The Ig Nobel Prizes 2008
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a celebration of weird, pointless and entertaining scientific research that, as the Improbable Research organisation puts it, “first makes you laugh, then makes you think.”
Some of the winners from this year include:
– Nutrition: making crisps crunch louder than they should
– Biology: “fleas that live on a dog jump higher than fleas that live on a cat”
– Chemistry: conflicting teams arguing over whether coca-cola is an effective spermicide
– Physics: mathematical proof that heaps of string will inevitably tangle up in knots
All geniuses, no doubt.
Here is the acceptance speech of last year’s prizewinners for Medicine: Sword Swallowing!
“JetMan” crosses the English Channel
From National Geographic:
“Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, aka Jet Man, practices flying his self-designed jet-propelled wing.
On September 26, 2008, Rossy became the first person to fly across the English Channel using a jet pack.”
Next week: IronMan flies around the world!
“Amazing Cells” from Learn.Genetics
Learn.Genetics at Utah have produced another excellent resource for Cell Biology: Amazing Cells
Go over and check out their tour inside the cell, find out how vesicle transport works, learn more about cell signalling, and get into the endosymbiotic theory of cell evolution.
It’s great for the IB Cells topic.
Eukaryotes quick post
Here’s the class presentation for Grade 11 revising for their Quia Quiz:
More links to be added soon – for now, click on the links posted in the presentation.
The Learn.Genetics people at Utah have just released the excellent Amazing Cells resource.
Sumanas – multimedia science resources
Sumanas, inc. has a good selection of high-quality animations and interactives.
Some highlights include their pages on Statistics and some excellent resources in the general biology page.
NOVA Life Science Resources
NOVA from pbs.org (Public Broadcasting Services) has a great library of animations and interactives on their site.
Topics include Evolution, Classification, Genetics, Ecology and Microbiology.
Many of the interactives can be saved using the downloader on Firefox.
Some nice cell division footage
Here is a newscast from NewScientist this week:
More posts on the Cells topic to follow very soon.
Statistical Analysis
Other websources:
Click4Biology has an excellent page for this topic
The Open Door website has some basic stats, as well more in-depth uses of statistics. Particularly useful is their page on errors in Biology.
The Field Studies Council has a good t-test page
Gapminder.org shows the awesome power of statistics. Grrr….
And you can ask your teacher to get the T-test Powerpoint from the OCC.
Using your calculator:
– Using the TI GDC (from Click4Biology)
– Using the Casio pdf download (from keymath.com)
BIS Students:
Here is our Quia Class page on this topic.
Big Bang Rap – The LHC team explain
This is just great -a rap produced by the scientists at the Large Hadron Collider to explain what they do, what dark matter is and how the Big Bang happened. They switched it on today, and the world didn’t end, which is nice. Read more about it here.
i-Biology 