Stated Clearly explains science through some great animations.
I particularly enjoy the one on chemical evolution, since I’m a chemistry teacher who enjoys biochemistry and evolution. It explains how fatty acids can form on their own and self assemble into bigger structures. That’s a pretty cool result from a bunch of atoms randomly just doing their thing.
Here’s a video from a guy I’m a fan of, Phil Plait.
Plait writes the Bad Astronomy Blog, which I enjoy.
He is the author of Death From the Skies, which is a super entertaining science book about some potential doomsday scenarios (asteroid collision with earth, gamma ray burst, heat death of the universe, etc). I highly recommend it.
More recently, Plait teamed up with the guys at Crash Course, a fun YouTube channel where you can click on interesting things to learn about. He is doing the Astronomy Crash Course.
All of the videos are pretty interesting, but I found the one on light to be incredibly good.
Here’s what’s in store for our galaxy in 4 billion years:
That neighboring galaxy is the Andromeda Galaxy. Today it’s 2.5 million light years away, which is 2 x 1019 km (no big deal).
The stars in both galaxies are really far apart. That means the stars won’t be collide with each other. BUT, gravity will slingshot lots of the stars all over the places. Some of them will get ejected from their galaxies, and the other ones will get new random orbits.
Because it’s fun, here are some other video simulations of this future galaxy collision:
Look at the object circled in this picture:
Can you see a bit of a blur around it? That’s because it’s not a star… it’s a trillion stars.
This is the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest really big galaxy to our home, the Milky Way.
Here’s what you get when the Hubble Space Telescope points at this little blur to get a REALLY high resolution picture:
That’s a taste of what 1,000,000,000,000 stars looks like.
At 125 million light years away, it’s just down the corner.
The smudge you see in the photo about is just the center of Andromeda. This is what it would look like if it was bright enough to see the whole thing. Even at 2.5 million light years away, this thing is huge – much bigger than the moon in our night sky.
By the way… our Milky Way will collide with Andromeda in 4 billion years.
A German couple was hiking in a frozen part of the Alps.
They decide to walk a couple hundred yards off the trail, and they find a frozen corpse in the ice.
This corpse is a lot more interesting than you think…
If you’re into visuals, here you go.
This is a RadioLab podcast. I LOVE these guys.
“Radiolab is a show about curiosity. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience.”
It’s created by Jad Abumrad, who got a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2011. That means they gave him $500,000 and told him to do whatever he wants with the money. Basically, MacArthur Foundation looks for amazing people and says, “You’re doing some incredible stuff, and we’re just curious what you’d do with a whole bunch of money.”
Even though Abumrad is doing this radio show about science, he didn’t go to college to be a science guy. He is a composer who got into the radio business. He does a fantastic job of putting the right sounds and music into these shows to make them especially compelling.
If you have curiosity, you will probably like what you find in RadioLab.
Want to see something very weird and cool?
This guy has a very cool YouTube channel that goes through all kinds of neat science stuff. Feel free to keep clicking on more of his videos!
How would you like to visit these places? Amazing visuals in here.
You want to full screen this thing and turn up the sound.
If you want to know which places you’re looking at, it’s explained here:
http://www.erikwernquist.com/wanderers/gallery.html
Our team has to make people feel included if we want to have more than 6-8 people active on each team.
If people feel excluded, they will have a bad experience and quit.
People can get excluded through social bullying:
Social bullying doesn’t have to be deliberate. Groups who turn their brains off do it without meaning to.
To avoid excluding people, we have to care about including people.
We need to spend some effort to include people. That includes spending the mental effort to think about it even when we’re focused on tackling other problems.
Including people means doing things that make them feel like part of the group:
It is difficult to avoid having an inner circle or clique on a team.
From inside a clique, it can seem like everybody is allowed to be part of the group, but from the outside it doesn’t feel that way. It takes presence of mind and some effort to avoid a clique situation.
It’s pretty easy to achieve an inclusive group of 6 people. It’s much harder to do in a group of 10 or 20 or 30. Spend the effort – it’s worth it to have a stronger team and give more people some great experiences.
Diversity means having a wide variety of people in a group. This can be thought of in many ways.
The first thing you can see about a diverse group is that it has a good male-female mix and a mix of people of different races. Gender and race are two legally protected diversity characteristics, which means it is illegal to discriminate based on those characteristics.
Here is a list of some legally protected diversity characteristics:
A diverse group has a variety of strengths, such as:
Diversity also encompasses different personality types. Some examples:
A diverse group of people has a wide variety of interests. Diverse groups are better at generating creative solutions and brilliant ideas, because they have many different perspectives to draw from.
Let’s not forget… a diversity group of people tends to be more interesting and fun!
In this project, you are investigating a fish kill that happened in the Snake River near the fictional town of Riverwood. This is a CSI style investigation to find the cause of death of the many dead fish that were found in the river last September.
Your class has a pile of data to analyze (workbook page 165-166), and some background information to help figure out what each set of numbers means (workbook page 163-164 and Fish Kill Background Info page)
Each pair of students will be in charge of one of the data sets. You and your partner will prepare a visual aid and make a presentation to explain what their data means.
After everybody presents, the whole class will discuss all of the data and try to figure out what series of events led to the water conditions that killed the fish.
Some questions you might want to address in your presentation:
Do some internet research to learn more about your topic. You are expected to include any basic information, found on this website or the textbook/workbook. But you also need additional information above and beyond the basics to add depth to your presentation. Find that info on the internet.
While researching your topic, include two sources of outside information that may help you with your research–try to find reputable sources. (Make sure to include the link in your blog so that other classmates can access it!)
Read all of the info in your workbook pages 163-164 Those have background info on the various citizen groups, and it includes some basic info that has to be in some presentations.
Use the Fish Kill Info page that I gave you, but you need to go beyond that info to get a top grade.
Presentation and Blog Grading Form: check over this form to see how you will be graded. Be sure to look before you present!
4) You will present this assignment in class. You need a visual aid.
5) The class will discuss and debate to figure out how the fish kill happened. It is complex and has multiple strings of events that led up to the fish kill, so prepare to use your thinking skills.
6) Each person will write a summary to describe the events that caused the fish kill. This typed summary will be due approximately two days after the unit test.