Engaging the Whole Child (online only):The Neuroscience of Joyful Education Most children can't wait to start kindergarten and approach the beginning of school with awe and anticipation. Kindergartners and 1st graders often talk passionately about what they learn and do in school. Unfortunately, the current emphasis on standardized testing and rote learning encroaches upon many students' joy. In their zeal to raise test scores, too many policymakers wrongly assume that students who are laughing, interacting in groups, or being creative with art, music, or dance are not doing real academic work. The result is that some teachers feel pressure to preside over more sedate classrooms with students on the same page in the same book, sitting in straight rows, facing straight ahead. Supporting Good Teaching Practices with Neuroscience The truth is that when we scrub joy and comfort from the classroom, we distance our students from effective information processing and long-term memory storage. The Brain-Based Research RAD Lessons for the Classroom Make it relevant.
Cell Size and Scale Some cells are visible to the unaided eye The smallest objects that the unaided human eye can see are about 0.1 mm long. That means that under the right conditions, you might be able to see an ameoba proteus, a human egg, and a paramecium without using magnification. A magnifying glass can help you to see them more clearly, but they will still look tiny. Smaller cells are easily visible under a light microscope. To see anything smaller than 500 nm, you will need an electron microscope. Adenine The label on the nucleotide is not quite accurate. How can an X chromosome be nearly as big as the head of the sperm cell? No, this isn't a mistake. The X chromosome is shown here in a condensed state, as it would appear in a cell that's going through mitosis. A chromosome is made up of genetic material (one long piece of DNA) wrapped around structural support proteins (histones). Carbon The size of the carbon atom is based on its van der Waals radius.
Largest Living Thing | Mushroom in Oregon Home > Animal Kingdom > Animal Records > Largest Living Thing Largest Living Organism: Fungus Armillaria ostoyae A Fungus Among Us People have known about the "honey mushroom" for some time, but were not aware of how large and invasive this species of fungus could be. Humongous Fungus Until August of 2000 it was thought that the largest living organism was a fungus of the same species (Armillaria ostoyae) that covered 1,500 acres (600 hectares) found living in the state of Washington. To go into the forest where this giant makes its home you would not look at it and see a huge, looming mushroom. How is it possible for a single fungus to get so big? And yes, the honey mushrooms are supposedly edible, but apparently not very tasty.
Revisiting Teacher Learning:Brain-Friendly Learning for Teachers David A. Sousa Think of those times you've left a professional development workshop saying to yourself, "Wow, that really made me think!" Now think of those grimmer occasions when you said, "What a waste of time! I'd have preferred a root canal." Why did you learn in one situation but not in the other? During my four decades as an educator and educational consultant, I have seen professional development delivered in many formats, everything from "Choose three sessions from column A and two from column B" to programs individually designed for educators. Motivation and Learning Recent brain research using imaging technologies suggests how both children and adults learn. The brain's biological mechanisms responsible for learning and remembering are roughly the same for learners of different ages. Imaging studies show that regions in the brain's emotional and cognitive processing areas are activated when an individual is motivated to perform learning behaviors. The Role of Emotions References
Wikispecies - the species directory Make A Bee Waterer And Help Hydrate Our Pollinators A single bee tends to at least 2,000 flowers daily, with their tiny wings beating 10,000 times per minute, carrying pollen, and dramatically assisting our food supply. All that work makes the bees thirsty, especially on a hot day. Bees need access to safe water sources, they often risk drowning in birdbaths or being eaten at rivers and lakes among birds, fish, frogs and other wildlife. This is why they often fly around our clothes lines and may even land on us if we are in an outdoor pool on a hot day. Kim Flottum, editor of the Bee Culture magazine, writes in her book The Backyard Beekeeper: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden: “Water is used to dissolve crystallized honey, to dilute honey when producing larval food, for evaporation cooling during warm weather, and for a cool drink on a hot day.” “Bees know exactly where to return for the same water source. One solution to this problem is to add marbles or pebbles to a bowl or pan and then add water.
Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture for Higher Education The Flipped Classroom, as most know, has become quite the buzz in education. Its use in higher education has been given a lot of press recently. The purpose of this post is to: Provide background for this model of learning with a focus on its use in higher education.Identify some problems with its use and implementation that if not addressed, could become just a fading fad.Propose a model for implementation based on an experiential cycle of learning model. Background About the Flipped Classroom This first section provides information from various articles that describe the flipped classroom, and how it is being discussed and used in educational settings. In its simplest terms, the flipped classroom is about viewing and/or listening to lectures during one’s own time which frees up face-to-face class time for experiential exercises, group discussion, and question and answer sessions. It’s called “the flipped classroom.” Sal Khan, of the Khan Academy, states: Personal Experiences Basic Tenets
Nature Institute: Viewing Nature, Science, and Technology in Context The revolution will not be crystallized: a new method sweeps through structural biology : Nature News & Comment Illustration by Viktor Koen In a basement room, deep in the bowels of a steel-clad building in Cambridge, a major insurgency is under way. A hulking metal box, some three metres tall, is quietly beaming terabytes’ worth of data through thick orange cables that disappear off through the ceiling. It is one of the world’s most advanced cryo-electron microscopes: a device that uses electron beams to photograph frozen biological molecules and lay bare their molecular shapes. In labs around the world, cryo-electron microscopes such as this one are sending tremors through the field of structural biology. “There’s a huge range of very important biological problems that are now open to being tackled in a way that they could never before,” says David Agard, a structural cell biologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Scheres was recruited to the LMB several years ago to help push cryo-EM technology to its limits — and he and his colleagues have done just that. Crystal coaxing