environmental education

A common theme I hear in talks on personalized medicine, is that increased access to genomic data and medical literature are changing the relationship between doctors and patients. Patients are through being passive recipients of paternalistic health care. They are demanding to participate and be treated as partners with health care providers. Citizen science can serve a similar role. Just as personalized medicine is starting to make it possible for individuals to monitor and participate in their own personal health, citizen science is making it possible for people to ... Read more

Do citizen science efforts ever go beyond "feel good" contributions? Do the data get published in peer-reviewed journals? In an earlier post, I started a list of citizen science projects that allow students to make a contribution. Many commentors are graciously adding to that list and I thank you all! I'm glad to learn there are so many interesting projects and ways for people to get involved. Science is so empowering! My question today concerns things like outcomes and deliverables. We' ... Read more

Next Saturday afternoon, at ScienceOnline2010, the science goddess, the chemspider, and I will be presenting a workshop on getting students involved in citizen science. In preparation, I'm compiling a set of links to projects that involve students in citizen science. If you know of any good citizen science efforts, please share them in the comments. Here we go! Before I start listing links, I am limiting this list to projects that ... Read more

If you're in Seattle, Dr. Bruce Alberts will be talking tomorrow night (Jan 5th) at the Seattle Aquarium on science education and the role that scientists play. There are also some really interesting talks at a day-long workshop, Wednesday (Jan 6th) at the UW South Campus Center. The details and registration info are below: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Tuesday: COSEE Ocean Learning Communities & Washington SeaGrant Present Redefining Science Education and the Roles that Scientists Play in Society Dr. ... Read more

We always see interesting creatures whenever we walk on the beach. Now, a new program from the University of Washington and the state department of Fish and Wildlife is seeking to enlist beach walkers in a community science project where they can help monitor biodiversity.

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"Digital biology," as I use the phrase, refers to the idea of using digital information for doing biology. This digital information comes from multiple sources such as DNA sequences, protein sequences, DNA hybridization, molecular structures, analytical chemistry, biomarkers, images, GIS, and more. We obtain this information either from experiments or from a wide variety of databases and we work with this information using several kinds of bioinformatics tools.

The reason I'm calling this field "digital biology" and not "bioinformatics" (even though I typically use the terms ... Read more

I don't know if any DIY biologists are looking for projects, but I think engineering yeast with a gene to detect heavy metals might be a good DIY biology project and I have some ideas for how to do this. What are the advantages of using yeast and working on this kind of problem?

• This could have a socially beneficial result. Contamination of soils, water, and even toys with heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and others, is a
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It was a wet and rainy day yesterday, and we have a dissecting microscope, so I decided to see if I could find some tardigrades.

Tardigrade photo by nebarnix

Reposted from Nov. 2006 I went outside and scraped a bit of moss and some lichens off of our deck. Then I put the lichens ... Read more

A few days ago, I wrote about a cool project that some high school students did where they used DNA sequencing to identify seafood. One question that came up from one of my commenters was how a school would start a project like this. I'm totally biased, but I think DNA sequencing (well, actually the data analysis) is one of the most interesting things that a class can do as part of a research project. These days, getting started with this kind of project, wouldn't be so hard. Here's are ... Read more

Two teenagers, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, carried out their own science project over the past year. They visited 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores and gathered 60 samples of fish and sent them off to the University of Guelph to get sequenced. I like this story. One of my former students did a project like this for the FDA years ago, sampling fish from the Pike Place Market and identifying them with PCR. He was an intern, though. Here we have students identifying sushi on their own! Quoting the ... Read more