Here’s today’s science classroom activity. We’re surrounded by the crushing weight of layers of atmosphere above us, but we don’t feel it. Why? Our perception is tuned to differences, not absolutes. If we were in a completely pink world, we would notice anything that wasn’t pink, but (I’m pretty sure) after […]

My friend and fellow science writer Jen Frazer has started a new blog (well, two actually, but let’s start with the first). I don’t know how she can spend a whole day at work writing copy, and then come home and spin out gorgeous and witty prose, but, hey, she didn’t win the AAAS Science […]

In this modern world, it gets tougher and tougher to figure out if someone is a Jim or a Jane. Whatever happened to the easy era of codpieces and corsets? Without those to fall back on, here’s a bit of physics you can use to figure it out in a pinch.
Have the person […]

Wow, super cool. A group of schoolkids in Italy measured the distance from the earth to the moon using the delayed echo in the audio recording of Neil Armstrong’s famous “One small step…” speech.
From the article in Technology review
They used the open source audio editing program Audacity to measure the echo’s delay which […]

Ooh ooh ooh, Bad Astronomy posted (a while ago) a fabulous list of Ten Things You Didn’t Know about the Earth. If you dig my science myths, check this one out. Such gems as “The earth is smoother than a billiard ball,” “Destroying the earth is hard,” and “Mt. Everest isn’t the biggest […]

I’m going to try posting a regular feature here on sciencegeekgirl — Hands-on Sunday. I figure, if I were a teacher, Sunday might be the day I’d appreciate getting an idea of a classroom activity. So, here you go.
Why do it?
This is a good activity to help your students visualize percentages (including really […]

One of our main messages here at the Science Education Initiative is that it’s important that teachers both find out what their students difficulties are, and then choose their instructional strategies accordingly.
That sounds easy, but for the average college faculty (facing a sea of 200 faces) or the average K12 teacher (who has to prepare […]

This myth appears in a bunch of textbooks, so it’s not surprising that it’s persisted. The myth is that we mostly taste sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, and sourness at different areas of the tongue. While it’s true that we do have different taste sensations on different areas of the tongue, the exact distribution of […]

I got a good question on my Adopt a Physicist forum last week, from an 8th-grader named, for privacy purposes, “S.F.” I asked them to look around for interesting things around them and ask me about the physics of them. He/she wrote:
Actually today I did notice some strange things. I was washing […]

I’m at the American Physical Society conference in Denver this weekend (a nice way to spend a rainy weekend) and heard a very interesting talk this morning by Zahra Hazari, from Clemson University on gender bias in how students evaluate their teachers. It was a very nice study, with very interesting results. She […]