You are currently browsing the daily archive for June 5th, 2009.
Theodore Gray (of periodictable.com) has a nice post on the Powell’s Books.Blog, Is Science as Important as Football?. A sample:
We have turned science, which should be the most exciting, the most engaging, the most relevant hour of the school day, into a deathly boring series of lectures and video games. Is it any wonder kids would rather become accountants, when chartered accountancy is made to seem like a more exciting profession than science?
The inevitable result is the well-documented decline in students entering universities to study science. But even worse is the equally well-documented decline in the understanding and appreciation of science by the general public.
Several weeks ago I thought the laser in our “black box” Raman spectrometer (literally – the DeltaNU 532 is a black box) had stopped working. Yesterday I finally had some time to spend messing around with it and discovered an interesting fact. When you turn the instrument on, the laser actually works. I thought I had left all of this kind of crap behind in grad school. Oh crap, could I be turning into an (shudder) advisor?
Science professors are often reluctant to teach their courses online, citing the difficulty of virtually replicating hands-on experience in the laboratory. Nevertheless, the proliferation of do-it-yourself experiment kits that allow online students to do at home almost everything that classroom students can do — including dissect a fetal pig — has won over some long-time critics to the portability of the sciences through distance education.
Women Bridging Gap in Science Opportunities
The prospects for women who are scientists and engineers at major research universities have improved, although women continue to face inequalities in salary and access to some other resources, a panel of the National Research Council concludes in a new report.
Apes often make weird sounds when they’re tickled, and some researchers now say these pants and hoots truly are related to human laughter.
Most of us have had the experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won’t open. That concept is at the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part) as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.
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