Lunar Plant Growth Chamber
This site invites students to design chambers for growing plants on the moon. (Plants may be used to supplement meals of astronauts during space exploration.) Teacher guides include lessons on providing light and water for the plants, choosing plant species, exploring the moon, and designing, building, and evaluating plant growth chambers.
Middle School Portal: Math and Science Pathways (MSP2)
The Cells Alive Web site (last mentioned in the October 25, 1996 Scout Report), offered by Quill Graphics, contains several activities to help students understand the basics of cellular biology. The animal cell cycle and cell mitosis animations are especially excellent visual learning tools, clearly showing what takes place during these events and giving well-written descriptions of each stage. The site also has three interactive quizzes on cell structure, cell function, microbes, and the immune
NASA Earth Observatory Mission: Biomes
This fun, interactive website was designed by NASA's earth observatory to introduce students to the Earth's Biomes. A biome, as defined by the site, is a community of plants and animals living together in a certain kind of climate. This website provides links to seven different biomes that students can learn about including coniferous forests, grasslands, and tundras. Each separate biome page contains a brief general description as well as basic information about characteristics such as Temperat
Middle School Portal: Math and Science Pathways (MSP2)
If you can tear your eyes away from the mesmerizing graphics on the main page, you'll find a very detailed and comprehensive cell biology tutorial created by graphic artist/biologist John Kyrk. Kyrk's animations demonstrate all major aspects of cell biology: amino acid structure, DNA replication, transcription and translation, cellular cycles (Krebs, glycolysis, mitosis), photosynthesis, and so on. The tutorial's beautiful graphics and cool animations should make studying cell biology relatively
Middle School Portal: Math and Science Pathways (MSP2)
The University of California at Irvine's National Fuel Cell Research Center maintains the Energy Tutorial Web site. This well designed online tutorial takes students through more than twenty subject areas, including energy, fossil fuels, solar energy, biomass and waste, energy conversion, fuel cells, environmental impacts, and much more. Each topic includes non-technical text, photographs, graphs, and other interesting graphics, as well as a short quiz and additional links on the topic. The easi
Mendel's experiments
In this web lab, Gregor Mendel directs students through interactive virtual experiments. Students experiment with pea plants to discover how the seven pairs of traits that Mendel studied are inherited. The lab can be completed linearly, or students can move to a particular segment using the Sections menu. After they observe pea plants and infer the number of traits present, students perform five plant crosses. Mendel instructs students to search for patterns in the transmission of traits. Next,
What Is Service Learning?
Learning in the context of real-world problems through activities that not only promote student learning but also serve the public. Environmental and analytical chemistry courses provide a background for using scientific skills to work with the community and gain an understanding of a scientist's role in society. A group of faculty was convened to examine how service learning can best fit into chemistry instructional programs.
Middle School Portal: Math and Science Pathways (MSP2)
In this activity, students learn about the body mass index (BMI) formula and how it can be used to determine health risk. The activity is part of the Figure This! collection of 80 online mathematical challenges emphasizing real world uses of mathematics. The activity web page contains links to a solution hint, the solution, and to other math questions, such as how the BMI formula can be written to show weight in kilograms and height in centimeters. Students and their families are challenged to u
Electricity
This document examines the mysterious force of electricity. The reading will focus on the physical properties of electricity and discuss topics such as (1) The Atom of Carbon, (2) Static electricity, (3) Magnets are special, (4) Magnetic fields can produce electricity, (5) Batteries produce electricity, (6) Electricity travels in circuits, (7) Secondary energy source, (8) Making electricity, (9) Moving electricity from power plants to homes, (10) Fuels that make electricity, (11) Fossil fuel pow
Cotton: Building a Better Plant
Plant genome research is already revolutionizing the field of biology. Currently, scientists are unlocking the secrets of some of the most important plants in our lives, including corn, cotton and potatoes. Secrets of Plant Genomes: Revealed! takes viewers on a lively, upbeat journey that explores how these plants got to be the way they are and investigates how we can make better use of them in the future. Plant scientists are hard at work--in the lab, in the field and at the computer--to increa
