Graphjam and Graphical Silliness
Here’s a response to silly graphs on TV news shows (is it Brasseye?)
The Graphjam blog has loads of funny (and not so funny) pop-culture referencing graphs…
… as does the Facebook group “You’re having a graph”
Idea: have a stupid graph-making challenge – middle school link with Maths?
Here is Brasseye with Heavy Electricity:
Gene Therapy ‘Reverses Hereditary Blindness’
Awesome. And just in time for the Grade 11 Genetics unit!
Here’s the NewScientist article. And here’s an old one about gene therapy treating deafness.
Here is an article from the Guardian’s Science section that sums it up nicely.
Learn.Genetics @ Utah has loads of gene therapy interactives to learn more.
And for the hard-of-researching, here is the gene therapy wikipedia page.
Exciting times we live in.
The $50 SMARTBoard
This is just unbelievable, for two reasons:
1. If it works, you get thousands of dollars of functionality for near nowt.
2. You get an excuse to bring a Wii to school.
Here’s Johnny Lee and his Wii hacks (thanks to Henri Bemelmans for letting me know):
And while you’re at it…
Go and spend some time on the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) website – there are some really top-class talks.
Animal Farm (Not the Orwellian one)
A while ago I posted about glowing pigs and fish and couldn’t work out where it had come from. Thanks to stitchintime from the TES Boards, I found out it was from Channel 4’s ‘Animal Farm’ series on genetic engineering.
Here’s the first part of episode 1:
It’s probably a good idea to save all the parts of it before it gets taken down. Here’s the link.
Nikon Small World
OK, so no video, but WOW!
Have a look at some amazing images from the World Photomicrography Competition.
YouTube Blocked – disaster (averted)
Aduh, YouTube has been blocked by the Indonesian government because of a dispute over the movie Fitna. I haven’t seen it, though it apparently paints a pretty negative picture of Islam.
This is going to slow things down on the blog, but I’ll keep trying to find useful non-YouTube sources that will help with Science topics.
Hopefully they’ll see sense soon and lift the ban.
Luckily, the ever-growing TeacherTube is still going strong.
UPDATE – it’s back on again – I wonder whey they changed their minds?
Let’s celebrate with a recent item from Newsnight:
Thanks to Badscience for the heads up.
Meiosis
Learn.Genetics at Utah is an excellent resource for this topic, and all animations are easy enough to save.
Meiosis:
Good animation from Biostudio
Simple animation from Lewison-Porter Central School District
Good animation from Learn.Genetics
Non-disjunction:
Trisomy from Learn.Genetics (their page on Down Syndrome is here)
Excellent animation of meisosis I and meiosis II from BioStudio
Karyotyping:
Animation and have-a-go from Learn.Genetics
Amniocentesis:
Simple animation from MedIndia
Video from GoogleVideo
Here’s a patient having an amnio:
Chorionic Villus Sampling:
Video clip from Discovery Human Body Atlas
i-Biology 