in India, Manu Prakash entertained himself with a bottle cap that spun around on two strings that he tugged with his fingers. As a physical biologist at Stanford University in California, he is now transforming that simple toy, called a whirligig, into a cheap tool to help diagnose diseases such as malaria.

Prakash started this project, the results of which are published on 10 January in Nature Biomedical Engineering1, after a research trip to Uganda in 2013. While visiting health-care clinics, he noticed that most lacked a working centrifuge — or the electricity to power one — and could not separate blood samples to perform basic disease diagnostics.

“One clinic used its broken centrifuge as a doorstop,” says Prakash, a 2016 MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winner who has also invented a foldable paper microscope2. “When we got back from Africa we asked ourselves, ‘Can we do centrifugation with no electricity, using only human power?’

A paper centrifuge, capable of separating out parasites like malaria from blood samples, in action. Stanford News/Kurt Hickman

[tobeagenius]

life motto

[fyp-science]

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Albert Einstein (via fyp-science)