sScienceMap Terry Pratchett speaks to Fiona Phillips about living with Alzheimer’s On my way to interview Sir Terry Pratchett I tweeted about our meeting. The responses ranged from: “How amazing! He’s a fabulous writer and totally awe-inspiring person”, to “I hope you find him as well as can be expected” and “You and he are both doing so much for dementia”. And that’s why we were meeting. The Discworld author first said he had it in December 2007, just over a year after I’d lost my mum Amy to early-onset Alzheimer’s. It was a particularly bleak period as we were told that my dad Neville also had it. Until then, I’d felt a bit of a voice in the wilderness, going on about the lack of understanding and good care. Terry’s honesty was a eureka moment for me. But it didn’t seem that way when I introduced myself and went to shake his hand. Dressed from head-to-toe in his trademark black, a top hat and frock coat, he looked like an authoritarian Dickensian character from his Oliver Twist-inspired novel Dodger. When he didn’t offer his hand back my heart sank a little. Daily Mirror
Procedure [Types of Variables] [Activity #1] [Activity #2] [Activity #3] [Steps to Success] [Move Beyond] You're doing great! You've chosen a topic and asked a question. You've done a little bit of research and made a best guess as to what the answer might be. Now it's time to design your experiment. The first step is to write the procedure. The procedure is a set of very specific instruction about how you are going to conduct your experiment. Sadly, no one could eat the sandwich on the left. Variables Details also help to control variables in your experiment. Independent Variable The independent variable is the one that YOU choose to help you answer your question. If there's more than one independent variable, the experiment becomes flawed because you can't be sure what caused the changes you observed. Activity #1: Start Thinking! Look at the image to the right. Take some time to think about how this student might write the procedure for this experiment: What are the controlled variables?
The Skeptic's Dictionary Understanding Science: An overview To understand what science is, just look around you. What do you see? Perhaps your hand on the mouse, a computer screen, papers, ballpoint pens, the family cat, the sun shining through the window …. Science is, in one sense, our knowledge of all that — all the stuff that is in the universe, including the tiniest subatomic particles in a single atom of the metal in your computer’s circuits, the nuclear reactions that formed the immense ball of gas that is our sun, and the complex chemical interactions and electrical fluctuations within your own body that allow you to read and understand these words. Science helps to satisfy the natural curiosity with which we are all born: Why is the sky blue? Science is complex and multi-faceted, but the most important characteristics of science are straightforward: Science is a way of learning about what is in the natural world, how the natural world works, and how the natural world got to be the way it is. Where to begin?
The Science Creative Quarterly & A DIALOGUE WITH SARAH, AGED 3: IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT IF YOUR DAD IS A CHEMISTRY PROFESSOR, ASKING "WHY" CAN BE DANGEROUS SARAH: Daddy, were you in the shower? DAD: Yes, I was in the shower. SARAH: Why? DAD: I was dirty. DAD: Why does the shower get me clean? SARAH: Yes. DAD: Because the water washes the dirt away when I use soap. DAD: Why do I use soap? DAD: Because the soap grabs the dirt and lets the water wash it off. DAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt? DAD: Because soap is a surfactant. DAD: Why is soap a surfactant? DAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. DAD: Why does soap form micelles? DAD: Soap molecules are long chains with a polar, hydrophilic head and a non-polar, hydrophobic tail. SARAH: Aidrofawwic DAD: And can you say ‘hydrophobic’? DAD: Excellent! DAD: Why does it mean that? DAD: It’s Greek! SARAH: Like a monster? DAD: You mean, like being afraid of a monster? DAD: A scary monster, sure. (pause) SARAH: (rolls her eyes) I thought we were talking about soap. DAD: We are talking about soap. (longish pause) DAD: Why do the molecules have a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail? DAD: That’s complicated.
How we edit science part 1: the scientific method We take science seriously at The Conversation and we work hard to report it accurately. This series of five posts is adapted from an internal presentation on how to understand and edit science by our Australian Science & Technology Editor, Tim Dean. We thought you might also find it useful. Introduction If I told you that science was a truth-seeking endeavour that uses a single robust method to prove scientific facts about the world, steadily and inexorably driving towards objective truth, would you believe me? Many would. The public perception of science is often at odds with how science actually works. But science is actually far messier than this - and far more interesting. In order to report or edit science effectively - or to consume it as a reader - it’s important to understand what science is, how the scientific method (or methods) work, and also some of the common pitfalls in practising science and interpreting its results. What is science? Science is not a body of knowledge.
