TGISF … Happy Science Friday!

Earlier this year I reviewed The War on Science by Shaun Otto. While the author spends most of the book recounting how corporations, making common cause with religious groups and supported by a corporate media that has come to believe that being “fair and balanced” means giving equal weight to the settled science on such issues as anthropomorphic climate change and patently false opinions, Otto also reserves some of the blame for the public’s distance from science to the scientists themselves. Scientists, he contends, have not done a very good job of communicating with the public, both about the nature of their work and about their findings.

Enter Science Friday, as one means by which that dynamic is changing.

On this last Friday of 2016 and just in case you haven’t stumbled on it yet, it seems particularly appropriate to spotlight this great resource for teachers, students, and the general public, and a vehicle by which scientists can share their work beyond academia. Science Friday airs every Friday on National Public Radio (NPR) from 2 P.M. – 4 P.M. Eastern Time, and you can also subscribe to podcasts or go to their website to listen to previous shows.

Science Friday, which boasts 1.7 million public radio listeners per week, celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2016. For 25 years, Ira Flatow and the Science Friday staff “have been devoted to helping people understand the world around them, and to making learning fun for everyone.”

In 1991, Ira Flatow, a young journalist whose initial forays into science reporting were stories about the first Earth Day in 1970, brought the idea for Science Friday to NPR as “a weekly conversation with researchers who discuss their discoveries in depth.” The show broke new ground as the first talk show dedicated solely to science. Now, as then, Flatow interviews scientists, mathematicians, inventors, technology innovators, and other researchers, “giving them the time they need to explain their discoveries and inventions. Over the years, Ira has spoken with some of the most celebrated thinkers and doers in the world of science, including Carl Sagan, Jane Goodall, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Sylvia Earle, Oliver Sacks, Richard Leakey, and many more.”

Ira Flatow, host of NPR’s Science Friday, discusses communicating science in his keynote address for the 50th Anniversary of NIH Environmental Health Research, November 1, 2016.

Flattow has written three books that popularize topics in science and technology: Rainbows, Curveballs, and Other Wonders of the Natural World Explained, They All Laughed… From Light Bulbs to Lasers: The Fascinating Stories Behind the Great Inventions That Have Changed Our Lives, and Present at the Future: From Evolution to Nanotechnology, Candid and Controversial Conversations on Science and Nature.

For a taste of Science Friday programming, give this conversation a listen — “How Much Math Should Everyone Know? (Show Your Work.)

I also love their science year in review and their science books of the year recommendations.

More recently, Science Friday has expanded to include opportunities and resources for participation and education. You can, for example, take a virtual field trip to explore the Columns of the Giants in California, complete with opportunities to collect evidence and apply your geological skills to other sites around the world.

And educators are offered free STEM activities and resources developed by the Science Friday Educator Collaborative, a group of six creative and highly accomplished teachers from around the country. “Starting in the spring of 2016, educators in the collaborative worked with one another and with Science Friday’s staff to create ready-to-use educational resources, all of which were inspired by the work of scientists and engineers featured in Science Friday media. The result is a collection of challenging and fun STEM resources for a variety of educational settings. And like all of the resources we share at Science Friday, they’re totally free and don’t require expensive materials to implement, so use as many as you’d like, and share them with your colleagues and friends.

Here are some of the ideas that these talented teachers developed:

• Backpacking into the Columns of the Giants to create an immersive virtual field trip;
• Drenching Colocasia plants to demonstrate hydrophobicity in nature;
• Painting watercolors to bring climate change data to life;
• Planting thermometers in a school parking lot to gather data on the urban heat island effect;
• Building kites to visualize and demonstrate Newton’s Second Law; and,
• Creating scale models of mud cores to simulate a timeline of tropical cyclones and hurricanes.

As you will see, each activity is unique. But they’re all designed to develop students’ critical thinking skills and encourage scientific exploration.”

Applications are now open, due Sunday, January 8, 2017, by 11:59 p.m. EST, for the 2017 Science Friday Educator Collaborative. You can learn more about that opportunity here.

Educators, you can sign up here to receive a monthly newsletter with free experiments and lesson ideas.

