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Nature of Science

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Richard Turere: My invention that made peace with lions. Using 3D Printers To Generate Villages Of Houses. Rome wasn't built in a day, but a village of 10 houses created out of 3D printed concrete parts has been constructed in just one day in Shanghai, China. And the even better news? Each one only cost around $5000. Oh, and they’re partly made out of recycled waste, too. The company that built the structures, WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co, spent years perfecting the system which allowed them to achieve this impressive feat.

They used a pretty hefty 150 meter long, 10 meter wide and 6 meter deep printer to generate the concrete constituents, which were then assembled together into small but sturdy buildings. The material used to construct the parts is a mixture of high grade cement, recycled construction waste and industrial waste, which is then reinforced with glass fibers. The software used to design the parts also allows for the addition of things like plumbing and windows which can be added on after the building is erected. Images via 3ders.org. Lawrence Krauss: Should Science Teachers Be Paid More Than Humanities Teachers? Nature of science. Nice ship, shame about the rivets - World - smh.com.au. Kids who spot bullshit, and the adults who get upset about it. Ben Goldacre, The Guardian, Saturday 28 May 2011 If you can tear yourself away from Ryan Giggs’ penis for just one moment, I have a different censorship story.

Brain Gym is a schools program I’ve been writing on since 2003. It’s a series of elaborate physical movements with silly pseudoscientific justifications: you wiggle your head back and forth because that gets more blood into your frontal lobes for clearer thinking; you contort your fingers together to improve some unnamed “energy flow”; they’re keen on drinking water, because “processed foods” – I’m quoting the Brain Gym Teacher’s Manual – “do not contain water.”

You pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for Brain Gym, and it’s still done in hundreds of state schools across the UK. This week I got an email from a science teacher about a 13 year old pupil. Both have to remain anonymous. This pupil wrote an article about Brain Gym for her school paper, explaining why it’s nonsense: the essay is respectful, straightforward, and factual. Error and the Nature of Science. March 2004 How science works is the key to understanding its concepts. Einstein predicted in 1907 that light bends in a gravitational field. Today, telescopes on Earth can pick up the light bending around a massive object in space. Source: NASA’s hubble.org. Scientific information abounds. Profiling the Nature of Science Observation comes from different angles. What features of the nature of the science are most important to know? Scientists think critically about claims.

Scientists back their findings with multiple lines of evidence. Observation is sometimes enhanced by quantitative measurement, by comparison—especially with controls that isolate the effect of individual variables or help distinguish correlation from causation—and by graphical representation and statistical analysis summarizing patterns in the data and the chances for error.Data does not speak for itself. Science deals with facts, not values. Science is a human enterprise. Some claims are rooted in unsound principles. Social. Why is science important? - A collection of thoughts from leading scientists, public figures, ...and you.