In Defense of Science: An Interview with NCSE’s Eugenie Scott Eugenie Scott, president of the Bay Area Skeptics and executive director of the National Center for Science Education. A physical anthropologist by training, Scott has spent the past three decades defending sound science and the teaching of evolution in schools. (Photo: Liza Gross) A few weeks ago I wrote about what happens when people respond to well-established science with disbelief or mistrust. As I considered how to respond, I wondered how science educators might deal with the chasm between scientific facts and public opinion. One of America’s most revered science guardians, Scott has long taught rational thought and “science as a way of knowing” as president of the Bay Area Skeptics and as executive director of the Oakland-based National Center for Science Education. I spoke with Scott last week about the challenges of communicating science when evidence runs headlong into ideology, belief, and denial. You find the same thing with people who object to vaccines. Related
Steps of the Scientific Method Please ensure you have JavaScript enabled in your browser. If you leave JavaScript disabled, you will only access a portion of the content we are providing. <a href="/science-fair-projects/javascript_help.php">Here's how.</a> What is the Scientific Method? The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions. Even though we show the scientific method as a series of steps, keep in mind that new information or thinking might cause a scientist to back up and repeat steps at any point during the process. Whether you are doing a science fair project, a classroom science activity, independent research, or any other hands-on science inquiry understanding the steps of the scientific method will help you focus your scientific question and work through your observations and data to answer the question as well as possible. Educator Tools for Teaching the Scientific Method
Science vs. Religion: 50 Famous Academics on God by Maria Popova Decoding divinity, or what the great intellectuals of our time have to say about science and spirituality. The dialogue between science and religion is among humanity’s oldest and most controversial, drawing each era’s greatest thinkers into some of history’s most heated debates. We’ve previously looked at a BBC documentary on the complex relationship between the two and 7 essential books on the psychology of faith. Today, we turn to a fantastic mashup of 50 famous academics — including Brain Pickings favorites Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Oliver Sacks, Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett — talking about spirituality and science, created by Jonathan Pararajasingham. I can’t believe the special stories that have been made up about our relationship to the universe at large, because they seem to be too simple, to connected, too local, too provincial. The speakers, in order of appearance: 1. via @kirstinbutler Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.
How to quickly spot dodgy science I haven’t got time for science, or at least not all of it. I cannot read 9,000 astrophysics papers every year. No way. And I have little patience for bad science, which gets more media attention than it deserves. I, like most scientists, filter what I read using a few tricks for quickly rejecting bad science. Okay, this looks bad Good science is often meticulous and somewhat anxious. If you’re taking the time to do meticulous science, why not take the time to prepare a good manuscript? Recently, Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier claimed to have detected “signals probably from extraterrestrial intelligence”. Was my caution justified? Furthermore, the surprising conclusions relied on a tiny subset of data, and there was no attempt to confirm the conclusions with additional observations. Of course, there are exceptions to good-looking good science. To be honest, I’m with Connare on the slides. Obviously “That’s obvious, why didn’t someone think of that before?” Well, perhaps someone did.
How to (seriously) read a scientific paper | Science | AAAS Adam Ruben's tongue-in-cheek column about the common difficulties and frustrations of reading a scientific paper broadly resonated among Science Careers readers. Many of you have come to us asking for more (and more serious) advice on how to make sense of the scientific literature, so we've asked a dozen scientists at different career stages and in a broad range of fields to tell us how they do it. Although it is clear that reading scientific papers becomes easier with experience, the stumbling blocks are real, and it is up to each scientist to identify and apply the techniques that work best for them. The responses have been edited for clarity and brevity. How do you approach reading a paper? I start by reading the abstract. I first get a general idea by reading the abstract and conclusions. If you want to make it a productive exercise, you need to have a clear idea of which kind of information you need to get in the first place, and then focus on that aspect. All the time. Be patient.