You might also be interested in the Science Friday weekly newsletter. It will let you stay up to date on all the fascinating science topics they’ll be covering on the program. You can sign up here to receive it.

In addition to being fascinating to listen to each week, Science Friday offers wonderful opportunities to build your science content knowledge in a fun way. They say, “We make science an ‘action’ verb.” But what I find particularly impressive is the fact that children as young as six can become addicted to the show. A mom recently tweeted “@scifri podcast is amazing. My 6 yo has binge listened to 4 hours of it. He loves it.” Why not introduce your students to Science Friday? Who knows, it just might inspire them to consider a STEM career. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

~ Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple STEM Institute here.

Blind Cavefish and You … Who Knew?

If you were a grown up in the years between 1975 and 1988, you might remember the famous (or infamous) Golden Fleece Award issued monthly by Senator William Proxmire (D – WI) to government funded projects and research that he deemed a waste of the taxpayers’ money. Rather than being the highly sought after prize bestowing authority and kingship of Greek mythology, Proxmire’s “Golden Fleece,” was associated with a fleecing of the public, a.k.a. a boondoggle. In all, Proxmire issued 168 of these “awards” before he retired in 1988. And various organizations and entities have carried forward on a similar vein since Proxmire vacated the scene.

To the average layperson, the Golden Fleece recipients’ projects looked like complete and utter wastes of time and money. We’ve all heard the refrain, sadly even from our Senators and Representatives, “I’m no scientist but …” Followed by something along the lines of “this makes no sense to me, seems utterly ridiculous, and therefore must be bogus.” The key phrase in this is “I’m no scientist,” because what follows is often something that may not make sense to laypeople but does make sense to other scientists. Nonscientists simply don’t have the background knowledge and training to know whether or not a line of research will generate useful and important knowledge. Sometimes the seemingly oddest lines of research do. Examples of that come later.

In fact, the same reasoning underlies climate change denial. Since it’s bitterly cold and snowing where I am (weather, a local phenomenon), the earth clearly can’t be warming (climate, a global phenomenon). Serious problems arise when the “common sense” opinion of a non-scientist is somehow equivalent in credibility to the consensus of multiply degreed climate and related sciences specialists. In what universe does that make sense?

A 2013 Washington Monthly article described Proxmire’s impact as follows:
“Proxmire doled out Golden Fleece awards to dozens of government agencies, including the Department of Justice, the National Institute of Mental Health, and NASA, often successfully stripping funding from their projects in the process. Scientists and their advocates were not amused, saying that Proxmire was presenting the intents of research projects unfairly to make them appear frivolous to a public predisposed to gobble it up, and that the award was a ploy for attention and political gain. While some of the projects he highlighted and stopped truly were stupid, the Golden Fleece Award did more harm than good: it halted legitimate research for political purposes, and worse, engendered widespread suspicion and hostility towards the notion of government spending on science, even when it represents only the tiniest portions of the overall budget.

It is the latter reason that makes those of us who want to love Proxmire for his litany of other accomplishments so uneasy, especially now that the mantle of equating scientific research with government waste has been taken up by the worst parts of the Republican Party, from cranky media obsessives like John McCain to anti-spending zealots like Tom Coburn. Bashing science in this manner became the cool new thing for the right—and it was a Wisconsin progressive who had made it cool!” 

And that brings me to the topic of this post – blind cavefish — and the research currently being done on them.

So there are these fish that live in caves and because there isn’t any light in those caves, the fish don’t need to see, and so they are blind and eyeless. They are also colorless. I mean, of what possible use could that research be?

Yet, scientists who study them have discovered some remarkable adaptations blind cavefish have made in response to their environment. For example, Science Daily reported that the research team led by Nicolas Rohner, Ph.D., of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, discovered that the species Astyanax mexicanus, a cavefish native to certain areas of Mexico, has “very high body fat levels, are very starvation resistant and have symptoms reminiscent of human diseases such as diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease,” yet, “the fish remain healthy and don’t have any obvious health problems like we see in humans. …While in humans this condition can lead to tissue scarring, inflammation, cell death, and eventually liver failure, the cavefish with fatty livers didn’t show any of these problems.”

