Posts tagged science
Can Science Explain Consciousness?
We trust science because its claims are based on experience. But experience itself is a subjective reality that seems to elude the objectivity of scientific understanding. We know that our experiences—of seeing red, feeling pain, falling in love and so forth—depend on physical systems like the brain that science can, in principle, exhaustively explain. But it’s hard to make sense of the idea that experiences themselves could be physical. No doubt experiences correlate with objective physical facts, but, as subjective phenomena, how could they be such facts? When I feel intense pain, scientists may be able to observe brain-events that cause my pain, but they cannot observe the very pain that I feel. What science can observe is public and objective; what I feel is private and subjective.
Did you know…
The human skeleton is fully replaced every 8 to 10 years.
So say you command a ship in Star Fleet and you shoot photon torpedoes in a battle and they don’t hit the other ship, aren’t they still governed by Newton’s laws of physics? Don’t they just keep beaming through space until they finally hit something and most likely destroy it? Why do we never hear about this kind of collateral damage?
Columbia Professor and GZA Aim To Teach Science Through Hip Hop
“Next month, the two men, along with the popular hip-hop lyrics Web site Rap Genius, will announce a pilot project to use hip-hop to teach science in 10 New York City public schools. The pilot is small, but it
s architects’ goals are not modest. Dr. Emdin, who has written a book called “Urban Science Education for the Hip-Hop Generation,” hopes to change the way city teachers relate to minority students, drawing not just on hip-hop’s rhymes, but also on its social practices and values…”
There are so many ways for students to collaborate online, but I’m looking for something in particular. My colleague needs a space where kids can post an argument analysis and attach the original science article (in pdf form probably), and where kids can read each other’s analyses and articles and comment (discuss) on them.
Any good ideas?
Scientists Invent Particles That Will Let You Live Without Breathing
Does anyone have this article on google drive or PDF somewhere? I would love to read the whole thing.
Experts Call for Teaching Educators Brain Science
A little knowledge about the brain can be a dangerous thing, and experts in mind, brain, and education studies are calling for more formal teacher training in the biological underpinnings of learning.
“We don’t have much neuroscience in our teacher training; most of the books available are from the brain-based-learning industry, not scientists,” said Paul A. Howard-Jones, a senior lecturer in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, and the director of Neuroeducation.net, a site that analyzes new research for teachers. “In the absence of legitimate neuroscience in education,” he said, “a neuro-mythology has arisen in schools.”
photo via flickr:CC | Ryan Somma
Researchers from Harvard Medical School have made letters and wingdings out of DNA. Each one of the letter above is made from a single strand of the genetic material:
Each strand is unique, and folds to form a rectangular tile. When mixed, neighbouring tiles stick to each other in a brick-wall pattern, and shorter boundary tiles lock the edges in place.
In their simplest configuration, the tiles produce a solid 64-by-103-nanometre rectangle, but Wei and his team can create more complex shapes by leaving out specific tiles. Using this strategy, they created 107 two-dimensional shapes, including letters, numbers, Chinese characters, geometric shapes and symbols. They also produced tubes and rectangles of different sizes, including one consisting of more than 1,000 tiles.
How we measure the universe.
Think You're An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely
Scientists say that there is no scientific evidence to back up the theory of different learning styles (i.e. auditory, visual, etc) and it might be better to focus on the similarities on how our brain works, rather than how different we learn!
via microkozmos
Sweet app! Can’t wait for it to hit Droid.
Identify trees with your iPhone
A new iPhone app from the Arbor Day Foundation lets you identify trees on the go — and even geo-tag them to start a national tree inventory system.Anyone out there teaching biology/ecology?
When we’re reminded of our own agency in such a positive way, it’s almost impossible not to feel optimistic. And that’s the positive effect the researchers were measuring in the M.I.N.D. Lab: excitement, joy, and interest. The more we fail, the more eager we are to do better. The researchers were able to demonstrate this: the right kind of failure feedback is a reward. It makes us more engaged and more optimistic about our odds of success.
Folding@home: Become part of a networked supercomputer to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases
You can help scientists studying these diseases by simply running a piece of software.
Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.
