An origami crab folded from one sheet of paper by Robert J. Lang, with the crease pattern used to make the object.

Mathematical Imagery explores the connection between mathematics and art, a link that goes back thousands of years. Mathematics has been used in the design of Gothic cathedrals, Rose windows, oriental rugs, mosaics, and tilings. Geometric forms were fundamental to the cubists and many abstract expressionists, and award-winning sculptors have used topology as the basis for their pieces. Dutch artist M.C. Escher represented infinity, Möbius bands, tessellations, deformations, reflections, Platonic solids, spirals, symmetry, and the hyperbolic plane in his works. Mathematicians and artists continue to create stunning works in all media and to explore the visualization of mathematics–origami, computer-generated landscapes, tesselations, fractals, anamorphic art, and more. This site is presented by the American Mathematical Society to showcase some of the best math visualizations.

Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGTN) is a privately funded, nonprofit organization that is creating a cutting edge science program paired with a innovative education program. When it is complete, the Network will use the internet to link robotic telescopes at the Las Cumbres Observatory in Santa Barbara, CA with others around the world. Currently, two telescopes are online from Haleakala, Maui and Sliding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. Three telescope deployments are scheduled for 2008, and three more for 2009.

Eventually the education network will consist of about 28 0.4-meter telescopes, and the science network will consist of about 28 one-meter telescopes. Two two-meter telescopes will be available for scientific follow-up. The telescopes within the network will be able to hand off observations from one site to the next, acting as an unblinking eye on the sky for 24 hours a day, every day.

Most objects in the universe vary on some time scale, ranging from fractions of a second to several days, months, years, or millennia. Astronomers have long dreamed of being able to take long term observations of transients, such as extrasolar planets, supernovae, and variable stars. The Las Cumbres Network promises to make the dream a reality.

Greener Education Materials for Chemists (GEMs) is an interactive collection of chemistry education materials focused on the rapidly growing field of Green Chemistry. The term refers to the design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances. Often referred to as a form of molecular- level pollution prevention, Green Chemistry relies on a set of 12 principles that can be used to design or re-design molecules, materials and chemical transformations to be safer for human health and the environment. The incorporation of green chemistry principles into the curriculum has fueled a fundamentally new approach to the teaching of chemistry and the GEMs database has been designed to be a rich and efficient resource for green chemistry education materials.  The site is sponsored by the University of Oregon’s chemistry department, which has been a center for green chemistry research.

Loops of plasma arc above the sun’s surface in this NASA image.  They can be 30 times Earth’s diameter.

In physics and chemistry, a plasma is an ionized gas. It is considered to be the fourth state of matter, apart from normal gases, because of its unique properties. “Ionized” means that a plasma has electrons that are not bound to an atom or molecule. This makes them highly conductive to electricity, and makes them respond strongly to electromagnetic fields. Fire and lightning are plasmas; so is the core of the sun, as well as 99 percent of the matter in the universe.

There is a great deal of information on the web about plasmas. The Coalition for Plasma Science is a group of institutions, organizations, and companies joining forces to increase awareness and understanding of plasma science and its many applications and benefits for society. Its website was designed by and for teachers to round up the best online resources on the subject.

Plasmas are a core concept in astrophysics, and they also provide the foundation for important industrial applications such as the processing of semiconductors, the sterilization of some medical products, lamps, lasers, diamond coated films, high power microwave sources, and pulsed power switches. They also provide the foundation for important potential applications such as the generation of electrical energy from fusion, pollution control, and the removal of hazardous chemicals. The Coalition’s site links to several good overviews of the subject.

HawkCount is a web-based database that facilitates the tracking and reporting of raptor migrations. It includes site reports from over a hundred hawk-watch sites in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. The sites, which are maintained by members of the Hawk Migration Association of North America (HMANA), report their daily raptor counts to HawkCount. An interactive map helps users find hawk watch sites.

