findingDulcinea

Let It Snow: Weather in the Classroom

To many students, bad winter weather means time off from school and time out of the classroom. This past weekend, The Associated Press reported that 49 out of 50 U.S. states had snow on the ground; that’s a lot of happy students.

But bad weather doesn’t need to be an impediment to a child’s learning. An impending storm can be the perfect segue into a lesson on weather. The Web has some valuable resources on the subject for teachers and students.

Teachers: Before instructing students on the finer points of weather science, refresh your own understanding with a visit to NASA’s World Book. The NASA entry on “Weather,” written with contributions from the extensively qualified Joseph M. Moran, Ph.D., discusses what causes weather, how it’s measured and how humans impact it.

Once sufficiently refreshed, visit the Discovery Education “Lesson Plan Library” for ideas on how to teach students about weather. You’ll find 12 lesson plans covering topics such as “Understanding the Weather,” “Mountain Barriers,” “Avalanche!” and “Hurricane!”

The BBC offers inquisitive readers a weather center with links to detailed explanations of natural weather phenomena; this is a good place to find answers to specific questions.

Curious how meteorologists generate daily forecasts? Hint: It’s more sophisticated than voodoo or trips to the local psychic. FindingDulcinea’s Nature Wages War series offers a look at how groups such as the World Meteorological Organization and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration predict both extreme and benign weather events.

Finally, Mark Twain's famous line that "everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it" is no longer completely true. In "Seeding the Clouds for Drought Relief," findingDulcinea discusses efforts to control the weather by Venezuela (to end a drought), China (to ensure clear skies for the Olympics' Opening Ceremonies), and others.

James Sullivan

Editor

The Wright Brothers and the Meaning of "Inventor"

Today is the 106th anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright’s flight at Kitty Hawk. The event is considered the first-ever motorized flight, and the Wright brothers are considered the inventors of the airplane, but those distinctions are disputed.

German Karl Jatho claimed that he successfully flew his own plane in August and November 1903. However, Jatho did little to publicize his flights, and the world knew nothing about it when the Wrights took flight that December.

Disputes over famous inventions are fairly common. In a 2008 article for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell examined the phenomenon of ideas being developed by different people in different areas at the same time.

Many famous inventions and theories, he notes, came in “multiples”: Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray inventing the telephone, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz inventing calculus, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace discovering evolution, and Elwood Haynes and the Duryea brothers building the gas-powered car.

In most cases, history remembers only one of the inventors. Similarly, inventions that developed over years of work by multiple people are usually credited to one man who made a famous advancement.

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the incandescent light bulb; he was the first to create one that was practical for everyday use. Guglielmo Marconi didn’t invent the wireless telegraph; he was the first to send a signal across the Atlantic. Alexander Cartwright didn’t invent baseball; he and his fellow members of the Knickerbocker Club modified the rules of contemporary stick-and-ball games to make it more like modern baseball.

Credit for an invention often depends on the publicity it received. Whereas Jatho’s flights were known by only a handful of people, the Wright brothers’ flight was reported across the world and its coverage launched an era of aviation.

In many cases, an inventor’s self-promotion is as significant as his ingenuity. As the satirical newspaper The Onion recently quipped, although Edison did not invent the light bulb, he did “devise the groundbreaking new process of taking ideas pioneered by other scientists and marketing them as his own.”

Denis Cummings

Sweet Sites | Don't Get Fooled Again: Know Fact from Fiction

Know how to tell truth from fiction with help from these three Web sites.
 
Keep your e-mail inbox free of viruses, scams and hoaxes with help from Purportal.com, "debunking bunk since 2001." The site allows you to search various reputable databases and sites that collect information about urban legends, sneaky ways of parting you from your money and various bits of code you just don't want on your computer.  Sources include Snopes, Symantec and Fraud Watch International.
 
Continue on the factual path with Scirus, a search engine for scientific information that indexes journals, scientists' personal pages and coursework. A sister site, SciTopics, offers "research summaries" on a variety of different subjects in the sciences and the humanities, such as chemistry, environmental science and philosophy.
 
Librarians built Infomine, a collection of databases, electronic journals, books and other resources for university-level students and staff. It includes links to both paid and free content, and offers bibliographic information about each site.

Find your own "eureka" sites using SweetSearch.

Amy Goldschlager
Editor

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Stung by the Facts: We Need Animals

For a while there, it seemed like every time I turned on the news, someone was talking about cutting the pork. A lot of people were quite worked up over projects in the budget that seemed unnecessary. So it caught my attention when I learned that England has recently allotted $9 million to funding an initiative to revive the bee population. It turns out that something called Colony Collapse Disorder is causing bees to die off in record numbers.

OK, I thought. What does this mean? Fewer kids get stung, and Honey Combs cereal has to change its name to High-Fructose Corn Syrup Combs (which is more truthful anyway). Who cares? But as I read on, I learned that bees help to produce one-third of the food we eat through pollination. Basically, without bees, we’d be very hungry.