The researchers also found that the cavefish exhibit very high blood glucose levels just after eating and very low levels when food isn’t available. These swings in blood glucose are similar to those experienced by people with untreated type 2 diabetes, though they appear to cause no negative effects in the cavefish. ’We think that like hibernating animals that acquire extra body fat in the fall to survive the winter, the cavefish become insulin resistant as part of their strategy to acquire high body fat levels,” said Rohner. ‘Similarly they likely use higher body fat levels to be more starvation resistant during periods when food isn’t available.’

The researchers identified a genetic mutation as the source of the cavefish’s insulin resistance. ‘It is not a regulatory or seasonal mechanism like in hibernating animals,’ said Rohner. ‘The cavefish are constantly insulin resistant, and that makes the argument even stronger that this is a strategy they are using to gain higher body fat levels. The fish must have also acquired compensatory mechanisms that allow them to stay healthy despite these high fat levels.’”

Scientists believe that further study of these fish might lead to cures for diabetes, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and obesity — all this from studying the genetic adaptations of an obscure species of fish.

When you consider that 30 million Americans have diabetes, probably including someone you know, and that $1 in every $3 Medicare dollars is spent on diabetes and $1 in every $5 of healthcare dollars is spent on diabetes, a total of $322 billion per year according to the American Diabetes Association, studying blind cavefish seems like a good investment, whatever the research dollars involved.

All of this makes me wonder if scientists, by simply pursuing their curiosity about the world, don’t often stumble on solutions to seemingly intractable problems that would remain unsolved if those research dollars dried up, withered away by the scorn of the “I’m not a scientist but” crew.

Cases in point, the Washington Monthly article cited above goes on to talk about the Golden Goose Award, created in 2012 by a coalition of various scientific and academic organizations at the urging of a bipartisan group of members of Congress, which intends “to celebrate scientists whose federally funded research seemed odd or obscure but turned out to have a significant, positive impact on society,” citing, for example, John Eng, a VA doctor, who received funding from the Department of Veterans Affairs to study Gila monster venom, which turned out to contain a hormone that is highly effective in treating diabetes, and Wallace Coulter who received funding from the Office of Naval Research and “invented a now-industry-standard way to count blood cells by studying how to improve paint used on Naval ships.” In the process, Coulter engendered “a technological boon with economic impact across major economic sectors like health and manufacturing,” giving American taxpayers ample return on their research investment.

Why is this important now?

We currently face a powerful impetus in America to mock science and defund major research agencies like NASA. It’s the popular thing to do, always good for a laugh. If we continue along these lines, however, the laugh will be on us. We will laugh ourselves straight out of contention as world class innovators and problem solvers in health, the environment, and other essential domains. And lives will be lost unnecessarily.

That is why, teachers, you are essential. You can activate the innate curiosity of your young learners from preschool on and guarantee that it won’t be extinguished before they get to university, where they will by then have the necessary background and interest to be eager and confident enough to pursue the advanced study necessary to find answers to the novel, mind-bending questions that lead to scientific breakthroughs, breakthroughs which ultimately benefit all of humankind. Keep science alive in your classroom to keep curiosity and scientific thinking alive in your students!

The first step toward both is to keep science alive in your own life, sparking your own sense of wonder at the diversity of life’s many solutions to the challenges of living on planet Earth.

To that end, you might enjoy this TED talk by ichthyologist Prosanta Chakrabarty on what we can learn from blind cavefish about the geology of the planet and the biology of how we see.

~ Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple STEM Institute here.

Several other articles not cited in this post might be of interest to you:

http://www.stowers.org/stowers-report/spring-2015/basic-research

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/10030/title/What-Proxmire-s-Golden-fleece-Did-For–And-To–Science/

 

Tell Them Stories! ~ An Interview with Science Teacher and Aviculturist, Jason Crean

Yesterday evening at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, during our final STEM Institute follow-up session of the year, I had the privilege of chatting with one of ten 2016 Golden Apple Award winners, a 2009 Presidential Award Winner (presented by President Obama), the President Elect of the Illinois Science Teachers Association, and a guy who built a 300 square foot aviary on the back of his house. They all happen to be one and the same person, Jason Crean.

Jason Crean with One of His Avian Friends, an Aracaris Named Bonito.

