Category Archives: IBDP Biology
15 year-old develops effective, cheap test for pancreatic cancer [TED Audition]
Wow. Here’s Jack Andraka’s TED Audition for a talk on his work developing a carbon nanotube and antibody-based test for pancreatic cancer.
Jack won the 2012 Gordon E. Moore Award ($75,000) at the Intel International* Science and Engineering Fair for the same work:
Read more about him, his work and the work he built it on here on Forbes.com.
*Yup – you can have a go too.
Thai Kids Anti-Smoking Ad [Video]
This is well done.
I wonder what would happen if a young orangutan asked this adult for a light? (Indonesian zoo aims to stub out orangutan’s smoking habit, Guardian).
Tori the smoking orangutan, from the Guardian
IB Science Weekly Magazine – Get involved!
IB Science Weekly Magazine – do you want to be a news spotter?
I kept seeing these paper.li posts in Twitter, so after a quick exhange with Adrienne Amichetti (@amichetti) decided to give it a go. There are lots of paper.lis out there, especially it seems in the ed-tech world. It was quick and easy to set up, though a bit of a fiddle to work out how posts were categorised and filtered (still not sure how it works).
The aim of this project is to provide a weekly publication which pulls in the current science and education news, for use in MYP, DP and PYP classrooms.
If you would like to get involved and be an IB Science or Science Education news spotter, please head on over to Twitter and let me know. If you see some worthy news, simply tweet it with a link and a description, along with the hashtag #IBSciWeekly. The paper.li elves will see it and it should appear in the finished product. I will be able to curate the posts as they are published each week. If you think that everything you (or someone you recommend) is gold, I can include their Twitter handle or blog url as a source.
The details:
- Address: http://tinyurl.com/IBSciWeekly
- Hashtags: #IBSciWeekly, #MYP, #IBDP, #IBBio, #IBChem, #IBPhysics
- Published: Weekly, on a Tuesday (I think)
- NewsSpotters: IB Teachers and Students
Of course, things are bound to go wrong at first! I would love to find a way to share the editing jobs.
And here is a lovely video of a murmuration of starlings:
E.O. Wilson’s Letter to Young Scientists [TED Talk]
This is a great motivational address to young scientists the world over. Living legend EO Wilson gives his words of advice to the problem-solvers of tomorrow: you guys.
“The thirst for knowledge is in our genes; it was put there by our distant ancestors and it’s never going to be quenched.”
EO Wilson
Fruit Fly Development: Cell by Cell [Nature Video]
Drosophila melanogaster
Wow. Two papers published in Nature Methods have outlined a new technique which allows researchers to track development of embryos (in this case Drosophila melanogaster), in real time. By taking simulataneous multi-view microscopic images of the developing embryo, individual cells can be tracked in real time. The methods are described in more detail at Nature News here.
Have a look at the amazing results below, as a fruitfly embryo develops into a larva, ready to hatch. The two views are the dorsal (upper side) and ventral (lower side) view of the same embryo. See if you can pick a cell and watch its path of development.
Think about how this links to IB Biology topics of cell division, cell specialisation and embryonic development. How does a stem cell know what type of cell to become? If you look closely, there’s a scale bar in the bottom-right. Take a snapshot and calculate the actual length of the embryo.
For more reasons to love fruit flies, check out my mini-review of Fly: An Experimental Life by Martin Brookes.
Image source: Drosophila melanogaster, from Wikipedia.
Aligning IBDP Biology and SAT Biology subject tests. Any takers?
This weekend is SAT Biology subject tests, which will be fun for a handful of kids in our IBDP school. I spent some time today with some IBSL year 1 students who needed help covering the content. We had fun with the respiration, photosythesis and DNA replication, but it made me realise I don’t know how and where the two testing systems overlap.
Are you experienced in teaching both and do you want to help out? If so, please open this GoogleDoc and add the relevant SL/HL subtopics in line with the SAT Bio subject test topics. If you really want to, add the links to the relevant i-Biology pages.
Let’s see how this works!
Updated Turnitin GradeMark QuickMarks
Here’s a new set of Turnitin GradeMark QuickMarks I have saved to Box.net. More IA resources on the IA pages here.
My QuickMarks – click to download
They correspond to the self-assessment codes in the rubric and checklists I use with students, and will only work if your school subscribes to the full Turnitin WriteCycle suite. Each comment has a check or cross, a title and some guidance or further description in the box. You can add your own comments individually to each as you use them in student work.
- IA Grades (Simple “6 CCC” and “5 PCP” comments in various combinations)
- Academic Honesty & Presentation
Atmosphere & Pollution Resources
These are for the Grade 10 Environmental Science students. More are on the topic page, here.
Habitable Planet chapters
Animal Development: We’re All Just Tubes! [CrashCourse Biology]
Another enterucational video from Crash Course Biology, which links nicely to section 5.5 Classification (and a wee bit on embryonic development). Check it out:
This is the kind of content that would be useful as a flipped lesson on TED-ED.
i-Biology 