A few days later, I was reading Nature magazine and discovered that bats are incredibly beneficial to humans. They also help to spread seeds that grow crops. Even vampire bats can be useful, as their saliva may turn out to be a medicine for stroke patients.

I was completely inspired. What other animals are we dependent on that we don’t know much about? Could I prove that money for helping the environment wasn’t pork at all, but rather integral to our survival on this planet?

Well, I don’t know how persuasive I’d be in Washington, D.C., but I did find that in addition to bats and bees, worms, fish and butterflies provide immense value to humans and the environment. And so I wrote “5 Animals We Need to Survive.” Not only did I learn how to make a worm compost for my kitchen, but I’m thinking of emailing my congressperson.

Rachel Balik
Senior Writer

Celebrating Charles Darwin at 200

Today we published a biography of Charles Darwin in honor of his birthday. But today also happens to be his 200th birthday, making 2009 a special opportunity for scholars and fans of Darwin to reexamine and celebrate his work. (The University of Cambridge, for example, is hosting a festival on Darwin this summer.)

How did Darwin become the legacy that he is today? Senior Writer Isabel Cowles writes that, like another mastermind, Albert Einstein, Darwin “was never a great student.” But he was an “avid collector of beetles” and loved the outdoors. Following his naturalist passion, Darwin accepted a position on the HMS Beagle to examine and collect specimens across the world. The observations he made while stationed on the Galapagos Islands became “The Origin of Species,” the foundation of the theory of evolution.

His work was not unanimously praised when it was first published. But today prominent figures emphasize how important Darwin is to science. For example, Sir David Attenborough has argued, “Evolution is not just a theory. It is a historical fact like any other historical fact.”

In a New York Times editorial on the bicentenary, author Verlyn Klinkenborg writes that Darwin’s explorations are in effect the “cornerstone of what we know about life on earth.”

Learn more about Darwin's work with the American Museum of Natural History’s online exhibit on Darwin.

You can even become friends with the digital effigy of Charles Darwin on Facebook and find multiple Web sources listed on his profile, linking to interesting articles about the man and his work.

Liz Colville
Senior Writer
Audience Development

The Most Memorable News Stories of 2008

As the year draws to a close, we look back on the stories that captured the nation (and the world) in 2008.

Our staff put together a list of the 10 Stories That Defined 2008 that includes the election of Barack Obama, the Beijing Olympics, Somali pirates, and the collapse of Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers.

Some articles from 2008 that didn't make our staff's list were huge hits with our audience, so with that in mind, here is a list of the top five most popular (according to traffic) findingDulcinea stories from 2008.

5. McCain Taps Relative Unknown Palin as VP. The story of McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for his running mate nearly broke our site record for most visits to a story in a single day, and was a good indication of the media frenzy that followed Palin throughout the campaign.

4.On This Day: Witold Pilecki Allows Himself to Be Captured by the Nazis.  Nearly 70 years after it happened, people are still captivated by the story of a man who risked his life to provide information about Auschwitz to the Allied forces from within the walls of the concentration camp.

3. Scientists Develop a Possible Cure for HIV. The world was stunned in November to learn that scientists had engineered "super T-cells" that might be able to attack the virus, testing of this could begin as early as next year.

2.Gay Penguin Egg Snatchers Get Their Own Brood. Many people were intrigued to learn that this couple from a Chinese zoo had been stealing eggs from other penguins and replacing them with rocks, the zoo finally caved in and gave them an egg of their own to raise.

1. Males of All Species Becoming More Female. A shocking study indicated that chemicals released into the environment were causing males of many species (including humans) to develop more feminine characteristics.

Jodie Foster Didn't Find the Higgs Boson

Martial Trezzini/AP

Remember that movie “Contact,” where the star Vega was trying to contact Earth, so Jodie Foster convinced the world that it was high time we build a fancy machine to visit the aliens? But then Jodie Foster finally got there and instead of seeing cool-looking aliens, she met her late father, and all the moviegoers were like, “Really?”

We can hope for more interesting results from the latest real-life fancy machine, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, designed to recreate the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang. On Wednesday, brilliant scientists from around the globe observed in awe as the “on” switch was finally flipped, after two decades of work and $10 billion spent. The famous “Higgs boson” will be discovered, antimatter and bizarro dimensions will be explained.

Some fear that the machine will generate a black hole that will swallow up the Earth. If you’re wondering if the planet’s been destroyed yet, there’s a helpful site to answer that question.

If we are still here, visit the National Geographic site for a nice interactive explanation of the Collider. The BBC uses some nonphysics words to tell you what’s going on, while the Boston Globe provides pretty pictures. Last, but certainly not least, do not miss science writer Kate McAlpine’s “Large Hadron Rap."

Josh Katz
Writer