Reading about Jason in preparation for this conversation, I was struck by the lifelong passion he’s had for living things and the impact he’s had on his students. By way of introduction, I found the following passage on the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) website, on the occasion of Crean winning an award for his genetics curriculum, Who’s Your Daddy?

“Growing up, I really wanted to become a veterinarian,” Crean said, “but the further through my education I went, the more I wanted to share my love of biology with others. Now that I have taught biology for about 15 years, I have the best of both worlds.”

Former student Allison Kihn has fond memories of the XY-ZOO and the school zoology club founded by Crean. As a second year vet student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she says she is “exactly where I want to be in life right now,” thanks in part to Crean’s encouragement.

“My time in the lab was truly treasured, and really gave me a grasp on genetics that has really helped me in the classroom and laboratory setting,” Kihn said. “I pretty much can thank Mr. Crean for single handedly helping me achieve my dream career.”

And so I asked …

What experiences from your childhood or youth set you down the path you’re on … being a science teacher, being an aviculturist and zoologist, being a writer.

I played outside ALL THE TIME. From morning until night, I was outside exploring: climbing trees, laying in the grass, digging in the soil. When kids play outside, they can’t help but encounter organisms and these experiences led to my interest in science. My parents allowed me to get a cockatiel as a kid and this sparked my lifelong interest in birds. I now have many different species as part of my live animal education program that serve the same purpose as that first bird: allowing kids to make connections with living animals which sparks not only an interest in science, but compassion towards nature as well.

Connecting Kids to the Natural World

What is one lesson or activity you’ve designed of which you’re especially proud?

I have worked with Dr. Jean Dubach, wildlife geneticist, for several years and I have authored curricular activities that make use of the fascinating work she does in her lab. We have published these activities free for teachers. One of the activities that best shows my transformation as an educator is the Lion Investigation (Who’s Your Daddy?, an AAAS award winning lesson). The traditional lab activity, which is handed to students in its entirety, as well as the updated version, which allows students to work with individual data sets one at a time and in sequence, are both available. I have found the “controlled release” of data allows students to become further immersed in the driving questions and allows them to alter their hypotheses as new data becomes available.

Jason Crean with Dr. Jean Dubach

How do you get your best ideas for new lessons?

I always start with an engaging phenomenon which usually begins as an interesting story. If the story is engaging, it’s going to hook more students from the onset. If they’re interested, they’re more likely to answer those driving questions. This could be a human interest story I see on the news, a particularly engaging article I read, or something I actually encounter. As a zoo consultant, I have had the opportunity to interact with some fascinating animals and their stories can lead to some engaging phenomenon for the classroom. The animal nutrition lab came out of an idea I had while feeding a rhinoceros by hand!

In working with students, what is your primary focus? What are your aspirations for them?

I want my students to have the skills to make sense of the natural world. I want them to be able to reason through data and make sense of it. I want them to be able to investigate problems and come up with viable solutions. I want them to be informed citizens and make good choices. These goals can lead them to pursue careers in science or, at the very least, act as a responsible citizen living on our planet.

What advice do you have for beginning science teachers?

Tell stories. Your life as a teacher will be richer and more meaningful if you can tell your students stories. They will be more easily drawn in and, at the same time, you’re providing the context for the idea you are presenting. Students have trouble learning concepts when isolated and only learning the ‘what.’ But when you tell the stories, the context provides them more of the why. Narrative learning has made my life as a teacher and scientist so exciting and that definitely rubs off on my kids.

Jason Crean received his B. S. in Biology (1996)  and his master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction (2001), both from St. Xavier University. He also has an M.S. in Biology and a graduate certificate in Zoo and Aquarium Science from Western Illinois University. He is certified in high school biology, chemistry, zoology, and other topics. He is a biology teacher at Lyons Township High School in La Grange and does research/service work for the Brookfield Zoo Conservation Biology Department’s Genetics Lab. In addition to the award mentioned above, he won the National Association of Biology Teachers’ 2009 Ecology/Environmental Science Teaching Award and the 2009 Drug, Chemical and Associated Technologies Association “Making a Difference” Award sponsored by the National Science Teachers Association among others.