Corn: The Dynamic Genome
Plant genome research is already revolutionizing the field of biology. Currently, scientists are unlocking the secrets of some of the most important plants in our lives, including corn, cotton and potatoes. Secrets of Plant Genomes: Revealed! takes viewers on a lively, upbeat journey that explores how these plants got to be the way they are and investigates how we can make better use of them in the future. Plant scientists are hard at work--in the lab, in the field and at the computer--to increa
Bioterrorism: plague as a biological weapon
Bioterrorism is the utilization of microorganisms or toxins in order to produce a disease and/or death in human beings, animals or plants. Different from conventional weaponry, relatively economic means are used that allow the elimination of living beings without destroying the surrounding atmosphere. The most probably method for spread of bioweapons is aerial transmission, continuing into water supplies and food. The CDC (US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta) has subdivided in
Bacteriophage T4
This is a highly accurate visualization of the Bacteriophage T4 based on Cryo-EM datasets of the virus. The scope of the animation is to show the infection process of the T4 into an E. coli cell. All scientific data sets and motion based off of research from Michael Rossmann Laboratory (Purdue University). Courtesy of Seyet LLC.
A semaphorin code defines subpopulations of spinal motor neurons during mouse development.
In the spinal cord, motor neurons (MNs) with similar muscle targets and sensory inputs are grouped together into motor pools. To date, relatively little is known about the molecular mechanisms that control the establishment of pool-specific circuitry. Semaphorins, a large family of secreted and cell surface proteins, are important mediators of developmental processes such as axon guidance and cell migration. Here, we used mRNA in situ hybridization to study the expression patterns of semaphorins
Fill up the Canvas
features journal entries from 20 points in the journey of Lewis and Clark: mission preparations, winter in St. Louis, first council with Indians, death of Sergeant Floyd, first killing of a buffalo, Sioux camps, near run-in with Teton Sioux, Rocky Mountains, Nez Perce, falls of the Columbia River, and others. The site also provides letters from Thomas Jefferson to Lewis and Clark; images of people, places, plants, and animals; and maps.
Early Virginia Religious Petitions
Early Virginia Religious Petitions presents images of 423 petitions submitted to the Virginia legislature between 1774 and 1802 from more than eighty counties and cities. Drawn from the Library of Virginia's Legislative Petitions collection, the petitions concern such topics as the historic debate over the separation of church and state championed by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the rights of dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists, the sale and division of property in the established chu
American Environmental Photographs, 1891-1936
This collection consists of approximately 4,500 photographs documenting natural environments, ecologies, and plant communities in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Produced between 1891 and 1936 by a group of American botanists generally regarded as one of the most influential in the development of modern ecological studies, these photographs provide an overview of important representative natural landscapes across the nation. They demonst
The Microbial Biorealm
The Microbial Biorealm is an informational site about microbes written by students for students. Hosted by Kenyon College, the site includes molecular and taxonomic information about microbes from all three domains of life. A comprehensive table lists the properties and characteristics of each domain of life while taxonomy pages list classification, description, significance, genome structure, cell structure, metabolism, ecology, isolation, cultivation, and references specific to individual taxa
Red Tide Activities
Welcome to Making Waves, a multimedia approach to learning that offers teachers and students an insider's view of current, relevant ocean science research efforts. This University of South Florida web site contains links to the article "Tiny Toxic Terrors: Harmful Algal Blooms" and four computer-based activities that teach students about various aspects of red tide. Activities include: "Where could they be?," "Is it a plant or animal cell?," "What is bioluminescence?," and "How does plankton sha
Microbiology Unit
This College level Unit in Microbiology explores microbes on five levels, their architecture, ecology, physiology, lifecycles and pathology. Students will be given an interactive tour of the world of microbes and learn more about their impact on Humans, animals, plants and on the environment in general. They will become aware of pathogenic (harmful) and non-pathogenic (helpful) microbes and develop an understanding of how microbiologists devise methods to study microbes in order to understand th
