Teaching science

by Vik Nanda

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]
Rethinking Outreach: Teaching the Process of Science through Modeling:
[Via PLoS Biology: New Articles]

How can we get high school students interested in science? Here is a program that matches students with researchers, with the purpose of building a physical model of the protein being investigated in the lab.
What an outstanding idea! Not only did these students learn a great deal about how research is actually done but they also were instrumental in helping the researcher have some of the tools he needed.

These sorts of interactions will always be needed. Humans like to interact personally with others. But, Web 2.0 technologies can make it easier for these sorts of interactions to take place. Meetup is a great example of this.

There are already hints that scientific meetings may take a similar path. Again, not to replace the conferences already taking place but as an adjunct.

Update: Of course, Web 2.0 approaches can also expand the reach of teaching and communications. A great example was the recent EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Online Focus Session.

Technorati Tags: Education, General, Open Access, Technology

This would be fun to play with

Darwinian Evolution on a Chip:
[Via PLoS Biology: New Articles]

Catalytic activity was measured for the starting (open circles) and final evolved (filled circles) enzymes.
(A) The observed rate constant, kobs, was determined for various concentrations of substrate and fit to the Michaelis-Menten equation.
(B) Values for kobs were obtained in the presence of 0.1 μM substrate for variants of the starting enzyme that contained each of the four critical mutations (left) and for variants of the evolved enzyme that lacked each of these mutations (right).

Darwinian evolution has been captured as a microchip-based operation, allowing the experimenter to observe and control in real time the adaptation of a population of RNA enzymes.

They performed 500 iterations of the cycle in 70 hours, resulting in RNA enzymes that had almost 100 times the biological activity as they decreased the substrate concentration 20 fold.

As discussed in the paper, they are nearing the theoretical limits for this particular reaction to take place. So, in less than 3 days, these scientists were able to evolve a molecule that came within a hair of being as optimal as possible.

What could be done with thousands of different molecules and millions of years?

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0