Real Climate has a lot of interesting links that would interest anyone who is concerned about our environment. The link I have given ypu is to the index of all their articles but they do have a regular blog which you might be interested in reading.
I know that our Science Fair is all but over but you might like to have a look at this, from Wesley Fryer:
“Meet the Robinsons” is one of my favorite movies for many reasons. The way in which the film celebrates creativity, innovation, and perseverance in the face of difficult circumstances is wonderful. Louis, the hero, is an aspiring science fair inventor, who eventually realizes his dreams and creates (or discovers) inventions which help shape the world into better, greener, and more beautiful forms.
In Ontario, Canada, 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd may be a real-life Lewis Robinson. According to Brandon Keim writing on the Wired blog, Burd conducted experiments for his science fair project which “isolated the microbial munchers” which can make plastic decompose in three months rather than thousands of years.
What a fantastic discovery!
Here’s my suggestion for your next project: Nuclear fusion at room temperature. Naysayers will tell you it can’t be done, but don’t believe them. You CAN do it. Keep moving forward!
I came across this site, InventNow, which Alice Mercer mentioned in a recent post on the Instructify site. It looks really interesting – you need to register before you can enter the site.
…. there is the InventNow.org – World which is an interactive online cartoon environment where kids can learn about inventors, and invention and get a creative spark to get the brain cells going. Then go to InventNow.org – Invent, and have kids start to put their ideas together.
I have been going through my saved RSS feeds and came across one from Karl Fisch where he talks about the Encyclopedia of Life. Those of you who are budding scientists are sure to find something interesting here.
Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world.
There are:
About 25 exemplar species pages. These pages show the kind of rich environment, with extensive information, to which all the species pages will eventually grow. These pages have been authenticated (endorsed) scientists.
Tens of thousands of additional species pages. These pages are authenticated, but do not contain the rich array of information found on the exemplar pages.
About 1 million minimal species pages contain the scientific and common names for a species and often have a distribution map, but lack other authenticated information.
BTW I have created an account for the class with our usual password (Year 7s we will tell you next week).
From Karl Fisch,
This teacher has taken an important, controversial topic, and attempted to start a global conversation. He started out with an earlier video titled, “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See!” It got a lot of views, and also a ton of criticism. He then acknowledges that he had a giant hole in the original video, and then created a series of videos attempting to address every criticism of the original, with the How It All Ends video being the jumping off point.
I think this is a very interesting approach, even if the topic wasn’t so huge or as controversial as climate change. Lay out an argument, address and attempt to refute all the criticism, put it all out there on YouTube to be freely distributed, commented on, criticized, discussed, and generally put through the wringer, and then also provide some next steps for those interested in doing something about the issue.
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree with his findings?
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BoingBoing pal John Parres writes,
Mars “has enough water ice at its south pole to blanket the entire planet in more than 30 feet of water if everything thawed out.”
I don’t know about you but it certainly makes me wonder what things, if any, have grown and evolved within over the billions of years of warming melting /cooling freezing.
Link to Space.com article, and Link to a larger version of the image above:
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Then this is the site for you. I was looking on the internet for something about how explosions work and other things like that. When I stumbled across this site and I thought how interesting? have a look for yourself and tell me what you think.
Posted by Daniel
Click on the picture to go to the site
It’s not often these days that I see something on the Net that really knocks my socks off. This site comes pretty close. Starting with an image of the Milky Way from 10 million light years out in space, this wonderful little flash animation moves closer and closer to Earth by powers of 10 with each frame. When it gets down to a blade of grass, well, it just keeps going and the whole cellular universe opens up. It’ll take a while to load on a dialup connection, but will be worth the wait!
