Foldit – help science by playing a game
Foldit is ridiculously addictive. 
It is a protein-folding game/simulation, designed and produced collaboratively between the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering and Biochemistry departments. There is a great introduction to the roles of proteins in metabolism and disease, as well as protein folding, on their about page.
Apart from the great software and in-game tutorials in protein structures, players at the highest level may be contributing to medicine! The University and associated labs are setting problems of protein folding for players to solve – each one an important molecule in its own right and some even the key to curing some diseases.
There is a great article about the game on RichardDawkins.net: ‘Computer game’s high score could earn the Nobel prize in medicine.’ There’s even a classic quote from co-developer Prof. David Baker:
“I imagine that there’s a 12-year-old in Indonesia who can see all this in their head.”
Too right. Let’s represent for Indonesia!
Here’s a quick clip of the game in action at a high level:
Download the game here and get playing!
Science Daily – News and Videos
Science Daily is another Science news service with RSS feeds and a video news service. It has a wide range of regularly updated resources and articles are generally student-friendly. One nice touch is the auto-cite tool at the bottom of each article – students can choose MLA or APA bibliography styles and just copy/paste the information into their work.
Chemical Elements and Water
Here is the class presentation:
You can click on the shadowed images in the presentation to be taken to the animations and videos.
Michael Crichton 1942 – 2008
I’ve been slow on posting this, but here goes…
Michael Crichton died of cancer last week, aged 66. No further details of his illness have been released.
Most good science geeks will have read at least one of his novels in their time, or at least seen one of his many movies or TV shows. Crichton was a prolific writer and TV/movie producer – often focusing on popularising science and raising awareness of the current hot topics in research. It seems kind of fitting that in his last week, details of the successful cloning of dead mice were published – the basic premise of his mega-blockbuster Jurassic Park from the nineties (just replace the mice with Tyrannosaurus rex).
It’s fair to say that without his ideas and ludicrous action sequences, the general public may still be unaware of some of the steps science is taking into the future.
Anyway, you can find out all you want about him on wikipedia or his website, so there’s no point regurgitating it here. You might, however, like this video interview with Charlie Rose, filmed with the release of genetic ‘thriller’ ‘Next‘. He discusses global warming, corporate ownership of disease and why ‘Next’ is terrible to read (apparently it’s because he was ‘picking up stories like the genome picks up junk DNA’).
Stumble It!Mice cloned from frozen bodies
So cloning is nothing new, but for the first time we see healthy lab mice cloned from the cells of dead mice – some articles are calling this a ‘resurrection’, although it is nothing of the sort.
It is, however, a big step forward for genetic reserach – lifting the possibility of cloning long-extinct species out of the realms of pure science fiction and into the ‘almost there’ zone. A team of Japanese researchers from Kobe, Japan, used a modified method to clone these mice from tissues that had been frozen for up to 16 years.
Here’s a clip from Japanese news, with a really clear section showing what looks like the insertion of the nucleus into an egg:
For a useful reader, here is the NewScientist article. Here’s another one from the Guardian.
As ever, one of the best reading sources is the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog, where Ed Yong tackles the research paper directly in his article and makes it easy to understand. Check it out here.
Learning idea: ‘dub’ the Japanese clip into your own language, using the information from the articles above.
How did they achieve it? How does it differ from normal cloning? What surprising results did they encounter?
Try to get your story to complement the images in the video clip.
I can just see Jeff Goldblum‘s gurning face as runs for his life from a cloned dodo…
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel
Diamond came up on TED Talks this week, and he is a great example of Edge’s idea of the Third Culture – taking the sciences and humanities and putting them together to get to the roots of how the world works.
Jared Diamond specialises in how societies collapse and how cultures have become different, by not only focusing on the social and political but also the environmental and evolutionary. One of his books, Guns Germs and Steel, tells the story of how human history took different paths and is one of my top science-related reads.
National Geographic ran a 3-part series on the book, and here it is on GoogleVideo:
Here are Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
In this talk, the comb-over king discusses how societies collapse:
Jared Diamond’s Edge profile
American Scientist interview
Amazon search results for his books.
Interactive Concepts in Biochemistry
Found this useful source on North Harris College’s linklist. 
Wiley.com have produced this online resource for Biochemistry and the Chemistry of Life, and it contains a whole load of interactives and animations.
It is an ideal resource for: photosynthesis, respiration, DNA replication, transcription, translation, cell structure, enzymes and protein synthesis.
Reproduction in Angiospermophytes
Here is the class presentation:
This is a quick topic, though it has some tricky bits in.
I’d recommend a review of transcription and translation when going through the photoperiodism section.
Now we’re finished with the unit, all of the presentations have been posted on the Plant Science Page.
Cell Division
Again, there is a load of resources on the internet for this topic, many of which have been linked in the presentation below:
Here’s the Click4Biology page.
Membranes
This is quite a long presentation covering membrane structure and function and passive transport, active transport and vesicle transport:
There are many links in the presentation – clicky clicky!
The internet is awash with decent animations and video clips for this topic – your best bet is to enter the search term “_____ transport swf” and see what comes up.
i-Biology 