American Kestrel (source: Cornell Lab of Ornithology)

One hot topic among hawk-watchers these days is a steep decline in numbers of the American Kestrel, the smallest and most colorful hawk on the continent. The annual number of Kestrels spotted at Hawk Mountain, PA declined at an average rate of 1.6 percent between 1974 and 2004; from 1994 to 2004, the average annual rate of decline accelerated to 4.8 percent. Similar trends have been observed at locations throughout the continent, according to a data analysis by Ernesto Inzunza published on the HMANA site.  While there is no consensus on why the decline is happening, Inzunza says there are four hypotheses:
* Contamination.  The negative effects of DDT on breeding may have carried into the late 1970s, and other contaminants could also be contributing.
* Forest Succession.  Kestrels depend on open and semi-open habitats,and these habitats have been declining due to the maturing of forests in the East and forest fire suppression programs in the West.
* Increased Predation.  Cooper’s Hawks prey on the smaller Kestrels, and their numbers are rising.
* West Nile Virus.  Some studied have shown widespread exposure to this virus among Kestrels, although the effects of the virus on Kestrels are not well-known yet.

Enthusiastic, skilled amateurs make important contributions to many scientific fields. The HMANA site is a great example of passion put to work.

Investigations in Number, Data, and Space is a complete K-5 mathematics curriculum designed to help elementary school children understand the fundamental ideas of number and operations, geometry, data, measurement and early algebra. It was developed in the 1990s at TERC, an education research and development organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is now widely used. Research has shown that students taught with the Investigtions curriculum do at least as well as other students in solving straight calculation problems, and they do better when it comes to understanding number relationships, word problems, and more complex calculations.

A second edition of Investigations is now available through publisher Scott, Foresman.  The new edition is aimed at developing “computational fluency” in the base ten number system, which means explaining the meaning of its operations and their relationships.  For example, kindergarten and grade one students solve subtraction problems by physically removing paper blocks from a pile.  During grades two and three they learn subtraction “facts” and solve different types of problems, such as comparisons and missing parts.  in grades three and four, Investigations students learn important generalizations about subtraction, and they compare strategies for subtracting.

The Investigations web site includes useful information on math teaching strategies, as well as a schedule of workshops for teachers using the curriculum.

Slide from AMS “Arctic Sea Ice Melt” presentation, Nov. 26, 2007

The American Meteorological Society’s AMS Environmental Science Seminar Series gives climate scientists a forum to explain their research directly to the public. “Sometimes science can be confounding to people, and we wanted to eliminate the middleman,” says Dr. Anthony Socci, a senior fellow at AMS who established the seminar series in 2005. “We think it is tremendously valuable for the public to have the chance to talk directly with the people who do the research. It also gives scientists the chance to hone their communication skills. Both sides benefit.”

The monthly lecture is usually held in a Senate office building in Washington, DC and is free and open to everyone. If you can’t get there, you can go to the archives page and see slide shows and transcripts of each presentation in the series. Socci says that spring 2008 lectures will be videotaped for streaming webcast or download. Because the presentations are in plain language, they are first-quality resources for high school and undergraduate classrooms.

We might mark the June 22, 2007 AMS Seminar as the official end of the argument over whether or not people are heating up the planet. Dr. Naomi Oreskes, an historian of science at the University of California-San Diego, reviewed 928 articles published in refereed journals found none that disputed the theory of human-induced climate change. She showed how the theory has been supported by inductive and deductive methods, by the consilience of evidence from multiple sources, and by successfully withstanding attempts to prove it false. Like any theory, human-induced climate change is an inference, she said, but decades of research have established it as the best explanation. The disagreements scientists now have are over the pace of climate change,the ways in which it will occur, and what its effects will be. For more on her presentation, see the July 9 post below.

Other recent AMS Seminars describe the rapid melting of ice in the Arctic Sea, the current state of research on hurricanes and climate change, weather in space, and “Persuasion and the Science of Social Influence.” The next seminar, on December 18, 2007, is on “The Scale of the Climate/Energy Problem: Treating Symptoms vs. Root Causes.”

