Education
Birds seeking safety of alligators
Posted by Dr. Dolittle on March 25, 2016 I came across this neat video summarizing a study that found some birds build nests near alligators to protect themselves from other predators. But the protection is not without a price.
POTW 7!
Posted by jrosenhouse on March 21, 2016 The seventh POTW has been posted. Enjoy! While at the Indiana math conference, I had the pleasure of seeing a short magic show by Caleb Wiles, who lives in Indianapolis and was apparently a math major at one time. I was impressed! It turns out he will at some point be appearing on Penn and…
Pesticide confuses bees
Posted by Dr. Dolittle on March 16, 2016 A new study conducted by researchers at the University of Guelph found that the use of certain pesticides impacts wildflower pollination by bees. According to a quote by study author Nigel Raine, published in CBCNews, the use of neonicotinoid-type pesticides “modify the way in which information flows through the nervous system.” The research team found…
Flight advantages in older hummingbirds
Posted by Dr. Dolittle on March 14, 2016 In a new study published in The Auk, scientists report that well-fueled older tiny Ruby-throated Hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris) might be capable of non-stop flights of over 4,000 kilometers, wind conditions permitting. They made this remarkable observation while studying birds from 2010-2014 as the animals made stopovers at a wildlife refuge during their annual migration to South America. In general, older birds not only…
Why so many of us sleep
Posted by Dr. Dolittle on March 11, 2016 A special thank you to reader Dr. Barbara Goodman, Professor of Physiology at Sanford School of Medicine of the University of South Dakota who sent me a story from The Scientist about sleep in animals complete with footage of a dolphin that was seen apparently “sleeping” (video posted on YouTube): Why do animals sleep? This is a question with many…
Genetic regulation of horse conformation
Posted by Dr. Dolittle on March 11, 2016 In a new study published in Physiological Genomics, researchers explored the role of genetics in the conformation of Tennessee Walking Horses. In other words, how close each animal they sampled looked to an “ideal” Tennessee Walking Horse. According to Kylee Jo Duberstein (Department of Animal and Dairy Science, University of Georgia), there are five criteria that are examined…
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It’s well understood in science education that students are more engaged when they work on problems that matter. Right now, Zika virus matters. Zika is a very scary problem that matters a great deal to anyone who might want to start a family and greatly concerns my students. I teach a bioinformatics course where students use…
Antarctica: Cowboy Science
Posted by Vince LiCata on March 8, 2016 Hi. Apologies for the radio gap. It turns out that Trish, the co-PI and irresistible force behind this project met with an immovable ice patch and broke her femur a few days ago at the Willy Field airport on the Ross Ice Shelf. She’s “fine” now, and freshly bionic-ized with new hardware pinning together her…
On Teaching Math
Posted by jrosenhouse on March 7, 2016 Periodically some social scientist notices that math is abstract and difficult. Thinking that math educators have overlooked this fact, he breathlessly reports his findings as a great discovery he has made. The latest example is Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queen’s College. In a new book, The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions, he…
The 12th annual Ilan Ramon Space Olympics (Rehovot, we have a winner)
Posted by weizmann science writer on March 7, 2016 Is this science writer jazzed that ninth-grade girls from a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem won a space/science contest? You bet your sweet solar-powered spacelab she is! It is not just that these girls beat out a lot of other classes (over 400), or that they break more than one stereotype. They also came up…
