Science: resources for teachers

Science fans this week got their first tantalizing peek at the long-awaited sequel to Carl Sagan’s classic PBS series Cosmos. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who takes Sagan’s place in the new series, traveled to Comic-Con in San Diego last week for the unveiling of this new trailer. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey will begin airing on the Fox television network in the spring of 2014. As with the first Cosmos, there will be 13 episodes. According to the Fox Web site, “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey will invent new modes of scientific storytelling to reveal the grandeur of the universe and re-invent celebrated elements of the legendary original series, including the Cosmic Calendar and the Ship of the Imagination. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.”

Listent to plays about the lives of scientists like Alan Turing and Richard Feynman as well as events like the Scopes Monkey Trial and the development of the atomic bomb.

Perhaps you live in a developed nation, or a pocket of a developing nation, where internet access is a relatively cheap commodity. Count yourself lucky. Right now, 5 billion people lack access to an affordable and reliable Internet connection. Which means they lack access to critical information — medical information that can save lives; scientific information that can improve farming and educational resources that can cultivate young minds. With Project Loon, Google is launching an audacious experiment that will hopefully make a dent in this serious problem. The experiment involves putting a fleet of high-altitude balloons into the air. Powered solely by the wind and the sun, the balloons will fly high into the stratosphere, well above where commercial planes fly, and they’ll beam Internet access back to the ground ”at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster,” claims Google’s main blog. 

A year ago the European Union launched a campaign to attract more young women into the scientific professions. In Europe, women lag behind men in science and engineering, making up only a third of science researchers. But the video the EU made was laughable.

Along comes science journalist Kerstin Hoppenhaus to set the record straight. Hoppenhaus’s new series for the German science site SciLogs is called Significant Details: Conversations with Women in Science. The interviews are fresh, informative, and accessible.

Google just bought one of the most promising airborne drones in development—it's not for surveillance, it's not for the military, and it's not for hobbyists. It's for making clean energy. It's essentially a giant, autonomous wind turbine that takes to the sky like a mechanical kite. And it may be integral to the future of wind power.

Makani Power, who we've covered extensively in the past, has been acquired by Google X, the search giant's secretive research and investment arm. Makani seems pretty pumped. The cleantech concern has for years pursued a unique goal: float kite-like wind turbines higher into the air, where they can harness the more consistent, more powerful wind that their earthbound tri-bladed brethren can't reach. Makani designed these drone kites to automatically take off and adjust themselves to the windstream to maximize energy production.

Far-flung lowtech satellite dishes have been bringing the continent up to astronomical speed.

Boredom is an under-appreciated and misunderstood tool in scientific innovation. Albert Einstein was pushing paper in a patent office when he developed his general theory of relativity, which altered the foundations of physics. In 2008 Mike Gaylard, then the associate director for radio astronomy at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (Hart­RAO), was bored.

A bearing on the 26m dish was broken – 48 years of hard use tends to do that and engineers were flown in from the United States to fix it.

This left Gaylard with time on his hands. So what does an astronomer do when he can't explore the skies? Well, from the sound of it, he became a chair-bound explorer, investigating lesser-known parts of Africa with Google Earth.

Ten years ago Stephen Hawking made a bet with the man in the office next door at Cambridge University: South Africa's Neil Turok, the son of ANC MP Ben Turok.

The iconic scientist balked at Turok's proposal for a money wager, so they agreed on another kind of stake: bragging rights over which of them had discovered the true story of how both Creation and time began.

Their bet – which boils down a complex debate – was supposed to be settled by the Planck science satellite, which released its "spectacular" batch of data last month. Instead, the analysis of the data has left Turok fuming.

As if to define what science is and what philosophy is weren’t hard enough, to delineate how the two fit together appears a formidable task, one that has spurred rather intense opinions. But that’s precisely what Dorion Sagan, who has previously examined the prehistoric history of sex, braves in the introduction to Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (public library) as he sets out to explore the intricate ways in which the two fields hang “in a kind of odd balance, watching each other, holding hands”:

PhysicsCentral, a web site run by The American Physical Society (an organization representing 48,000 physicists), has created a series of comic books designed to get kids excited about physics. If you click here, you can enjoy Nikola Tesla and the Electric Fair for free online. The 2008 comic book pits Thomas Edison against Tesla, the unsung hero of electricity and magnetism. Also on the Physics Central web site, you can enjoy four free comics from the Spectra series, which presents the adventures of a middle school superhero, who possesses all of the great powers of a laser beam.

Nairobi-based Ushahidi, better known for its crowd-sourcing software that helps map violence, has just entered the hardware business. Sticking to their populist roots, it crowd-funded the start-up capital to produce a new type of Internet modem that’s designed by Africans, for Africans. SIMON ALLISON wants one.

Architect Alastair Parvin presents a simple but provocative idea: what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? The concept is at the heart of WikiHouse, an open source construction kit that means just about anyone can build a house, anywhere.

It's not a demo, more of a philosophical argument: Why did Sergey Brin and his team at Google want to build an eye-mounted camera/computer, codenamed Glass? Onstage at TED2013, Brin calls for a new way of seeing our relationship with our mobile computers -- not hunched over a screen but meeting the world heads-up.

The volume of data in our age is so vast that whole new research fields have blossomed to develop better and more efficient ways of presenting and organizing information. One such field is data visualization, which can be translated in plain English as visual representations of information.

The PBS “Off Book” series turned its attention to data visualization in a short video featuring Edward Tufte, a statistician and professor emeritus at Yale, along with three young designers on the frontiers of data visualization. Titled “The Art of Data Visualization,” the video does a good job of demonstrating how good design—from scientific visualization to pop infographics—is more important than ever.

The making of Fly Fubai Boeing 737-800 Timelaps. This is actually a commercial for the airline but it's an interesting peek into the manufacturing process.Might be useful in class?

Late last week, it was announced that plans are finally properly underway to turn an old Long Island laboratory into a permanent memorial and museum to the late Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla. For Tesla’s supporters, it’s the culmination of a 70-year battle – since Tesla’s death – to see the appropriate commemoration of the man largely responsible for our modern electricity system, and a host of other scientific advancements for which he never received sufficient credit. By REBECCA DAVIS.