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(l-r) Stefan Smith, John Jax, Tim Gerber, and Karen Lange, developers of the Hagar Center STEM site, holding some of the Best Science Books of 2007.

The Alice Hagar Curriculum Resource Center at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse is an old-fashioned library. But its books are supported by a fine collection of digital resources in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Elementary and middle school teachers from the area are invited to browse a large collection of high-quality STEM textbooks at the Hagar Center during Teacher Resource Day, then use the online resources to make their lessons stronger.

Even if you can’t get to the west coast of Wisconsin, the Hagar Center’s website is still worth a visit. Tim Gerber, a biology professor at UW-LAX, and Stefan Smith, webmaster, launched the site last October. Each book is in Science Books & Films’ Best List or the National Science Teachers Organization’s list of Outstanding Trade Books. The resources are organized by topic, using the Resources For Science Literacy in Project 2061, the influential standards template created by the American Academy for the advancement of Science (AAAS). The books and associated online resources help PK-12 pre-service and in-service teachers develop high-quality lesson plans.

Gerber added Wisconsin and Minnesota STEM standards to the site, and the online resources mix national sites with those that focus on Wisconsin and Minnesota. He and a colleague build STEM professional development programs for teachers in local districts near the campus. “The website gives me a way to stay connected to the districts and our teacher education program, even though I can’t be in their classrooms,”� says Gerber.� As a scientist, I can build this website and they can use it for their curricular needs.

WorldWideScience opened for business in June 2007 with an ambitious goal - to give “citizens, researchers, and anyone else interested in science the capability to search science portals not easily accessible through popular search technology.” The site was developed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) at the U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with the British Library and eight other countries. WorldWideScience.org uses a technology called “federated search” to comb through 24 large international science databases, including the national science gateways of 19 nations.

So far, all WorldWideScience results are delivered in English. Researchers are attempting to build a service that translates an English-language query to another language, then translates the results back into English, “but it isn’t simple and I don’t know if or when it will be available,” says Dr. Walter Warnick, director of OSTI. A more attainable goal, he says, is providing authentication to national science portals that require users to register. Jumping that hurdle will make several more databases available, he says.

Many science research results are archived in sources that are not reachable through common search engines like Google and Yahoo! This hidden content, which is sometimes referred to as the “Deep Web,” is estimated to be many times larger than the sea of information most people surf upon. Federated search engines transmit a single query to multiple search engines after translating them into the appropriate syntax, then report the results back to the user on a single page. WorldWideScience follows the model of Science.gov, the U.S. interagency science portal that relies on content published by each participating U.S. agency. Warnick estimates that the volume of scientific information made accessible through the new portal equals the volume that’s searchable by Google.

“We are the only federated search that will send your query to servers in every inhabited continent in the world, in real time, and get the results back to you in seconds,” he says. “We feel that we’ve taken federated searching to a new level.”

Farmers have taken half of the Everglades, and developers would love to drain the rest of it. Their impacts threaten the 2.3 million acres of subtropical marsh preserved in Everglades National Park, but recently efforts have been made to save and restore the region’s ecosystems. You can learn all about it at the Everglades Digital Library (EDL).
The EDL is a service of the Digital Collections Center at Miami’s Florida International University. It was established in 1996 to support research, education, decision making, and information resource management within the greater Everglades community. Since that time, the project has grown to serve patrons from around the world with Web-accessible digital collections, the online reference service “Ask An Everglades Librarian,” and other online information services.

Much of the documentary history of south Florida is scattered in different collections, so the EDL actively collaborates with numerous scientific, government, library, and educational organizations. Their activities include cooperative grant writing, cataloging and indexing of unique materials, digitization and web delivery of popular and important items, materials conservation, and a reference desk. The whole package is organized by the Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS), a software package created by the NSDL Pathways partner Internet Scout Project.