To connect with more of Jason’s work, check out Beaks Birdhouse to learn about avian nutrition and various kinds of hand-reared softbills, the Illinois Science Teachers Association, to join with other science educators to share knowledge about science and teaching, and see his list of accomplishments and publications in his online resume. There’s lots to explore!

Jason Crean with Golden Conure Chicks

Given the enormous impact that playing outside had on shaping Crean’s lifelong passion for living things, I’d like to recommend a favorite book of mine which advocates that children have more opportunities to do just that, Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder.

~ Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple STEM Institute here.

 

Golden Apple STEM Institute TED Playlist: 10 Inspiring Talks for Inquiry-Based STEM Teachers

If you’re a follower of TED talks you are probably already familiar with TED playlists, TED or curator created groupings of TED talks around a particular theme. You know the power of these collections to spark your thinking about a  topic. If you aren’t familiar with TED, the following short videos will provide you with an introduction to these inspiring and entertaining talks on the cutting edge of human understanding.

By the way, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, but the talks are much more wide-ranging that those three words suggest, delving into science, mathematics, education, and numerous other fields. The talks themselves are given at an annual TED conference. This year’s TED conference was in Vancouver and just just concluded. Attending the conference is by application and invitation and costs $8,500, not including airfare, lodging and food. In the coming weeks, the talks from that conference will be posted online and are free. Cities around the world have created their own TED conferences called TEDex, and those talks are posted on the TED site as well.

STEM Institute has assembled the following ten TED talks that capture the spirit of inquiry, curiosity, and fun that are at the heart of our program. They suggest what we hope students will experience in their STEM classes.

 

Why we need the explorers

This talk could be subtitled “on the importance of curiosity driven science.”

 

Three rules to spark learning

A high school chemistry teacher shares insights he learned from his surgeon that changed how he practices the craft of teaching.

 

Hey science teachers – make it fun

Why textbook driven instruction isn’t the way to go — be playful and use storytelling to awaken your students’ interest.

 

Science is for everyone, kids included

This talk is on the importance of play; science as a way of being; children’s questioning; and experiments as play.

 

Math class needs a makeover

Although this talk is about high school math, the takeaways apply equally to elementary math and science – the importance to students of formulating the problems; here’s some great teaching advice to lead students to patient problem solving.

 

Hands-on science with squishy circuits

Make some homemade play dough for little kids to build circuits.

 

Kids can teach themselves

Sugata Mitra explores how you can indeed feel confident in turning over more responsibility for learning to kids themselves.

 

How I harnessed the wind

Inspiring talk by a young man from Malawi that could lead students to explore the maker movement, engineering, and the power of young people to make real world contributions; a good hook for a unit on energy or for Earth Day.

 

Biomimicry’s surprising lessons from nature’s engineers

Why immerse students in nature? This talk explores the intersection between science, design, and engineering.“Learning about the natural world is one thing; learning from the natural world, that’s the profound switch.”

 

Do schools kill creativity?

Saving the best for last, I close with the most popular TED talk of all time. It gets to the heart of what is wrong with most schools, the deadening impact they have on students’ creativity, creativity that is essential to success in the STEM fields.

 

Enjoy! And if you have a favorite TED talk or comments about any of these, please share in a comment below.

~Penny

You can learn more about STEM Institute here.

On Teamwork: Walking Each Other Home

“We’re all just walking each other home.”  Ram Dass

Teaching is a serving occupation. We teachers are servant leaders. Most often we probably think of that service as service to children. After all, teachers are specialists in generativity. We pay it forward to coming generations.

Whenever I would lament to my dad that I could never repay him for something he had done for me, he would tell me, “The only way you can ever repay me is to help the next generation, your children and others.” It was something his father had told him, and his own life proved that point in all the many things he did to help me and my brother and sister get off to a good start in life. Teachers also prove that point every day. We can never repay our teachers for the lessons they taught us and the belief they had in us, but we can provide those essential supports to the students who come into our own lives.

Recently, I’ve been thinking that it isn’t just our students that we have an obligation to serve. We have an obligation to serve our colleagues as well, especially those newest to the profession. And we are a profession. Let’s never forget.

Every time a teacher shares resources with a colleague, collaborates with other teachers in planning a lesson, mentors a student teacher or a novice teacher, we are offering the same kind of service that we render to our students. Adult-to-adult sharing also pays it forward and benefits future generations.

