Category: Uncategorized

What was your favorite part of Science One?

Did you do something science-y over winter break?  Read a popular science book?  See something unusual that you wondered about?  Visit a planetarium?  Tell us about it!

AAAS (the American Academy for the Advancement of Sciences) is coming to Vancouver in February. This symposium offers cheap student registration ($60) and we will likely organize an optional Science One field trip for a day. For this post, your assignment is to go to the program website and browse the program. Find one seminar that you are interested in attending and post a synopsis of that topic here. Note: Do not simply cut and paste what is presented on the AAAS website. Do your own synopsis – What is the topic? Why is it interesting to you? What questions do you have?

http://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2012/webprogram/start.html

Pastafarians (members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) dress like pirates to fend off global warming based on the graph found at the following link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PiratesVsTemp%28en%29.svg

For this exercise, pretend that you have designed an experiment and gathered data resulting in the graph above. (You can be as creative and silly as you’d like in your methods and data analysis). Your task is to write an abstract for your publication on the previous mentioned data and post it here. For guidelines on how to write an abstract, please see:

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/essays/abstract.html

Arrgh!

Pictures are often difficult and usually expensive to reproduce. For this assignment, choose one journal from the shelf in the Science One lounge (Science or Nature.) Then choose one graph or image representing data from a research article. Write a submission explaining what the graph/image is meant to portray. How long did it take you to decipher the point of the graph/image? What did you learn? How much did you rely on text to help you figure out the image/graph?

Great job on your story finding!  Some of those news articles are truly unbelievable.  Your second mission is to find the original scientific journal article that the news source is citing.  Sometimes this is obvious and mentioned in the news article.  Sometimes it is not, but maybe a researcher is mentioned.  You may have to do some Google-searching to find the source of the original scientific work.  You can probably find this online via the UBC library online system.  Please post on the following:

(1) Is the scientific article a primary research article (where one is presenting original, new findings) or is it a review article (where someone is condensing the collective findings of other people)?

(2) Read the original scientific article. (By “read”, I mean scan through and get the general idea of what was done and what was found).  Compare this to what is presented in your news story from the previous assignment and post a comment on your findings.  (This should be roughly 1 paragraph in length.)

Have fun sleuthing!

Celeste

For this assignment, your task is to find a biology related story in the popular news. (You can be generous in your definition of popular.) Please (1) Post a link to the story, (2) Briefly describe why it caught your eye, and (3) write one paragraph on what you think about the trustworthiness of this story and how you may go about verifying the claims presented.