We have optimized a procedure for igniting hydrogen-filled balloons containing metal salts to obtain the brightest possible flash while minimizing the quantity of airborne combustion products. We report air quality measurements in a lecture hall immediately after the demonstration. While we recommend that this demonstration be done outdoors or in…

As well as being a founding father of modern chemistry and physics Michael Faraday was also a skilled lecturer, able to explain scientific principles and ideas simply and concisely to nonscientific audiences. However science didactics today emphasizes the use of open and student-centered methods of teaching in which students find and develop…

This article describes the rapid, green synthesis of a biaryl compound (4-phenylphenol) via a Pd(0)-catalyzed Suzuki cross-coupling reaction in water. Mild reaction conditions and operational simplicity makes this experiment especially amenable to both mid- and upper-level undergraduates. The methodology exposes students to purely aqueous…

This laboratory project is one component of a semester-long advanced biochemistry laboratory course that uses several complementary techniques to study tRNA[superscript Phe] conformational changes induced by ligand binding. In this article we describe a set of experiments in which the thermal unfolding of tRNA[superscript Phe] is studied with…

Science education currently has incomplete understandings of potential relationships between students' beliefs in Nature of Science (NOS) and evolution, and how these beliefs may be related to scientific understandings of evolution. Because of evolution's prominence in science education, curricula decisions, and the future of science teaching and…

Efforts have been devoted to introduce in science curricula direct instruction for evaluating scientific reports on socioscientific issues. In this study, students' opinions on the SSI of mobile telephones effects have been investigated before and after a classroom activity designed to enable students to assess scientific data. Aspects of the…

Switzerland is the land of Big Ideas, where even the streets have Nobel prizes. At the European particle physics lab known as CERN, the roads through campus bear the names of Einstein, Curie, Bohr, and Heisenberg. Working amid those tributes to giants of the past century, physicists from around the world are trying to make history of their own and…

We present a case study of the physical principles necessary to model the high altitude parachute jump made by Colonel Joseph Kittinger, USAF, in 1960, in order to determine the maximum speed attained and to calculate whether this speed was sufficient to exceed the speed of sound at that altitude. There is considerable discrepancy in the value of…

The four essays reviewed here constitute a worthwhile attempt to discuss various aspects of postcolonial theory, and offer constructive ideas to ongoing academic as well as public conversations with respect to whether science education can meet the challenges of educating an increasingly diverse population in the 21st century. These essays are…

A simple model of the random Brownian walk of a spherical mesoscopic particle in viscous liquids is proposed. The model can be solved analytically and simulated numerically. The analytic solution gives the known Einstein-Smoluchowski diffusion law r[superscript 2] = 2Dt, where the diffusion constant D is expressed by the mass and geometry of a…

Organic reactions in introductory organic chemistry courses are most commonly taught with a mechanism-based approach to the understanding of molecular reactivity. However, the effectiveness of the popular curved arrow representation to describe reaction mechanisms is often compromised by the overuse of shortcuts and obscure notation. The…

A carousel gives possibilities to explore physics in rotating systems and to gain first-hand experience of methods to measure rotation, without the need for an external reference. This paper discusses the Foucault pendulum, as well as the sideways deflection of horizontally and vertically moving objects in a rotating system. These experiments lay…

Examples from Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and others suggest that fundamental laws of physics were--or, at least, could have been--discovered by experiments performed not in the physical world but only in the mind. Although problematic for a strict empiricist, the evolutionary emergence in humans of deeply internalized implicit…

The purpose of this study was to understand how Thai scientists from four disciplines viewed nature of science (NOS). The sixteen participating scientists were chosen from the areas of chemistry, physics, biology/life sciences, and geology/earth sciences and were separated into novice and expert groups. The scientists' understandings about NOS…

The main purpose of this study is to investigate a science teacher's beliefs and understanding of the nature of science (NOS) in order to be able to relate these beliefs about the NOS to classroom practice and therefore student experience. Teachers' beliefs about the NOS are embedded in their experiences of learning and teaching science and hence,…