Nightingale Elementary Team in Action. Even the Body Language Says “We’re In This Together.”

The sharing teachers are doing these days on teacher sites, from Pinterest to teacher-written blogs, is a way we cross pollinate, so that good ideas spread from one classroom to the next and from one school to another. Good ideas were never meant to be hoarded; they deserve to be offered generously.

Recently, I visited the classroom of Kesha Brown at Gregory Elementary and saw a great idea she had for her science teams. Each team’s lab table is labeled with a category of scientist from Archaeologist to Physicist, reenforcing the notion in students’ minds that there are many kinds of scientific specialties and professions they can aspire to, depending on what interests them most. Kesha was happy to have me share that idea with other teachers.

Teacher Kesha Brown of Gregory Elementary Uses Types of Scientists for Her Table Teams

Perhaps the Internet has opened us up a bit more with the notion of a collaborative commons and shareware. Perhaps, being under siege as a profession has helped us to close ranks, recognizing that we all sink or swim together in this day of high stakes testing and radical accountability. After all, it’s in our own self-interest to help our colleagues. Or perhaps the ideal of a “Professional Learning Community” has captured the imaginations of teachers. Whatever the impetus, working together has made teaching better, better for us and better for our students, who now have a model of how adults cooperate to achieve success.

And this spirit of collaboration just happens to be supported in the Next Generation Science Standards. In Appendix H Understanding the Scientific Enterprise: The Nature of Science in the Next Generation Science Standards, for example, one of the standards for grades 3-5 claims “Most scientists and engineers work in teams.” The evidence of this can be found almost every time you read about an amazing new discovery or invention, such as the announcement I ran across today in Huffington Post that astronomers have created the first 3D map of the hidden universe. I couldn’t help but notice the paragraph that begins, “To create the map, the team …”

I also recently started reading Walter Isaacson’s new book The Innovators: How A Group Of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, a central theme of which is that “most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively.” In a published excerpt from that book, Isaacson said, “The tale of their teamwork is important because we don’t often focus on how central that skill is to innovation. There are thousands of books celebrating people we biographers portray, or mythologize, as lone inventors. I’ve produced a few myself. Search the phrase ‘the man who invented’ on Amazon and you get 1,860 book results. But we have far fewer tales of collaborative creativity, which is actually more important in understanding how today’s technology revolution was fashioned.”

According to Isaacson, “their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.”

This faith in teams being more creative and better able than individual teachers to foster improved STEM education is behind Golden Apple STEM Institute’s insistence on working with teams of teachers from our partner schools and in encouraging them to work “as an iTEAM” when they return to their schools following our summer professional development. Simply put, we are stronger together. Absolutely the best professional development of my teaching life came when I worked after hours for about a year with a team of my colleagues, usually late on Saturday nights over pizza and beer, to help solve some of the problems our school was facing. I grew so much as a teacher and as a professional through those late night conversations. I also learned something back then that’s essential to team work. Bring food! Food helps fuel the good work that you want to do. It’s amazing how much mileage a team can get out of potluck snacks.

I like to think of the Ram Dass quotation at the head of this post as emblematic of what good teachers do as colleagues year after year. We walk each other home. We help each other get to the destination that is our common goal, providing students with the best education we are capable of providing. Surely, that is more certain of success than the Lone Ranger spirit that often prevailed in our schools, when teachers all but set up private practices, shunning collaboration and jealously guarding their lessons lest a colleague “copy” them. A clever cartoonist once defined high school as a place where independent subcontractors parked their cars. I remember those days, and I’m glad that, for the most part, they are gone.

So, are you part of a team? If not, how about inviting one to form? Who will your teammates be? If yes, have you worked with your team today? When will you gather again? Over what questions? What needs doing?

It will be well worth the time and effort you invest to connect as colleagues over the important work you are each doing on behalf of students. I promise.

~ Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple’s Inquiry Science Institute (soon to be Golden Apple STEM Institute) here.

 

“Disproportionation of (Mg,Fe)SiO3 perovskite in Earth’s deep lower mantle” … say what?

I’m going to invite you to skim the following research summary from Science.

