For people with lots of time on their hands, or a relaxing winter vacation coming up, the top 100 Science Lecture Videos from News Junkie Post, including Richard Dawkins, Kary Mullis, Steven Chu, Craig Venter, Stephen Hawking, E.O. Wilson, and a whole lot of other good stuff!
SEED magazine is one of my favorite resources for science news. They always have great articles, interesting perspectives, beautiful design, and useful content. Each issue has really fun pull-outable “cribsheets” about different trendy science topics, now available online as “downloadable tool[s] for living in the 21st century.” I’ve had the synthetic biology cribsheet up on my desk’s bulletin board for a while (right under the ad for hydrogen fuel cell SUVs featuring Fergie), but I just found it online and wanted to share it (you can download it here).
Maximizing Progress: Young Scientist Centre ~ Kids Learning-by-Doing!
Sometimes experiments don’t work and you have to do them again and that’s very time consuming. But it’s vital to get a true understanding of the subject. These days it’s so easy to download a fact, but do you understand it? What I feel is that sometimes, when things are taught without true experimentation, students don’t understand it. And that needs to change. Children can do science at school, but they don’t necessarily learn what a real scientist is — planning an experiment, needing to repeat things, having a clear hypothesis and testing it.
This is the hardest part of becoming a scientist, and has made me (and many of my classmates) question why we wanted to do this in the first place. Failing at something every day for years is terrible, even if the cumulative effect is a true understanding of a subject and maybe even the discovery of something totally new. I wonder if I had learned about how failure is so closely linked to experimental science as a child in my science classes would I be better able to deal with it now, or would I have chosen another path entirely?
I also think that experimental failure has interesting implications for synthetic biology, but that will have to wait for another post…
about the article “A Universal Truth”, but more thought out and well-reasoned. Sheila Jasanoff’s response, “Lessons for Science Envoys”, makes many excellent points about the traps that we can fall into when discussing a “universal” anything in the context of diplomacy. One of the best I think focuses on the misconception that more science necessarily means more progress:
But just as more food does not necessarily solve the problem of global hunger, so too more science cannot be expected to solve the basic problems of development. Technical knowledge and skills are indispensable for problem solving, but answers can be only as good as the processes that defined the problems.
My other favorite point is that science is not the entirely objective search for “universal” truth that the previous article states, but that scientists are subject to the same social, economic, and cultural forces as everyone else. I think she makes the point by asking what kind of science is going to be promoted in the proposed scientific diplomacy
Which versions of science and technology will our expert ambassadors carry when they travel abroad: science for the people or science for profit and power? Will American science serve the democratic humility of smokeless cookstoves, waterless toilets, and community clinics or the autocratic hubris of nuclear technology, genetically modified miracle crops, and pricey cancer drugs?
I hope that with this kind of attitude science and diplomacy can both benefit from this program.
Taking Biofuels From the Lab to the Classroom
This is great, a program to allow high school students to do hands-on research in synthetic biology and bioenergy organized through the Joint BioEnergy Institute. I think that synthetic biology has a lot of potential for improving how we teach and learn about biology, as evidenced by the tremendous success of the iGEM program. Even simple techniques in synthetic biology are based on a huge amount of knowledge about how cells cut, copy, and express genes, and about how different enzymes work to do some of the amazing things that bacteria can do (like break down cellulose and produce fuels). The basics of biochemistry and molecular biology are transformed from boring textbook memorization to something literally alive. There’s a big push in the synthetic biology community to abstract these details away, but I think it’s important to remember that synthetic biology is nothing without biology.
BioBuilder: Activities & Animations for Synthetic Biology
An animated version of the “Adventures in Synthetic Biology” comic. Cute.
The idea of DNA Literacy has been around since the start of molecular biology, and seems to be even more important now with the availability of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, the hype and misconceptions around synthetic biology, and the political fight over genetically modified organisms. Would a traveling “Mobile DNA Laboratory” work now? How can scientists and educators work with groups like DIYbio and use the internet to promote general DNA literacy?
