Maybe you were like me when the RLS ads first started showing on television, not believing that RLS was real, thinking that it was a fabricated condition to sell more pharmaceuticals. Or conversely, maybe you suffer from RLS and became impatient with non-believers like me. I am now convinced that RLS is a real condition that we can use in the classroom when we study brain and nervous system function. [More]

In the World War 2.0 segment, various banks, police and government organizations, and businesses throughout Estonia were subjected to a variety of attacks via the Internet. Specifically, Estonia was attacked by a botnet – a set of computers all controlled by an outside computer attempting to access a single server and flood it with requests. As noted in the article, a similar attack against the United States, grown proportionately, would effectively cripple the country. [More]

The demonstrations that Dr. Megavolt gives in this episode are an ideal way to get your high school kids "charged up" about physics. I used this clip as a catch to get kids interested in the topic of magnetism and electricity. After twenty years of teaching physics I can safely say that the Tesla coil is the number one science demo kids want to see. So I want to give a few pointers, and suggestions about how to use these safely in the classroom. [More]

Tracy Caldwell was a high school student in Arcadia, California when Christa McAuliffe was chosen as the first teacher to go into space. McAuliffe served as an inspiration for Caldwell to pursue a career in space. The Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986 didn’t deter Caldwell from pursuing her dreams. After receiving her doctorate in physical chemistry, she was selected by NASA for training and in August 2007 she fulfilled her childhood dream by flying on the Space Shuttle Endeavor. [More]

Benjamin Alvin Drew began his career in the United States Air Force Academy, where he trained to become a pilot. He served in several military missions, including: Just Cause, Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and Operation Provide Comfort. Selected by NASA as a Mission Specialist, Drew flew in mission STS-118 on the Space Shuttle Endeavor in August 2007. [More]

In his demonstration of captcha’s, those ubiquitous pattern recognition challenges we face when we need to authenticate ourselves as humans on the internet, Luis von Ahn describes challenges computers have with images. He talks specifically about two very tough problems, optical character recognition (OCR) and labeling images with words. By presenting humans with activities such as solving captchas to create a new yahoo account or image labeling games such as ESP, von Ahn is orchestrating a grand teaching experiment -- teaching computers about image recognition through many millions of hours of online work and play. [More]

Barbara Morgan first came to national prominence in 1985 when she trained alongside Christa McAuliffe as part of NASA’s Teacher in Space Project. After the Challenger accident, Morgan resumed her career as an elementary school teacher in McCall, Idaho, but she continued her affiliation with NASA by speaking with groups and serving on various task forces. More than two decades later, Morgan fulfilled a lifelong dream by serving as a Mission Specialist on STS-118 in August 2007. [More]

Pilot and astronaut Buzz Aldrin served as the Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 11 which landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969. He was the second person to step on the Moon, following Neil Armstrong. Armstrong was selected by NASA as part of its third group of astronauts in 1963. He has logged a total of more than 289 hours in space. Prior to NASA, Aldrin served as a jet fighter pilot for the United States Air Force during the Korean War. [More]

Wow. This segment of WIRED SCIENCE brings home the great strides we have made in tissue culture and organ repair. This information fits into our biology classes in several places—when we talk about immunology, when we talk about cancer, and when we talk about body systems. [More]

For this installment of the "In Your Classroom" blog, I would like to share with you two examples of projects related to remote data collection. The example projects are a high school robotics project using LEGO Mindstorms robots, Vernier sensors, and video instant messaging technology to collect data on "Mars" and an elementary school project using the same technology for a simulated marine biology expedition. [More]

Wired Science's "GeekDad: UFO" video includes a fun and educational segment showing a step-by-step method on how to build a hovercraft with your students. It is something that every physics teacher should have in their arsenal of fun toys that teach physics. So what follows below are a few construction tips, some helpful advice, and some teaching strategies on how to use them. [More]

Listening to the interview with Paul Kedrosky, I was immediately struck with two ideas I currently use in my classes/department. Although very different in their setup, purpose, and methodology, they are both excellent at producing quality student work. [More]

"The Grapes of Math" segment brought forward a couple of wonderful math ideas. The first one that I thought of was the use of modeling data. The use of yeast in the fermentation process of making wine is an example of a substance being used to speed something up. How does yeast work? How fast does it work? [More]

Recently, I was fortunate enough to be awarded an Fulbright Memorial Fund Scholarship to travel to Japan to observe the Japanese school system, its classrooms, its buildings, its teachers, and its students. I was able to see several elementary, middle school, high school, and even university students in their educational settings. At the elementary building, I received a gift of 100 paper cranes, folded by the students of the school I was visiting. This art of paper folding has been around for generations in Japan. [More]

In watching this video, I thought of the wonderful engineering that goes on in constructing many things. Seeing the junk yard and the materials NASA is trying use to replicate or mimic the Saturn rocket, made me think of the movie "Apollo 13" when the engineering leader brought in the square piece of piping, told his staff they had to make it fit into a round hole, and gave them all the items they had to use. [More]