The mineralogical constitution of the Earth’s mantle dictates the geophysical and geochemical properties of this region. Previous models of a perovskite-dominant lower mantle have been built on the assumption that the entire lower mantle down to the top of the D″ layer contains ferromagnesian silicate [(Mg,Fe)SiO3] with nominally 10 mole percent Fe. On the basis of experiments in laser-heated diamond anvil cells, at pressures of 95 to 101 gigapascals and temperatures of 2200 to 2400 kelvin, we found that such perovskite is unstable; it loses its Fe and disproportionates to a nearly Fe-free MgSiO3 perovskite phase and an Fe-rich phase with a hexagonal structure. This observation has implications for enigmatic seismic features beyond ~2000 kilometers depth and suggests that the lower mantle may contain previously unidentified major phases.

I know. Me too. Even some of the words I recognize seem to be used in a way I’m not familiar with. And my spell checker went ballistic with red underlining.

But I want to tease out a few key phrases before I ask you to read a very short Huffington Post article that translates the above passage … sort of. The phrases are “previous models,” “built on the assumption,” “on the basis of experiments … we found,” “this observation has implications … and suggests.”

Sound familiar?

Perhaps those phrases remind you of this:

Our old friend, the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices

Now here’s a link to the story, “Earth’s Mantle Isn’t Quite What We Thought It Was, Study Shows,” that sent me to the summary in Science. What is exciting to me about this little story is what it reveals about science, about what a theory actually is — an understanding of how a particular facet of the world works, based on all the available evidence to date … something that can change but only in the face of new data — and about scientists’ willingness to continuously push against the boundaries of our understanding. The closing sentence is especially revealing. “But according to Dr. Yue Meng, another Carnegie geophysicist involved in the study, the finding ‘may significantly alter the prevailing theory of the lower mantle.'” And that’s cool!

But here’s another thing to ponder.

The kind of thinking these amazing scientists did to arrive at a new understanding of how the earth is constituted, which ultimately will make its way into updated science textbooks, can begin for your students in your classroom this year. The words and phrases in the research summary at the beginning of this post and in the popularized version published on Huffington Post for us non-scientists are words and phrases your students can learn from you in the process of doing science. They won’t get it from reading chapters in textbooks. The best way for you to lay the foundation for scientific research, or even for understanding enough science to be an informed citizen with an appreciation of the kind of thinking that underlies science, is to help students frame investigable questions and conduct inquiry-based investigations to find answers to those questions.

The scientists involved in this breakthrough study are Li Zhang, Yue Meng, Wenge Yang, Lin Wang, Wendy L. Mao, Qiao-Shi Zeng, Jong Seok Jeong, Andrew J. Wagner, K. Andre Mkhoyan, Wenjun Liu, Ruqing Xu, Ho-kwang Mao. Notice anything? What isn’t so obvious is that with the exception of Li Zhang, Wenge Yang, Lin Wang, Ho-Kwang Mao, who are affiliated with the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research (HPSTAR), in Shanghai, China, but who are also with American research institutions, all of the scientists involved in this study are based in the U.S. at places like Argonne National Laboratory right here in Illinois, the National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, and Stanford University.  Science is international. It is also collaborative. (Yay, for science teams!)

Teamwork is an Essential in the Science Classroom.

We must do everything in our power to insure that all of our students have the opportunity to follow this life path, if their interests and talents incline them to it, and regardless of their socioeconomic status, their race, or their country of origin. Quite simply, all of our students need more time in the school day, and more opportunities in elementary school period, to lay the groundwork for pursuing this life choice. Only then will they be prepared to take on more challenging science in high school and to become science majors in college. And someday, because of your early encouragement, perhaps they will publish their findings in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal like Science. That’s what!

~ Penny

You can find us here.

 

 

 

How Does a Child Become a Scientist? Part 2

I started with a simple question, “How did you wind up as a scientist? What early experiences led you to pursue that career?”

Lawrence Heaney at Field Museum Reflecting on His Path to Becoming a Mammalogist

It turns out that was all it took to have mammalogist Larry Heaney’s face light up as he recollected a rather wonderful childhood and the life it led him to. What follows is his response, a one question interview.

When I was two and a half years old, my family moved from an urban area of Washington, D.C. out to what then was the far edge of the suburbs. A block away was an old farm with fields and forest, and at the bottom of the hill was a creek with fish and crayfish. I grew up running around in the woods as much as possible; I loved seeing the animals and plants, and spent a lot of time learning to identify them using field guides. My friends and I collected bugs, rocks, and a few fossils, and caught turtles and crawfish that we kept as pets. It was not something that I or my parents thought of as a future career; it was simply doing what I enjoyed most, and I found it to be wonderful.

When I was in sixth grade, my parents learned that there were Saturday morning classes for middle-school-aged kids taught at the Smithsonian. I took a class on archeology, and it was OK. I next signed up for a class on mammals; we spent our time behind the scenes in the research areas, learning to identify actual specimens of mammals from the world’s largest research collection of mammals. We learned to skin and stuff mice and shrews from our instructor, who was Curator of Mammals: guts and muscle, sawdust and cotton, field catalogs and taking notes. I loved it, bought some little mouse traps at the hardware store, and began catching mice and preparing specimens from my local woods that were cataloged into the research collection at the Smithsonian. At the end of the class, I asked if I could volunteer at the museum during the summer. My instructor became my supervisor, and at the age of 14, I was helping to curate the research collection at the Smithsonian Institution. It was crazy of him to allow it; I surely wasn’t qualified to do such work, but he took a leap of faith and gave me a chance. He was only the first to do this; a researcher working in the Division of Mammals gave me things to read and took me to help collect whales that washed up on the beach; a new curator took me under his wing and hired me to help collect data for one of his projects. It still was not something that I or my parents thought of as a future career; it was simply doing what I enjoyed most, and I found it to be wonderful.

Scientist Larry Heaney holding a previously unknown species of mouse that his team had just discovered in the rain forest in the Philippines. They live in the treetops, eating seeds. Their whiskers are so long that they reach nearly to their ankles.  Note his science journal!

From there it was a pretty straight-forward progression. When I went to college, I picked a school that had a very active natural history research museum on campus, and hung around until I was hired as a work-study student. I volunteered to help with field work done by faculty and grad students, and eventually was hired during the summers to do more. Grad school in evolutionary biology was an obvious choice, with the opportunity to develop my own research projects, with a great deal of encouragement from the faculty and friends.

I can’t point to a single individual who was the sole or primary influence on me; rather, it was a series of people who were remarkably generous with their time and trust. Some were officially teachers, but many were unofficial, and I learned from them all. When I screwed up, they made sure that I knew it, then gave me another chance. What I learned from them was to follow my interests, to take the initiative, and to recognize that I had the opportunity to learn things that no one had understood before. That, I think, has always been the single greatest driving force for me: to find or understand something that had been unknown before, and to make it known to others who share my interests. The natural world is an astounding place; learning to understand it is the greatest challenge I can imagine. Books are fine, but it is what you learn by yourself that really lights the fire of learning. Good teachers are those who nurture that fire. They are all my heroes.

Today Lawrence Heaney is Curator of Mammals at the Field Museum of Natural History and 2014 recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award from the American Society of Mammalogists.  He spends much of his time working in the Philippines, where he has discovered new species of mammals. He’s written extensively on the things he finds to be wonderful, over 160 publications including Vanishing Treasures of the Philippine Rain Forest. Dr. Heaney is also heavily engaged in training the next generation of local mammalogists.

Larry Heaney and Filipino Colleagues in the Field

In Pavlov’s Last Testament, the great researcher said, “Remember that science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives, that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching.” Larry Heaney exemplifies that spirit and passion. The question is what can we learn as teachers from his story that will help us guide students in uncovering their own passion, for science or, for that matter, anything else? One of my takeaways is that giving your students opportunities to explore the natural world along with lots of real world hands on experiences, more than most children today currently have, will help them find those passions that will light the spark and shape the course of their entire lives. Then trust your students to pursue their curiosity.

What are your takeaways?

If you’d like to share scientists’ stories with your students, you can do so by taking them on a virtual visit to the Field Museum here.

~ Penny

Learn more about the Inquiry Science (STEM) Institute here. (New name coming soon!)